“If you can’t go to Heaven, may you die in Ireland.”
“May God give you:
For every storm, a rainbow,
For every tear, a smile,
And or every care, a promise,
And a blessing in each trial.
For every problem life sends,
A faithful friend to share,
For every sigh, a sweet song,
And an answer for each prayer.”
A hot topic these days in the blogosphere, in the media world, and in psychology research is the modern-day phenomena of “burnout.”
Older generations are rolling their eyes, taking the time-trampled tradition of calling the next generation weak, fragile, snowflakes, etc. They ignore the multitudes of evidence portraying the current economy and the now standard lofty expectation of health and wealth as being unrealistic and impending undue stress upon the average millennial. It’s a lot easier to blame their own parenting failures rather than embracing their failure of creating a long-term self-sustaining world, I guess.
In addition to the weight of gargantuan student loans, an imploding real estate market, and unrealistic definitions of personal success, we have the 24/7 world of social media and mobile connection. It’s a self-perpetuating merry-go-round of constant availability. If you’re not connected all of the time, if you are literally never unplugged enough to just focus on you, you are a less desirable candidate for work, and you’ll be easily replaced by someone who isn’t burnt out, probably for less money. Or, at least, that’s what we’ve convinced ourselves.
Luckily, I’m not currently in a position where I have to test that particular belief. So when my husband and I took a ten day vacation to Ireland last week, I turned off my phone when we got to the airport. And I didn’t turn it back on until we were stateside again.
I made an active decision to commit to this experience – completely unplugged.
I started taking unplugged weeks in my everyday life about two years ago. The primary reason being that I was realizing what I was seeing on social media was just instilling me with an unreasonable rage (the “fake news”). I didn’t want to be so consumed by this communication vehicle that I allowed it to control my moods. So, about once a month or two, I took a week to unplug from social media.
Initially, it was just to soothe my faith in humanity. But, over time, it grew into a much deeper self-reflection of what power social media had taken over me. It grew into a habit that reconnects me with the world I’m in, rather than the world I want to portray to my peers.
This is a deeper commitment than you may think – it was a complete unwrapping of the mold that a lot of our generation, and those younger than us, use to approach life today. A re-wiring of my brain. It was all based around one concept, that is slowly changing how I see myself.
Stop sharing everything.
I had noticed that one of the things we love to do on social media is take this pre-adolescent “Look at what I did!” Approach to communication. Look at this music I played. Look at this event I went to. Look at this art I created. Look at all these friends I’ve made. Look at my amazing life, justify and praise me for it.
We spend all of this time and effort reaching outward into the world to seek out praise and approval for these things that we did. What if we didn’t? What would happen if we were forced to seek out approval and praise from ourselves? What if we just did things, without the intent of seeking out approval and praise in others?
Would self-confidence rise? Would satisfaction in our own worth improve? Would we find out that we have enough in ourselves, in our own validation, that we don’t need this constant justification from our “insta-friends” (aka strangers) online?
The thoughts that have occurred to me since I decided to adopt this principle have been a little embarrassing, and disturbing. What if people think I’m not doing anything? If I’m not posting about it, and people aren’t seeing I’m doing it, how do I prove that it happened?
My self-worth was so attached to this persona my peers see online, that I had begun accomplishing tasks while drafting the caption for the photo I’d take and share once I’d completed it.
This, I now know, is an effect of working in social media for five years, documenting and sharing the accomplishments of a business while simultaneously trying to continue marketing myself in my personal time as a business media strategist. It had taken over my brain because of the complete evasiveness of the 24/7 social media monster, and believing it to be the key to my professional success, my personal connectivity, and, ultimately, setting the bar for my (very American) competitive nature.
Unplugging, however, has wiped the slate clean.
Instead of being absorbed by drafting a caption in my head while we sipped whiskey on Bow Street in Dublin, I was immersed in teasing and flirting with my husband while we followed the instructions of our whiskey-tasting guide. Instead of obsessively flipping through angles of photos while we drove through the mountains in Killarney, deciding which ones to post, I peered through the windows, absorbing the beauty of where the sun met shadow, the brilliant, marveling at the hyper-saturated greenery of the hillsides. Instead of clinging to my phone during breakfasts and lunches in tiny, historic pubs, combing through the notifications, I sipped my Guinness, tapping my foot to this or that Irish jig and just soaked in the reality that I was finally in Ireland.
I lived in the moment.
By the way, we were the youngest people in our nearly all-American tour group, the average age being roughly fifty or so. With the exception of the two passengers in their mid-eighties, we were the most unplugged. And the entire group thought we were on our honeymoon because we were so absorbed with each other and the vacation.
Seven years later, we are still being mistaken for newlyweds. I guess we must be doing something right? (Or maybe we’re doing something very wrong? Ha? Ha?)
We are home now, feeling refreshed, reconnected with one another and ourselves, and planning our next international unplugged vacation. (And I am back to consistently forgetting to carry my phone with me.) Maybe Japan? 🙂
