Today’s Question for Your Uncommon Evolution: What deserves more of your attention than it’s currently receiving?
There are a few big decisions I’ve made in my adult life that I can point to and say, without hesitation, they changed me. And I’m really proud of each of these decisions because they were all an intentional, thoughtful act in pursuit of becoming more of the person I want to be.
Unequivocally, leaving social media is one of them.
Not because my life suddenly became more productive (though it did). Not because I finally found discipline (I already had it but this decision gave me more). Not because I stopped wasting time (I still do, in different, more intentional ways that are more aligned to rest and play). In truth, I like who I am and I liked who I was then, even on social. I exercised regularly, built a business, read books, traveled, wrote, and generally spent my time in ways that reflected the life I wanted to create. I wasn’t someone who lost entire days scrolling my phone or found myself awake at two in the morning stuck in an endless loop of videos.
That’s part of what makes this hard to explain.
When people hear that I left social media, they often think I was trying to fix a problem. Social media addiction is really common thing to hear these days and I didn’t have that.
If anything, I had a complicated relationship with it because there was one part of social media that I truly loved: the connection to real people.
I LOVED watching female friends graduate with their masters or doctorates or complete marathons. I genuinely enjoyed meeting new people I never would have come across in real life, or realizing that someone I hadn’t spoken to in years was doing really well. There is something very human about wanting to connect with our fellow humans, and I don’t think that instinct is something to be ashamed of. I still don’t.
It was, for me, more about the feelings I would feel when I spent even 20-30 minutes on social. The constant stream of chatter than ran through my head even when I was off the app. The endless thinking about some bullshit that didn’t matter because I had seen a TikTok about someone else’s random thought. The feeling that if I was sitting in silence I was missing something.
Don’t get me wrong – because I had such a complicated relationship with social I had left it many times before, only to eventually come back. Not because I loved internet cat videos but because it started to feel a bit lonely to someone who genuinely loves human connection.
But I finally decided to fully kick it when I made a big life decision that I realized I didn’t want anyone but those in my closest circle to know about. I had told a few people (in real life) that I thought were friends and immediately saw jealousy – the opposite of being happy for me. At that moment, I realized I wanted to shrink my circle by a LOT and that meant my digital one as well.
For me, the biggest surprise wasn’t getting time back. As mentioned, I was already a disciplined, organized, and product person. I mean, I am a lawyer with my own practice – there’s no way to do that other than with intention. And I was only spending a very limited amount of time on social every day. So it wasn’t the time.
It was my mind.
I don’t think I realized how crowded it had become until it wasn’t anymore.
There is a kind of silence that only appears when something noisy finally goes away. And we’ve all heard that social media causes anxiety in both children and adults and that it contributes to depression as well. But I haven’t heard a ton of conversations around the way it truly hijacks your brain.
I started noticing that the feeling of FOMO was disappearing. I found myself sitting with my coffee a little longer. Thinking. About – who’d have thought! – my own opinions. I realized the silence felt peaceful and meditative and conversely, I remembered what it felt like to get overstimulated by thinks that were too loud.
I’m also a person that loves feelings. Joy. Grief. Wonder. Nostalgia. I don’t think those emotions are inconveniences to manage; I think they’re what make us feel alive. One of the most unexpected things about leaving social media was realizing how much easier it became to access them. Once I left social, I realized I was feeling a LOT more deeply.
I’m a firm believer that it is our feelings that make us truly alive and getting off the constant hamster wheel of crap on social allowed me to get more deeply into my own emotions.
Ideas stopped competing for attention. Conversations stayed with me longer. Books lingered in my mind instead of being interrupted by the next thing demanding to be seen.
I didn’t realize how valuable uninterrupted thought was until I experienced it again.
And oddly enough, even though I was only spending a limited amount of time on social, I felt like I got a lot more time than that back because I could hear myself think.
And then there were my relationships.
One of my biggest fears before leaving social media was that I would feel disconnected from people I cared about. Oddly enough, the opposite happened. Instead of feeling loosely connected to hundreds of people, I began feeling deeply connected to the few who were actually in my life.
Phone calls became longer. Visits became more intentional. Ireached out because I genuinely wanted to know how someone was doing, not because an app reminded me it was their birthday or because I’d just watched a highlight reel of their weekend.
Days also felt longer, in the best way imaginable – like I had more hours to spend on things that were meaningful to me.
As cliche as it might be, life become a lot more real.
I’m thinking about this all right now because I recently had an experience that jarred me. I was flying from Florida to Costa Rica and was sitting one row behind a man who spent the whole (2.5 hour) flight scrolling and then continued his scroll until the very last second before he had to get up to get his bags and get off the plane. He switched constantly because Facebook, X, TikTok, and some stock app I had never seen.
And I could viscerally feel my nervous system light up and the anxiety spike. The muscle tightening, the chaos, the overestimation.
Watching someone flick through an endless stream of unrelated images, opinions, headlines, ads, and videos now feels incredibly overwhelming to me. My mind instantly starts wondering what it must feel like to have your attention pulled in a hundred different directions every few seconds because thankfully, brains are adaptable and mine doesn’t remember that well enough to be acquainted with it. And of course, I don’t remember feeling that way when I was doing it myself because at the time, it felt normal.
Which is perhaps the most unsettling realization of all.
The things we grow accustomed to rarely feel unusual while we’re living them.
Only afterward do we see how much they shaped us.
Sometimes I look around a coffee shop and see everyone staring into their own small rectangle of endless information, and I find myself wondering what we’ve quietly given up in exchange.
Not productivity or efficiency. Those are capitalist ideals and I’m never bothered when someone wants to relax instead of work.
But are people on social actually relaxing?
What we’re giving up that is more important is attention. Presence. The ability to become bored long enough for an original thought to emerge. The chance to notice the world directly instead of through someone else’s interpretation of it.
I still believe the part of social that lets us genuinely connect with other human beings is beautiful.
But I also think we’ve accepted a trade that deserves more scrutiny than it gets.
We’ve exchanged solitude for stimulation. Reflection for consumption. Depth for volume.
We’ve become used to carrying hundreds of voices in our minds every day without asking what happens to our own voice in the process.
For me, leaving social media wasn’t really about leaving social media.
It was about reclaiming my mind.
As I get older, I’m more convinced that our intentional attention and our presence are some of the most valuable things we have.
Our relationships, creativity, and emotions are shaped by these things. Our lives are built around where our intention goes.
And if that’s true, then maybe the most important question isn’t whether social media is good or bad. (I vote bad but you knew that already).
Maybe it’s simply this: What (or who) deserves your attention?
Because whatever the answer is quietly becoming your life.
I love working with millennial women of color as they reconnect with themselves and build lives that feel authentic, intentional, and fully their own. I also genuinely love connecting with people and hearing their stories. If you want to share what this essay brought up for you, or if you’re a millennial woman of color who would like to work with me, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out through my Contact Page or email me directly at anjali@uncommonevolution.com.
