I finally did something I’ve been wanting to do for years: I burned it all to the ground and I deleted everything. In this episode, I’m sharing what finally led me to delete not only my personal social media accounts but all of my business ones as well. I’m flying solo now without the use of social media in my business, and honestly, it feels better than ever.
In this conversation, I’m opening up about:
My Breaking Point: How I noticed my brain was depleted, my energy was low, and my creative capacity was shrinking because of the "swirling vortex" of my phone.
The Addiction: Why willpower wasn't enough to stop a habit that saw my screen time hitting 8 to 10 hours a day.
How I Untangled My Business: The steps I took to disconnect Facebook logins from apps like Canva, request my data, and manually archive my Instagram highlights.
Marketing Without the Apps: Why I’m focusing on long-form content and SEO, especially since 85% of my students already find me through search.
The Mental Health Shift: How that "heaviness" in my chest has disappeared since I stopped performing my life for an audience.
Reclaiming My Time: How I’m spending my days now - at the library, watching more birds, reading more books, and being truly present in the moment.
I used to think I couldn't live without these platforms, but I’ve realized that I don't need social media, it needs me. I’m choosing to look away from my phone and be present in my own life again.
I finally did it. I burned it all to the ground and deleted everything.
For years, I’ve felt this pull to leave social media, but I was scared. I worried about my business, my reach, and my connection to all of you. But a month ago, I reached a breaking point where my brain felt depleted, my energy was low, and my creative capacity was shrinking.
I realized there was never going to be a "perfect" exit plan. So, I pulled the trigger. I deleted my personal and business accounts—Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and TikTok are all gone.
If you’ve been feeling like you’re stuck in a swirling vortex of "like, comment, and subscribe," this conversation is for you.
The Addiction of the "Attention Economy"
It’s easy to blame the algorithm, but my decision stemmed from how I was experiencing my life. I was tired of looking down at a tiny rectangle instead of looking up at the sky, my husband, or my bulldog.
In 2026, social media isn't what it was in 2010. Back then, it was a physical place—you sat at a computer, uploaded an album, and when you were done, you were done. Today, it’s an endless pull-down lever designed to keep you addicted. I found myself on TikTok for two hours, losing all situational awareness until it was dark outside.
"I noticed that something was not only holding my attention, but dictating my emotions... it truly felt addictive."
How I Untangled My Business from Meta
Leaving wasn't just about deleting apps; it was a deep-dive untangling of my digital life. If you're a business owner considering this, here is the messy reality of how I did it:
Disconnected Integrations: I went into Facebook settings and disconnected every app I had used "Log in with Facebook" for—including Canva.
Requested My Data: I downloaded nearly 20 years of photos and memories, especially of my dad and my college years.
Saved the Highlights: Since Instagram doesn't make it easy to save "Highlights" in order, I used a third-party tool to manually download my bulldog and garden clips one by one.
Moved My Community: I transitioned my Facebook Groups to Heartbeat. While engagement has dipped (around 30% of students made the jump), the quality of connection is much deeper.
Can a Business Survive Without Social Media in 2026?
The short answer? Yes.
We’ve been conditioned to believe social media is the only way to connect, but that's a lie the platforms tell us so we don't leave. In reality, most of my students find me through Search Engine Optimization (SEO)—they search for "how to publish a planner," find my blog or workshop, and enroll.
Now, instead of spending hours on "AI slop" or trending reels, I’m focusing on long-form content:
Podcasting: Deeper, more intentional conversations.
Blogging: High-value SEO content that lives forever.
The Mindful Moment: My new physical newspaper and email newsletter.
The Mental Shift: Real Presence
The most shocking change? My anxiety has plummeted. I even had a prescription for Lexapro that I never ended up starting because that "heaviness" in my chest disappeared once I unplugged.
I’m no longer performing my life for an audience. When I see a beautiful sunset or my bulldog doing something cute, I don't reach for my phone anymore. I just experience it. I’m spending more time at the library, listening to the radio, and being present in my local community.
Your life is short. How do you want to spend the hours of your day?.
Stay Connected (Off Social Media)
If you want to continue this conversation, the best place to find me is via my newsletter. I’d love to hear your thoughts on "burning it all down."
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Hey, it's Sarah Steckler, and this is episode 219 of the Mindful Productivity podcast. This episode's gonna be juicy because I finally did something I've been wanting to do for years. I burned it all to the ground and I deleted everything. And that thing is social media. In this episode, I'm gonna be talking about what finally led me to delete not only my personal social media accounts, but also all of my business ones.
I'm flying solo now without the use of social media in my business. And I'll be honest, it feels better than ever. But even a month ago when I made this decision, hesitating and I was scared out of my mind. But I gotta tell you, things are feeling great. We're gonna be talking about all the reasons why I left social media.
I'm gonna be telling you what's changed for my mental health, for my business, the possibilities and opportunities I'm seeing now, and how you could do the same thing if you want to. So keep on listening because I think this is gonna be a really interesting conversation and there's likely gonna be follow up episodes as more questions and conversations come in from all of you guys. So let's go ahead and get into it.
Welcome to the Mindful Productivity Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Steckler, and this is the place to be to live a more mindful and productive life. If you're ready to turn daily chaos into calm and start your days with intention, then get ready to join me as we dive deep into mindful living and personal productivity. It's time to connect with your true self so you can live the life you want to live. And it all starts now.
Chances are, if you're listening to this podcast episode, you're already there. You've already thought about it, you're already tired of it. And social media is something that you're realizing is taking up a lot of time and a lot of your energy. This is how I was feeling. I noticed that my brain was depleted, my energy reserves were lower.
It was harder for me to have a creative capacity. Everything just felt more and more difficult. And I kept asking myself, how did I get here? It was like waking up in a weird dream where I was like, I swear that a decade ago I could do more. And granted, yes, we had the pandemic and we have all the horrible things going on in the world now, but I still felt like there was something else that had happened.
Like this wasn't normal, this wasn't the way I was supposed to be feeling. And yet, every time I went to go pick up my phone, I entered into this swirling vortex. I couldn't seem to stop, like, comment and subscribe. Facebook, Instagram, smash that like button. Oh my gosh, like, subscribe enough.
So I finally made the decision. I finally realized that there was going to be no perfect exit plan. I realized that I wasn't going to be able to, willfully using willpower, stop my screen time from growing and growing, sometimes hitting as much as eight or ten hours a day on my phone. Doing what? And while I could use a ton of this podcast episode to talk about all the things that I don't like about the algorithm and about social media, this desire to really get off my phone and get off of those platforms really stemmed from something else.
It wasn't just the amount of group think and lack of critical thinking skills and mis and disinformation that you could see at every corner and orifice of these platforms, but it was more so about my life and how I was spending it and how I was experiencing it. The amount of time that I was looking down at a tiny rectangle instead of looking up at the sky or out in front of me, at my husband, at my bulldog, at all the amazing things that are happening every day. Those were the things I was missing out on. I wasn't going to be missing out on things that other people were sharing or the millions and thousands and trillions of random hot takes and thoughts that everybody else was thinking. Those things didn't matter.
And once I really realized how I was spending my time and what I wasn't able to be doing because of that, something really started clicking in me. I first had this thought years and years and years ago. In fact, it was probably close to five or six years ago that I, that I started thinking, I don't want to be on social media as much. It doesn't feel the same. You know, in one of my recent newsletters that I created, I created a new physical newspaper as a way of reconnecting with my audience.
It's called the Mindful Moment. You. You can find it on my website. But in the first issue, I talked about my departure from social media. And I wrote in there about how in 2010, 2011, you know, this was kind of the peak, I would say, of Facebook.
I got on Facebook in, I think it was 2005 when I started in college. But there was this time when I was out of college. We were all kind of working our nine to five jobs, and my friends and I would Go out, I would have my digital camera, we'd take photos, I'd go home. And then the next day, like usually like a Saturday morning, I would go to my computer, go to my desktop. When the Internet and Facebook was still kind of a physical place, you'd go much like in the 90s or early 2000s, you know, we had our computer room.
You would go somewhere to be on the Internet and then you would be off of it and it would end. In fact, I remember Facebook at that time. You could actually get to the bottom of your newsfeed. It would say, that's all for now. That was it.
There wasn't some magic pull down lever that would just recreate everything and have it be endless. But I would get home and I would take all these photos off my camera and I would upload them into a Facebook album. And I think at the time you couldn't have more than 60 photos. And I would have so much fun looking at all these different photos of me and my friends. I would tag us and, and then the comments would roll in and all of my friends would comment, we'd make jokes, we'd say, oh yeah, remember when we took that photo of so and so and they were doing this at the club, it was so silly.
And we'd kind of reminisce and re experience the moment, almost like having a group conversation or a group chat about it, but on Facebook. And that's what it was, it was a reconnection, it was an extension of connecting with friends and family. And you'd go on Facebook and that's what I would see. Friends and family. I wouldn't see influencers, I wouldn't see ads.
And if I did, it was really slow at that point. It wasn't what it is today. But that quickly died. And even Instagram, when it first started, you know, I remember going on there and you'd have the cephia, you know, overlays and filters. And there was nothing more exciting than taking a sunset photo and posting it or a photo of your food.
I'm really showing my millennial ness right now. But that was what it was. It was social sharing and interaction. And things obviously went really downhill with, you know, Twitter turning into X and all of that and all the deep disinformation that's went on since then. But I think that it was inevitable.
It was inevitable for the Internet to turn into something once we realized that there was an attention economy and that people could not only be fed ads and like we could learn information about Every single person and every single like and comment and probably where our eyes are looking on our cameras, too. All of that stuff becomes information that companies can use. But all that aside, coming back to. Even if Facebook continued to be that way, it wasn't like this addictive thing at that point. Like, you could go on Facebook, and sometimes I would do that.
I distinctively remember being 22 years old, barely making enough money to cover rent, eating a bowl of Kraft Mac and Cheese on, like, a Thursday night. And part of my nightly activity, living alone, was sitting down at my computer and checking Facebook for maybe 20 minutes. And about. After about 20 minutes, I kind of seen everything I needed to see. And I'd lose interest and I'd go watch a DVD in my living room.
That's just not the case anymore at all. I think it was around 2020, 2021, I had finally downloaded TikTok. The pandemic brought me to that place, and it was really fast. How quickly I realized how addicting it was. In fact, there was a moment, I think it was 2022 or 2023, where my husband was gone leading up to a deployment.
He had to be. He was gone just all the time. He's always gone. He's in the military, but he was gone for an extended amount of time. And we just moved to San Diego, and it was just me in my home with my pets.
And I remember I started being on TikTok a lot more. In fact, it would kind of just become this nightly thing. And I distinctly remember one night I got on TikTok, and I didn't have any concept of time. In fact, I don't think I looked up from my phone, and it had been almost two hours in that time. It had gotten dark outside.
I hadn't closed the blinds. I. My pets hadn't needed anything from me, so they hadn't bothered me. But it was such an unnerving feeling of I had no situational awareness, like all these things could have happened. And I was just glued to my phone.
And I also noticed that feeling of one thing after the other. Something makes you laugh, and then suddenly something makes you cry. Something makes you feel incredibly nostalgic, and then something makes you incredibly angry. And it's. It was actually wild to witness that in real time, actually step outside from that and realize how much something was not only holding my attention, but dictating my emotions, whether I was realizing it or not, how quickly that was happening and how endless it was.
And I remember distinctly, too, there were several nights when I was on TikTok and I felt like I couldn't stop scrolling. And that sounds so silly, but I remember feeling like I just didn't know how to stop it. Truly felt addictive. And I know that they recently came out with. I think there was a case in.
I think it was California where a woman sued. I'm totally. I need to actually, like, look at the article again. But Basically meta and YouTube have. Are being held accountable for creating an addictive algorithm.
And, you know, I'm surprised TikTok isn't on there. It's all. We're all just in this kind of like, weird experiment. And so apart from that and then apart. And I won't go too deep down the rabbit hole in this, but apart from all that.
And then there's also the other aspect of social media and just being connected to it. Like, you log into things with Facebook, you know, you could. You could download the McDonald's app and log in with Facebook and that, you know, Palantir, this bigger company, has access to all this information that we're giving it across all these different platforms. You walk into Walmart, you don't put in your phone number, but you use your debit or credit card that they know is attached to your account. And all of a sudden they say, hey, Sarah, welcome back.
Stuff like that. There's facial recognition stuff, even Wegmans now as they found out that if you go in there, they're like creating profiles of people. And some people might argue, well, why does that matter? But I really find it disturbing and dystopian. And the same thing is happening with flock cameras all across the United States.
You can look into them. You've probably seen them. They're these black poles with a tilted tiny little solar panel on the top. And they have a camera that's designed to monitor vehicles. But they're also creating profiles.
They can recognize face facial recognition. They can recognize the gait, like how you walk. They will take images of your car and they can see what times you're driving past places and how many scratches or dents you have on your car, what bumper stickers you have. And all of this can not only be used for ill intent, but also, do we really need all these different, bigger companies creating this many data points on us? Do we need to experience that?
Do we need to be manipulated in that way so that when we're at the grocery store, all of a sudden we see an ad or we hear an ad or there's ads on the doors now in some stores and it's going to come up with stuff that's really specific to you, that may influence you to spend 10, 20 or more dollars on a purchase or on a shopping trip that you wouldn't have otherwise. So we're all susceptible to this kind of stuff. And that was one of the reasons why I really just wanted to unplug from social media. And the big question, though, for me was, well, how do I do this as a business owner? Because even my personal account, like, okay, I could do that, but my personal account is tied to Facebook, and I'm in all these Facebook groups.
And if I'm being honest, that's probably the biggest negative is I did like the Facebook groups. I did like a lot of the entrepreneur communities there. I liked connecting with people. I liked kind of seeing what was going on. But.
And I'll get into more of this in a second. Like, what? It's like being off of that now, but I do miss some of those conversations. One thing, though, is that around the end of 2023 and especially into 2024, I realized I had to get off of a lot of these platforms. So for the longest time, Instagram and Facebook felt like these, like, pillar things that I just could not disconnect from.
I didn't. Like, I had login stuff connected to them. I had. I was using different platforms. At one point, I logged into my Business Canva account through Facebook.
And so I felt. It felt like this really weird web of stuff tied to everything. And I was like, well, how am I going to possibly disconnect from all of this? The first thing I started doing, though, was I deleted threads. Threads became a really big issue for me because it was like all these micro conversations and hot takes and, you know, whataboutisms.
And I also thought it was so bizarre. And I think this is something that just appears within social media. But it was so weird to see how different people acted on threads versus Instagram. For example, I remember this one Bookstagram account that I found that I followed on Instagram. She had a huge following, like over 100,000 people on Instagram.
And I loved all of her posts, right? Like, curated or not, fake or not, staged or not, it was so cool to see, like, this little fireplace she had in her reading room and all the books she was reading. And again, this made me want to always buy more books that I didn't need, right? But I loved her content. And then I remember seeing her on threads and all the stuff she was posting was so mean, girl.
There was like, all this Things she would say or she'd talk about her quote, unquote haters, or she'd just slam other entrepreneurs. And granted, there wasn't anything she was saying that was like, wrong per se, but it was just a completely different vibe, right? Like she wasn't expressing these things in Instagram posts around her stories, but on threads, it felt like a different medium. It felt like a different room. For some reason.
It gave kind of, you know, like you're at a slumber party with your friends or something, or you're out to the bar and you can kind of just let loose a little bit more, explain things a little bit differently, maybe show more of your true colors. And I thought that was really interesting, but it also made me feel really unsettled, especially when there were people that I bought, like, courses or products from, and then I'd see them complaining about their students and customers, right, on threads, almost as if they thought it was a peer only group, as if they were only talking to other entrepreneurs. But many of their customers were on threads, reading the things they were saying. So it just created this really interesting dynamic. And so that's an aside, but I found that anytime I had like, a thought or I somehow wanted, you know, to be validated in a way, I was thinking that was different.
I noticed myself going to threads or posting something, and then if it didn't get the reaction I wanted, I'd be like, oh, no. And then I also just got caught up in different political conversations with people or trying to debate people online. And you can't do that. You just can't do that. So I deleted threads around, I think it was after the election, the presidential election in the United States.
I just deleted threads because my mental health was just in a free fall state and I couldn't unplug from it. And my husband very gently and kindly kept saying, like, hey, why don't you spend the weekend without being on threads? Or what if you just turned off your phone this weekend? Because he could just see the level of despair that I was falling into and not, you know, there was that. And then, you know, you could also talk about all the different bots that we see online, right?
So I won't get into all that. But there was all these reasons. So I deleted threads, I deleted TikTok, which was an immediate better thing. I will tell you right now, if you have the option to get off TikTok, I mean, I'm not gonna tell you what to do, but that was one of the most immediate things that felt Good. I think there was maybe for me like a 72 hour, like, oh, I kind of want to go on TikTok.
But then that quickly ended. I just immediately felt like I had my own self agency and awareness and lot of my thoughts back. It was really interesting to notice that because we all think we're special, right? We all think we're not immune to, you know, or we think we are immune to the algorithm or mis, or disinformation or political stances, hot takes, you know, whatever, you name it. And the more I was off of it, the more I realized, like, oh, some of these opinions, like I agreed with them.
But the more I sit with it myself, the more I realize I actually have like a more nuanced opinion. Like, it's not so black and white. It's not this or that. It's not think this or be canceled. It's not, you know, and so that was also very, very fascinating.
So I get to this place where I'm off threads, I'm off TikTok. I deleted Twitter like years and years ago. I think when X took over, I had to go in there and actually like delete it. Delete it. But I hadn't been on there in maybe like four or five years.
And so I was in this good place. But I still felt kind of like beholden to Instagram and Facebook. So I started researching like, okay, if this is a deep dive and I actually am going to untangle myself right then let's do it. So one of the first things I did, and I apologize, I can't give you a step by step tutorial or information because I just had to get out of there. I thought about maybe trying to do screenshots of how I deleted things or how I did this, but.
But it was like I so desperately needed to do it while I was in the mindset to do it and not to back out again, that I just had to go forward. So one of the first things I did was I went in and you can go into Facebook settings and disconnect any accounts that are basically integrated or connected with. So if you're using Facebook to sign on to into a different account and I can't even tell you, like there were things on there that I don't even remember signing up for, you know, like games, maybe Candy Crush or something, Canva was one of them. But you can go on there and disconnect it. And then what usually happens is then you get an email from whatever service that you had signed into with Facebook and they Say, hey, like, let's.
Let's reconnect your account with just your email. So that's what I did. I disconnected all the Facebook logins. That was cool. Then I just logged in to everything with my actual email.
And they make it so easy, right? Like, oh, just log in with Facebook. Just sign up with Facebook. But again, you're just. It's just like another way to keep you tethered into the platform.
So I did that. That was one of the first things. And then back in, I think it was 2024, I signed up. At the time, it was a deal on AppSumo for Heartbeat, which is a community where you can create. You know, it's similar to Circle or.
I don't know what's another thing. School now is popular, but I signed up for a lifetime deal. So I moved all of my Facebook groups for my business into Heartbeat. And, you know, huge caveat here. Like, you move your.
Yourself off of Facebook, things are gonna plummet. You're not gonna see the same engagement. Maybe you. I think we're seeing that with school right now because it's got, like, cool gamification stuff. But school right now feels like.
And if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's S K O O L. It's like another community platform. Entrepreneurs pay a minimal fee or I think there might be a free option to create communities on there. The vibe of it feels. Feels like Facebook groups felt in 2015, 2016, just very like, hey, I'm so and so and I do this. And I don't know, you can also just kind of see right through a lot of people.
Like, there's those. Those latter posts again, like, drop a yes if you want to do this. Right. But anyway, it has that same vibe. And I think overall it's good, it's fun, it's collaborative.
But I see it just going the same way as Facebook groups in terms of people being completely burned out on it. Like, I remember in 2015, I was on, I don't know, probably like 100 or more different entrepreneur Facebook groups. And I met a lot of entrepreneur friends on there at the time, but it just quickly became too much. And everyone was doing the theme days too. Do you remember that?
I did that. I had a free Facebook group for my mindful productivity thing. I can't even remember what it was called. I changed it multiple times, but I did. I don't know, I had different theme days, like Mindful Monday or whatever, and then I would schedule them all out ahead of time with Meet Edgar, I think it was before Facebook had an integrated or like a built in, baked in way to schedule posts.
Gosh, I'm going on so many tangents. Forgive me, but anywho, Facebook groups was. Where am I even going with this? Facebook groups was different. So that's one of the things I'm missing now that I'm apart from it.
However, I also realized that that's not the only way. It's like we've been made to believe that the only way to connect with people is through social media. One of the early ways that I remember meeting entrepreneurs, I actually thought this was kind of fun, was people would host webinars. And I remember people would create Google sheets, like spreadsheets, specifically for a webinar. And then you would go into the Google sheet.
This was like 2015, okay? You would go into the Google sheet and there'd be like different columns for, like, your name, your email, your website, and you would just put it in there, and then you would email people that you were interested in. Like, I remember meeting a couple different bloggers that way, and then I ended up collaborating with them, or you'd swap blog posts or something like that on each other's websites. There was all these really unique ways that people found to connect with people that were doing the same kind of stuff on the Internet without, like, this is before you could message people, even on Instagram. So.
So there were all these different ways, which leads me to say that we forget that there's so many ways to connect and collaborate with people, even on the Internet. Like, without social media, we don't need it. It feels convenient. But even now, as we're constantly posting online, nobody's seeing it anymore. And that's another thing.
It's like we all feel this pressure to constantly post online, but no one's actually seeing our posts, you know, or you're part of a summit or something, and there's a requirement to post on social media, but then it, like, doesn't get any views. And. And that's another topic I can touch on later, but it's all fascinating. Gosh, that was a tangent. So I created a heartbeat community.
That's what I was talking about, and moved my groups there. I would say only about 30% of my students have joined those groups, and engagement is just down. Granted, things have also changed. I think we're a little burnt out. We all have zoom fatigue, maybe community fatigue, but it's been harder to get people in there.
And then, to be honest, I haven't been as active in there, but when people do ask questions in there, it's great. I provide support there. I can message students directly there. You can even do like voice notes. I really like it.
So I'm on there. And then I've joined a lot of other people's communities off of Facebook, obviously, whatever platform they're in, Circle Heartbeat School. I'm sure there's others. I'm totally down to go on there. And then, you know, there's also Slack and stuff like that.
So that was the first thing it was moving groups off Facebook and trying to like untie myself personally and business wise from these platforms. So I did that, but then I. And then I downloaded. I requested all my data. So I downloaded like all my Facebook stuff.
Because I was on Facebook since 20 2005. I had like crazy videos from college that never should have been on the Internet. I had photos, you know, on there of, you know, my dad that I lost when I was 23. And I didn't know if I had them other places. Just so I made sure to like download all that information.
But then Instagram was the hardest thing for me because I was like, well, I'm on there the most. It's the one platform I like to go on. And if I'm being honest, I liked creating and sharing stories because I liked organizing them into highlights purely for myself. I loved the highlights I would make of my bulldog. We had a groundhog who I named Marvin, who showed up here this last summer, and I made a whole reel about him.
And then I would put that in the highlights and then I would go back and look at it. And if I ever wanted to find stuff, I would go in there. I had all these cool memories I had, you know, when we moved. And so I didn't want to delete it because I didn't want to lose all that stuff. And what I ended up actually doing was going through because it was taking too long to get.
You could download all that data, but it wasn't. Instagram doesn't give you at least that. I know an organized way to download your highlights as. As you can view them when they are highlights. So it can give you all that information, but it's scattered.
And I. Part of the reason why I loved it was that you could see them all in sequential order and how you organize them. So what I ended up doing. And you can look at this, Google it yourself. I found it.
You can find it. But I found some different websites where you can go and just download directly Anything from Instagram, technically, from anybody's account, but I just did this for mine. And I went in and I think I spent about two and a half hours one night, I think it was the night before I deleted Instagram, and I just downloaded all my highlights one by one. I would do this highlight, and I would download the 40 or 50 little clips I had, and then I would put them in a folder, and I saved them on an external hard drive and on my computer. And now I have them.
Now I have all of those things. And so I did that. But then as I was doing it, it also made me think if I didn't share so much on here, I wouldn't have so much to download. And that's like the other thing that social media has done for me is it's made me want to share more. In fact, I wrote a note here as a reminder to talk about this on this episode.
But there's something about this call, this pull to share, share into the void. Like, the void. The void that is the Internet. Social media, specifically. It just asks this question all the time in the back of my head.
You know, this is my experience. Like, what are you mad about? Tell somebody on social media. What are you sad about? Complain about it.
You know what's hard right now? Tell somebody about it on social media. And then. True, true. Also, what's going well?
Oh, you're having a breakfast. That's very perfect. Oh, why don't you move your book a little bit to the left and position the camera a little bit more so you can see the bulldog in the background. And people can, like, see this part of your house that's not as messy. Take a photo of that, share that.
Right. And so I noticed that I would have these moments where I would take my bulldog, Bella, on a walk. We live right next to this beautiful open field. And we would get out there and I'd see, like, a sparrow, or the sun would be, you know, cascading over Bella, just this way. And it was so beautiful.
And my first thought was, oh, I should share this on Instagram. And that made me sick to my stomach because that it hasn't always been that way. The fact that I would experience something so wonderful, and my first thought was, where's my phone? How do I capture this and show this? How do I add this to my Instagram story instead of being in the moment?
And also, not just for social media, but also, why do I need to capture all these things? You know, I think about this all the time. I think about naturalists, you know, hundreds of years ago, or specifically in, like, the early 1800s, when nobody had, like, a personal camera. You know, you'd see, like, a groundhog or a blue jay, and you couldn't take a photo of it. You couldn't record it.
So people spent all this time in nature with, like, a, you know, a piece of paper and a pencil, and they would document things as best they can. That's why we have all these incredible books from naturalists, you know, drawing out birds and nature, people that did paintings. Right. Like, you'd have to be so immersed and present to truly observe that. And you'd probably have to see something multiple, multiple times to accurately capture it.
Right. Because, like, I'll do bird watching now, and I'll sit in my backyard, and I can take a photo of a blue jay or a cardinal, but I'm not actually really observing it that way when I just sit out there without my phone. It's interesting because the less I'm on social media, the less I feel the urge to capture everything. Like, I'll have moments where I'm like, oh, my gosh, there's this squirrel, and it's doing the cutest thing right now, and it looks like it's waving to me, and it's, like, holding its little hand against its chest, and it's so cute. And I just really want to send this to my mom, but at the same time, I can just really be present in the moment and experience it.
And there's this acceptance of the fact that moments and experiences are fleeting and we're not meant to capture everything, because even when you rewatch it back, it's not going to be the same kind of experience. Now, I'm not saying I don't, you know, record things or take photos of things sometimes that's really lovely. But there's also something really wonderful about being in the moment. And my mom often tells me this story. She told me this years ago when I started, like, posting everything on Facebook.
And it was about this photographer that had always wanted to see the Queen of England. It was a goal of his, and he finally got to go to an event and be one of the photographers there. And he was so caught up in taking these photos of her that he realized that the only way he actually saw her was through the lens of his camera. And he never actually stopped to put his camera down and actually look at the Queen and, like, see her and see the whole room. And it was, like, this really devastating realization.
And so I think about that all the time, and what it means to be present, what it means to be mindful.
And I notice more and more the more I'm off social media that I don't have this same desire to share as much. I also just realized that I don't care. For the first two weeks after being off of social media, I had some, like, had some moments, right, because you delete your account and then you have to wait 30 days. And they make it really difficult, too. They, like, make you re.
Log in. And the minute you start trying to, like, go through your photos or request data, all of a sudden they have an error and you can't delete your account. And whether or not that's part of their process to keep you tethered in there or not, who knows? But I did think it was interesting, but I just don't. I had these moments where I was like, oh, man, I deleted all my Facebook photos.
But you know what I didn't do? I didn't go back to all the photos that anyone else had ever tagged me in. So I'm likely missing photos of me from, like, 15 years ago that other people tagged me and that, like, I'll never see again. And I remember, like, I had this moment where I'm like, well, you could. You could log back into Facebook and stop the.
Deactivate, you know, the deletion process and go get those. But then I was like, well, why. Why does that. Does that matter? Do.
Does it matter that we have access to all these things? I mean, people lived even not that long ago where maybe they had one photo of themselves, right? Or, you know, you know, they don't have any photos of their relatives. But we just feel this connection, this connection to stuff. It's very similar to, you know, it's like a digital connection that's very similar to a physical connection to all the stuff that you might want to declutter, right?
So anyway, these were all the things that started coming up for me. And as you can see, there's so many, like, rabbit holes and tandems I could go on here. And I'm trying to keep this more cohesive. But I want to talk to you about some of the things I'm noticing now, some of the opportunities and possibilities that are showing up for me. First of all, one of the reasons.
One of the many reasons why I decided to finally pull the trigger was that I knew there was never going to be a perfect time. My life is going by every single day. I was spending so much time on Instagram, even if it was an hour a day. I'm like, that's an hour. I could be reading or doing literally anything else.
And if I didn't, it was going to be uncomfortable to delete it. There was never going to be a moment where I was like, I'm totally ready and there's no hesitation, right? Just like, you know, doing anything that feels addictive. Like at some point you have to stop doing it. You have to make, you know, change is going to be uncomfortable.
There's going to be discomfort in it. So I finally did it one night and I remember just walking downstairs and telling my husband like, I did it. I deleted Instagram and Facebook and those are the last two platforms. And I was so excited. Like I was so excited.
The things that started happening immediately were like, the next day I'd be on my phone and I'd check my email or whatever, check the weather, and then my thumbs would just be trying to navigate to the Facebook app or navigate to the Instagram. Like I didn't have it, they were deleted. But I would like just physically look for it like out of habit, which I thought was crazy. That's now stopped, but it took about a week for that to go away. But I also was looking at how much Instagram, Facebook, how much were those leading to sales in my business and they weren't.
There was a time when you could post on Instagram and you could get a lot of reach. During 2020, I made, I created a podcast course called Pretty Simple Podcast and it did a whole pre sale and all this kind of stuff, early bird pricing, whatnot. And I had 25 people enroll from Instagram within 48 hours, like from, just from posting on Instagram. If that was still the case today, it'd probably be a little more difficult to get off of social media. But I just don't, I don't see people I want to see on there no matter how many times I try to update my feed.
Because there's ways to go in and like reset your feed in Instagram, your for you page or whatever. It just continually would find ways to bring in like AI slop or stuff I didn't want to see or news stuff or it just, I didn't want to see it. So I deleted those things. I also deleted my like meta ads account, which I only used a couple times. I've dabbled in, I, I'm ashamed to say like how many courses I've bought that teach you how to do Facebook ads.
And I just was like, you know what? I, I Don't want to do it. I don't want to be a part of it. I don't want to give money to Zuckerberg. I just don't want to do it.
And the thing is, okay, as an aside, this isn't a virtue signaling thing because we exist and we give money to the billionaires and the bros and all those people. I run Publish With Purpose, which is a course that teaches you how to publish a planner. And primarily we use Amazon and kdp. And I get a lot of emails throughout the year that are like, well, I really want to publish planner, but I hate Amazon. I don't want to use Amazon.
I want to boycott it. Good for you, right? I mean, like, yeah, I do too, but it's how we get our dog food when we can't get it off chewy and I need it. And it's only available on the Internet. So there's all these reasons, right?
But also, Amazon runs just about everything they run aws, which hosts probably everything. You probably look at a website that uses it. So it's like, how far down the rabbit hole do we want with boycotts? Right? Some of it's inevitable, right?
Like, if we found out that every single building that houses a grocery store is run by so and so and we don't like them, are we gonna stop going to the grocery store to get food? Right? That's the system we're in. It's. I'm not saying that boycotting can't work in some situations, but I don't want to go down this huge rabbit hole.
However, I knew that I personally didn't want to give any money to Facebook with ads. I just like, oh, I couldn't do it. Like, I just. It was. That was my line for me.
I just like, was like, no. And granted, running ads other places, Google, whatever, also could be problematic. But I just knew that Facebook wasn't the place I wanted to do it. So I deleted my ads account. And the things that have happened now are that one, I don't need to or feel any pressure to create social media content.
So I'm not spending any time thinking about what's trending or what reels I need to create or what images I need to post to my grid or like, oh, look, they changed the stupid size of that made me so mad. They changed the size of the Instagram photo from a square to whatever it is now. I don't need to worry about that anymore. I don't have to worry about how to repurpose content into Smaller content bits. No, I'm focusing on long form content in my business.
Podcasting, blog posts. I still do have a YouTube channel. You could argue that that's social media. There's problems with Google and YouTube too. But I.
It's gonna be longer form content and videos on there. And I also don't watch shorts. So every now and then like, what will catch my eye? And I'm like, damn it. But you can go into the app and you can say, show fewer shorts.
You can also go in and delete shorts from your history and you'll see them less and they'll stop popping up when you first open YouTube on your phone, you can also just not have YouTube on your phone and just do more things from your desktop computer. So. But anyway, now that I'm not on there, I feel better and better every day. I feel more confident about it every single day. I am thinking about all the ways it's like I didn't see it.
It's like I couldn't see it before, but like, there's so many other ways to run a business online, even online without social media. You know, webinars, JV webinars, collaborations, summits. Yes, of course. Podcasting, you know, but also just blogging and focusing on search engine optimization. Cause that's honestly how most people find me.
Most people, I'd say about 85% of my students that join publish with purpose are people that have searched how to publish a planner. They find my content, they watch my workshop masterclass, and they enroll. That is how I want to run my entire business with literally everything. I'm done with social media. It's no longer going to be a thing that's taking up my time.
I've gotten so much more time back. Mentally, I feel so good. I kept being like, what's wrong with me? I even got a prescription for Lexapro for anxiety that didn't end up starting. And granted, anxiety is a real thing, but I'm telling you, since being on social media, I don't have this heaviness in my chest anymore.
The news is something that I still keep a pulse on, but it's okay if I don't know something for 72 hours. It's okay if I'm late finding out that Chuck Norris died. It's okay if I'm late hearing the latest celebrity gossip or whatever the crap is going on. It's okay. I think there's so much pressure for us to constantly be plugged in.
Like there's this weird social more thing if you don't know everything. The minute it happens, it's okay. I'm now more tuned into my local community where I live. I'm not in Facebook groups for any dumb stuff in the local community, which don't help anyway. If I want to look at news, I go to news sources I trust.
I'm not just seeing random stuff on social media that I have to like, fact check. I'm still fact checking things, but it's just different. I listen to NPR podcasts. I also have a physical tiny little radio with batteries that I'll take with me around the house. Sometimes I'll listen to NPR in there.
I've also started subscribing. I'm donating now to PBS and I watch more of their Masterpiece Theater stuff and more of these shows that aren't just this in your face, like attention grabbing thing. And I, because of that, like, I'm kind of, I'm watching like less reality tv, less true crime. And I just find that I feel better. I'm still gonna indulge in those things, right?
This isn't some like purity content thing, but I just find that it's interesting that in switching that off, I'm starting to do more things. I'm going to the library more. I go to the library now just to pick up and drop off books, like holds I'm putting in at least twice a week more if I'm going there to work sometimes. Recently I just went to the library because I was like, you know what? I want to go to the library.
Something I wouldn't have thought of doing had I just been on my phone all day. But I was like, I took all my journals and I went to the library and I sat at this desk in the sun. And I love going to the library because it feels like this immersive ASMR experience because there's like people whispering over here and over here and you know, people clicking their pens or typing on a keyboard. And it's just so calm and it's so cool to be submerged in a place where people are just there to learn and read and study or search for a job or meet up with people. You can hear tutors working with kids learning how to read, learning how to solve math problems.
It's just such a cool place to be. It's truly a third place and we need more of those. And I'm also just looking at other places. I could run ads if I want to. There's just so much more out there than social media.
And you may feel like you can't delete it, but you can. You don't need it. It needs you. And the more we unplug, the more we say no to the algorithm, to all this endless screen time, to being fed, like, different narratives and we actually just read more books. And that's the thing too is oftentimes I think a lot of people shy away from, from reading a book versus watching like the hottest, like news take on YouTube or wherever.
And a lot of the news we see now isn't even news. It's just conversations about the news, conversations about what people think about the news or think what might happen. But it's not actually necessarily helpful. And it's okay to pause and slow down and read a book about a current event or history. Those things are going to help you so much more in terms of understanding nuance and critical thinking and building a different perspective and changing your worldview.
There's just so much out there. So that's where I'm going to leave it. This podcast episode ended up being very long. If you've listened this far and you have enjoyed this and and you want to continue the conversation, please do. I want to hear from you.
The best way for you to do that is to be on my email list. So if you go to sarasteckler.com newsletter or anywhere on my website, there's going to be something that you can sign up for. You can join my newsletter, you can respond to any email. I would love to hear from you. So I hope this episode was helpful.
I'll likely do some follow up stuff. I can get a little bit more deep into the weeds of things I'm doing as a business owner without it. But I kind of wanted this episode to just be a very conversational, messy intro into what I'm doing and why. And if nothing else, I hope it's just an inspiration for you to realize how short our lives are and that you get to control how you spend your time. That's really what it is.
Social media or not. How do you want to spend every day? Where do you want the hours of your day and your attention being called to? What do you want to notice and what do you want to be present of? For me, it wasn't my phone anymore.
To end this episode, I'm going to leave you with what it sounds like in my brain now. Being off of social media and feeling like I have so much more control, being able to put gaps in spaces in between things and being okay with sitting stillness and silence again, it truly feels like such a treat. So I'll leave you now with some wonderful sounds that I recently recorded from my backyard.
