This allowed for a natural experiment. What would change in my life if I didn’t put social media back on my phone?

I have not looked at Instagram or Facebook since June 3rd. I decided to go back on Twitter (mostly in a lurking capacity) this past weekend because it really is a good source for breaking news.

(I occasionally look at LinkedIn, and my business is still posting content there, but I don’t think anyone views LinkedIn as being an addictive sort of social media.)

So, what did change in my life? Well, my screen time tallies did not go down. My new iPhone is shinier and faster than my last one! What can I say — it’s more fun to use.

I quickly realized that I have a strong desire to scroll through something. In the absence of social media, this wound up being comments at the New York Times and on blogs. In the absence of Instagram and Facebook, I wound up looking through my own old photos a lot (which Apple assists with — its slideshow widget is quite good). I did more online shopping. Seriously. I spent a lot of time scrolling at Amazon, Nic + Zoe, NYDJ, Kut from the Kloth, etc.

Now, there is an argument to be made that the comments on blogs and the New York Times are more wholesome than those on Twitter, though I’m not sure that’s true. My own photos are less problematic than social media ones in terms of comparison, though again, not entirely. I wish I had appreciated how un-wrinkly I was in 2016 at the time. Shopping is…shopping.

So where does this leave us? Basically, reminding me that most of us waste some amount of time. The human desire to avoid boredom during time that is not otherwise spoken for is strong. Getting off social media mostly just changed how I wasted time. I don’t have a huge desire to get back on Insta/FB right now, and I may sign out of Twitter if the news calms down (if only) but I have not become massively more productive, much as I might wish that were true. Oh well!

In other news: Here’s a round-up of this week’s content!

Over at Vanderhacks I wrote about how we should “Choose how much news to consume,” perhaps “Take a spending pause” during the Prime day sales, and behind the paywall I wrote about how “Nothing is fun for the whole family” — but there are some things you can do to have adventures with a varied crew. If you’d like a daily dose of life strategies, please consider a free or paid subscription!

In the Before Breakfast podcast I talked about how “Magic happens in the mushy middle” and that “You can go a long way in a weekend.” Someone wrote me that she listened to that episode and booked a weekend away — excellent.

Over at the Best of Both Worlds Patreon community site, we’ve been covering advice for parents sending kids to sleep-away camp for the first time. This week’s episode was a mailbag one (recorded together in person!). Please give it a listen, and as always we welcome ratings and reviews.

I’ll write a bit more about that later this week, but over the weekend I decided to go back on X/Twitter. I don’t really post there much anymore, but whenever big news happens, as it certainly did, I do find it interesting to see the variety of sources and voices. I don’t want to spend my life on there, so maybe I’ll log myself out and not save the password or something. I am still figuring that out — how to get the benefits without the time cost.

Anyway, life continues. We sent another kid off to camp this weekend so we are now down to three. My husband and I took the 12-year-old and 9-year-old for a short bike ride on Saturday and it was logistically easier than moving 7 people around for sure. We only needed one car. The 12-year-old and I volunteered for the preschool Sunday school class again. My husband and I went to Longwood Gardens on Friday night and walked around and had dinner in the beer garden. There were pool trips on Saturday and Sunday. There was also a massive push with an online class. Longtime readers may recall that this has been a source of summer stress/anxiety for me in the past — a child signs up for a self-paced online class that nonetheless “counts” on a school transcript. I was under the impression that the child was on pace, and said child was — if that child was not going to be away at camp for multiple weeks. The good news is that you can do a lot in 72 hours. But I wish we’d had this conversation, oh, like 72 hours prior to that.

While school has only been out for a month, in my mind July 15 is about the mid-way point of summer. So I’m doing a quick check in on my Summer Fun List (you can read the original post here).

We went to a baseball game in June, and have also now hit 2 separate beer gardens. There have been two bike rides with kids and several solo ones (it’s pretty easy to stick my own bike in my car with the seats down and then I don’t have to deal with the bike rack). I’ve done a number of early AM runs (about the only time running outside is comfortable in 90 degree weather!) including two early morning runs in Central Park during the NYC trip. I’ve wound up in the hot tub multiple nights per week — we tend to do evening pool trips at least during the week, and I get cold after not that long in the regular pool. There was one beach trip over the July 4th long weekend, but we’ll be back for two weeks in August and will do most of the beach items on the summer fun list then. I have now gone to our local farmers’ market twice.

I’m currently doing an evening hours challenge for Big Time…I probably need to speed up some of my research on this but it’s been mostly OK. I have been writing summer sonnets for sure — I posted the Tiger Lily one last week and I’ll post one at the end of this too.

I have not listened to the summer part of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Probably should get on that.

As for one-on-one time with each kid…. I’ve spent one-on-one time with the 4-year-old just by virtue of him being little. The big kids have all gotten fairly large trips this year. The 9-year-old is a little harder but we shall see.

Other than in NYC the older kids have not gone to any nice restaurants. Well, I took my daughter out for brunch. My husband is supposed to take the two older boys out when they’re back from camp.

I have been outside at night! I don’t think there will be any camping happening this summer. But I have seen the stars.

And I’m enjoying my new summer wardrobe. Basically it is all Nic + Zoe jeans in various crops plus flowy shirts. And my Charix shoes.

If you made a summer fun list, how is it going for you?

Here’s a sonnet called “Elegy on the harbor”:

The fragile warmth of June gives way to heat
that’s thick as clouds, a damp weight still at dawn.
The ebbing tide pulls water in retreat;
the dock now wonders where the boats have gone.

An old wood cabin, dark when it was built,
is faded gray, with weeds beneath the stairs
the porch boards broken, railing at a tilt
inside, a musty bunk bed where the pairs

of children woke and scurried to the hall —
the smell of bacon in the morning haze.
Then once when summer faded into fall
the children stopped returning, and the days

of campfires ended — lingering like a ghost
in smoky mist along this northern coast.

So why not curate these inputs to make life a little more intentional (or fun)? In this week’s episode of Best of Both Worlds, Sarah and I talk about how and why to curate your media consumption. She shares some lessons from her popular Digital Detox course (which is really more about curation than detoxing!) and we talk about what’s in our various queues these days.

In the Q&A we answer a question from a listener who wants to help her rising 6th grader plan and organize schoolwork.

Please give the episode a listen, and as always we welcome ratings and reviews!

Now that we are part of iHeartMedia, you can also listen on the iHeart app.

I have a great life. And yet certain social media posts still get at me. It’s not about cars or homes — I’m perfectly happy there, so these don’t inspire much jealousy on my part. Instead, it’s people waxing eloquent about their relaxing and wonderful family vacations, or those large family pictures where the kids are all in matching lovely clothes and the mom looks polished and put together. A close runner up is anyone talking about the long retreat they took to write their book next to a babbling stream.

I know plenty of this is unreal. Who is taking those family photos of the whole family? This is not setting your iPhone up on a tripod. It’s clearly a commercial enterprise, and those “relaxing” family vacations were paid for and arranged, in full, by the hotel/resort/amusement park sponsoring the post.

That said, I think it’s wise to recognize these exact triggers because they often tell us something about our lives and what we might want to change. In my case, the existence of the toddler means that relaxation is hard to find — on vacation or any other time. But not impossible. I’ve set up a few hours of weekend childcare for the baby over the next few weeks so time will feel less frantic. I suppose if I wanted to hire a stylist and a photographer to follow me around so my family scenes looked more polished I could do so. I probably don’t care enough to make that happen, but I could invest a bit more in my appearance (hello coming out of Covid into the real world again…). And I’m analyzing my time to make sure I have more uninterrupted writing stretches. I have removed myself from the camp runs today for instance. It’s not weeks of solitude along a babbling brook, but I’d probably get tired of that pretty quick.

What sorts of posts most send you into these musings? I’ve pondered pruning my feed down to only people I know in real life and dollhouse furniture accounts, but on the other hand, the matching outfits are pretty cute…

Photo: A relaxing vacation drink, though abandoned about halfway through when something or another happened