The things I miss as a minimalist
I reactivated my Instagram account tonight. My best friend Kyle and his wife, my friend Marie, had a baby today. Welcome to the world, Hudson Beau! I pray you grow to greet this world of opportunity with eyes-wide-open eagerness, optimism, and joy. I pray you always know you're loved.
When your BFFs have a baby, you start to fear the FOMO—I want to be along for every mile of their ride, but I know I can't, so I'm hoping to share in their joy with the use of social media. If you've been reading, you know I have such a fear of what social media does to my brain.
I'm a minimalist. This means that in every aspect of my life I try to live simply and intentionally. I often fail. I failed massively this week—I found a rare piece of guitar equipment at an insanely low price and couldn't help but to buy it. This was such a deal, but everything is 100% off if you don't buy it!
I often miss the thrill of hunting down a piece of guitar or studio equipment and finding it at the right price, and then buying. I feel like I should feel like a guitarist when I buy guitar-stuff, but I've found that I most feel like a guitarist when I'm playing the guitar. It took me years to realize this. Does that mean I'm dumb? I feel dumb.
What makes us miss things? Not people—we miss people for obvious reasons. What makes us miss things? Is it the comfort a thing provides? Many things in my life have caused more anxiety than comfort. The anxiety of maintaining things, protecting things, packing and moving things, checking things, comparing things to other things...
What makes me miss Instagram, when I know that it fuels my FOMO, it tempts me to compare myself to others, it drives me to more carefully craft my "feed" in a way that makes me feel like such a liar, as I doctor my life's record in that way? What made me want to come back?
I don't think it was to share my life. I think it was because I love and often miss my friends.
My life is a mixture of gorgeous, bright, resplendent moments—moments in the sun—and mundane, gray, sometimes dark moments. My life has beautiful sunsets, but it's also got days of cloud coverage and drizzle. It's like a storm on the beach. Lightning over the ocean is a truly terrifying thing, forcing you to spend the day in your rental. The rain feels harder over water, doesn't it? and it carves the earth as it pounds the sand.
Fear in a place of beauty. Storms over the ocean. And then some days, my life is neither a storm nor a beach. Some days it's just simply un-Instagramable. Unimportant. Many people use Instagram as their 'highlight reel' showing the greatest moments of their life. I'm about using mine to enjoy my friends' highlights, but I'm going to diminish my own, for my own sake.
I put my website in my Instagram bio so if you clicked, having visited my newly-reactivated profile, check out the blogroll below. I wrote every day in February on the topic "Jesus on minimalism," where I show that Jesus was all about the simple life. I write personal, journal-esque meditations like this one almost daily. If you click "Blog posts about minimalism" you'll find more formal stuff—I spend a lot of time on those ones.
I'm keeping my Instagram username private and only following IRL friends. I'm not answering DMs on it and I don't have notifications turned on—that way, hopefully, I won't feel the need to constantly check it. It's for friends. I dearly love each of my friends and I can honestly say, no exaggeration, I owe my life to my wonderful friends.
I'm into this idea from Cal Newport, called 'Slow Social Media.' Here are a few principles of slow social media:
Only use a given social media service if it provides valuable benefits that would be hard to replace. Use these services only for these purposes.
Delete all social media apps from your phone. (Few serious uses for social media require that you can access it wherever you are throughout the day.) Instead, access social media through a web browser on your laptop or desktop, once or twice a week.
When logged onto a social media service, don’t click “like” or follow links unrelated to your specific, high-value purposes — these activities mainly serve the social media conglomerate’s attempts to package you into data slivers that they can sell to the highest bidder.
Maybe slow social will help me manage my anxiety that constant contact is turning my brain to mush. Thank you for checking out the blog. This is one of the things I most look forward to doing when I wake up each morning. I would encourage you to click around!