Glennon’s Dramatic Social Media Plan with Amelia Hruby

December, 3, 2024

Glennon Doyle:

Okay, Pod Squad, I have been looking forward to this conversation for a long time, and this is why, because I have recently come to understand.

Abby Wambach:

Recently?

Glennon Doyle:

You know I only speak in 12 step languages, so here we go. I have come to believe that I am powerless over social media, and I have ended it in my life, and since now I have ended it…

Abby Wambach:

What do you mean ended it?

Glennon Doyle:

Well, I don’t have any of it anymore.

Abby Wambach:

You don’t consume it.

Glennon Doyle:

I don’t consume social media anymore.

Amanda Doyle:

You don’t have the apps on your phone. You are there, but we’re posting your stuff, but nothing on your phone?

Glennon Doyle:

Right. Which we’re going to talk about all these layers of what that means. The person we have today here has been talking about the challenges of social media world for a very long time, and I have been covering my ears, and trying not to listen to her, because just like I used to cover my ears, and not listen to my friends who asked me why I was drinking so much every day, because before you’re ready to make wise decisions, you avoid wise friends. So, today is going to be a conversation with Amelia Hruby, and she is going to talk with us about social media in a way that is non-judgmental, non-scary, we are not going to shame anyone to getting off social media, but my goal for this conversation is to talk about it very personally, not in big sweeping declarations, but my experience with it, Amelia’s experience with it, and how we can either get ourselves off if we want to get off.

That sounded overtly sexual, but you know what I mean. And it might be an unintended consequence of being off social media. So, how to get off, or how to, I guess stay, and not be so plagued by all of the problems that come with it. So, just stay with us. Maybe by the end of the hour we’ll find a little bit more freedom, and sanity together. Let me introduce Amelia Hruby, who is a writer, educator, and a podcaster with a PhD in philosophy. She’s the founder of Softer Sounds, a feminist podcast studio for entrepreneurs, and creatives, and she’s the host of Off The Grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients. Welcome, Amelia.

Amelia Hruby:

Hello. Thank you so much for having me.

Abby Wambach:

Just before we begin, I just also want to level set that if you are listening to this, and you might not be as intense, or serious needing to fix things as Glennon is, I want you to know that you fall into my camp, and so I will be speaking throughout this podcast to maybe set some good boundaries, and maybe have a better relationship with it so it’s not an all-or-nothing situation here, folks. Just follow along. You’ve got people on your side.

Glennon Doyle:

That’s an interesting [inaudible 00:03:26]

Amanda Doyle:

Abby represents the people that can drink in moderation.

Glennon Doyle:

Exactly, yes. Is that possible? I mean, I want to talk about that, too. Let’s start with that. Amelia, is social media, I’m going to venture to say that many of us have different levels of addiction to it because that’s what it’s intended to do. So, smoking, it’s something that was made to get us addicted, but is it like smoking in which there is no safe way to consume it, and we should just stop? Or is it other process addictions where, okay, well let’s say food for me, it’s an addiction, it’s a problem, but I have to navigate it each day, and there are ways to do it in healthy ways. Which one is it, do you think, Amelia?

Amelia Hruby:

I think that it’s more like the latter. It’s something that some of us can navigate, and we don’t feel so hooked, and trapped by it. We don’t develop such addictive, or extreme patterns around it, but some of us really do. Some of us cannot be on social media at all, or we are immediately going to experience the negative side effects so dramatically that it starts to impact our life, not only online, but offline. And that’s really where I start to see the balance. If our social media use is now impacting our life offline negatively, I think we need to address how are we engaging with these apps? Which apps are we engaging with, and how are we changing our behavior so that our lives on, and offline can be really mutually beneficial, not extractive, or exploitative, or just feel bad.

Abby Wambach:

Can we get into what are some of the just basic things that you could say that are negatively affecting our life outside of social media use?

Glennon Doyle:

Personally, tell us your story. How did you notice that it was affecting you, and why did you make different decisions?

Amelia Hruby:

Yeah, so this goes a bit back to how I started getting on social media. Like many Millennials, I joined Facebook in high school. I joined Instagram in college. I got on Twitter somewhere along the way. I was on these platforms for over a decade, and it started small. It started with creating this digital, or virtual place to kind of keep my offline connection stronger. I would keep friends from high school when I was in college. I’d keep in touch with family members along the way. I loved expanding my social network. It felt so good. But I noticed that over the course of that decade that I was really active on these apps, my experience with them started to change. And I noticed that it mapped really closely to my experience of codependency with personal relationships. I felt like I was exporting my self-worth, my relationship with myself, my relationships with other people to the app. I didn’t know if I was valuable, or not, unless Instagram likes told me that what I was doing was good the same way in many relationships. I didn’t know if I was a good person.

I didn’t know if I was a good girl, or a good girlfriend unless the other person was constantly telling me that I was affirming for me, validating for me. So, this relates to how I’m feeling online, and offline, but the things I start to notice that I feel are I really struggle to establish my self-esteem, or self-worth without this sort of third party, whether it’s an app, or a person, I feel bad about myself a lot. My self-image kind of tanks. I can’t have a clear perception of how I look, or how the things I’m saying sound, or if they’re meaningful to other people. What I noticed the most is just I’ve totally outsourced my sense of self to these other things. And that over time just erodes your self-trust, and your self-belief, and your identity.

Glennon Doyle:

Yes. Okay, so like you, I have a very long history with social media, much of it, beautiful. So, I started blogging when dinosaurs were roaming the earth, and then I think it was before social media, I don’t know. But then social media came about, and it was fun, and exciting, and connective, and I used to be so joyful about it. And I used to for maybe 15 years, Amelia, I read every single comment on every single post. And when I tell you sometimes there’d be thousands of comments. And I considered this my community. If people disagreed with me, if they were mad at me, I would always respond back. I was like the comment whisperer. For a while, we started a nonprofit. We raised 55 million for marginalized people by social media. It was quite beautiful, which makes it confusing, and I think that’s probably a lot of people feel like, “Well, there’s good stuff that comes with it, too.”

One of the interesting things that I have found is that I think why now? Why now after all these 20 years, or however long it’s been, can I not handle it anymore? And I think it’s because I’m healthier, I’m getting healthier, not less healthy. Here’s what I noticed, Amelia, I think, and I didn’t know a lot of these things until I stopped, but I think it made me feel like I had connection, and community, but I don’t know that it was real. My kid just got this cool thing. She just got recruited to this soccer school for college, and I had this picture of her that she was in her little costume, and her uniform.

Abby Wambach:

Her jersey.

Glennon Doyle:

Her jersey, and I realized I don’t know who to send it to. I was sitting on a plane, and I had sent it to my first my sister, Alison, Abby, but that was it. And I realized why am I not getting this celebratory hit of mutual excitement? And it was because I would usually put it online, and get a bunch of fake feedback from people that I don’t truly know. And it was this moment of like, “Oh, I haven’t built.” It’s like I need sugar, but I’ve been eating aspartame for 20 years. There’s something about the faux proxy of community that is making me understand now that I was not putting enough into the real building of community. Is that something that you see?

Amelia Hruby:

Yeah, absolutely. So, one way we talk about this is that you had developed hundreds of thousands, or millions of parasocial relationships, and perhaps what you’re realizing is to the detriment of your social relationships.

Glennon Doyle:

Yes.

Amelia Hruby:

We’re all human beings. We only have so much capacity for how many people we can be in contact with. We can be meaningfully connected to, and I like your aspartame sugar analogy, but one way I think about it is all of those parasocial relationships may represent 1/1000th of a relationship. It may take a thousand of them to feel as good as one person who actually sees us, but sometimes these numbers can get really out of whack. If you have millions of followers in your experience, you’re in a need now suddenly hundreds, or thousands of actual people to validate you to feel the same way. There’s this proportionality to it that can really shift our understanding of how we feel seen.

Amanda Doyle:

So, it’s like a tolerance threshold? If you’re used to having the equivalent of a thousand people, even if that represents by a hundred thousand people online, you need to get that hit. You need that much more affirmation from real people?

Amelia Hruby:

I think that a window of tolerance is a nice metaphor, or analogy here, yes. That sometimes when we’re used to getting this much, so much validation, or affirmation, no matter how much we love the three people we send the photo to, they can’t give us that same feeling. And it’s really challenging to negotiate, and navigate that without feeling like, “Well, does anybody see me? Why did it feel so different, or better, or worse when all of these people affirmed it than when these specific people I’ve chosen in my do? Why doesn’t it feel like enough?”

Abby Wambach:

That’s interesting.

Glennon Doyle:

Yeah, I have noticed just in the last however long it’s been, I don’t know, has it been three months?

Abby Wambach:

Two months?

Glennon Doyle:

I have already been building things more than I did before. I have kind of reached out to cousins that I didn’t before. I have-

Abby Wambach:

Real life relationships.

Glennon Doyle:

Life relationships, yeah. And I do feel like they feel better, and different. It feels better to get a response from an aunt who actually loves, and knows my daughter than get a thousand woo-hoo’s online. Another thing that I noticed about social media is that, this is going to sound really revolutionary to you, Amelia, but it made me feel bad. Okay?

Amelia Hruby:

It does.

Glennon Doyle:

And here’s one specific way. I feel like I have a good life, I like my life. I like my wife, I like my kids. I feel good about the work that I do. I like my team. I think we do good work, and I’m satisfied with it in my body, in my own life. When I get on social media, it takes me about three minutes to in my body start feeling like I’m not doing enough, that other people are getting more opportunities than I am, that I’m not working hard enough, that I’m not in enough places, that I’m not relevant enough in other people’s minds to make me relevant. Is this something that happens to other people, or is it just me?

Amelia Hruby:

It absolutely happens to other people. I think I’m going to say that a lot of times today, I think we typically call this a compare, and despair cycle, and almost every person who comes to me to talk about social media has experienced this in some way. You open an app, you are flooded with tens, hundreds, thousands of other people’s lives, and you, I think pretty innately, and naturally start to compare your life to those lives, your face to those faces, your body to those bodies, your career, to those careers, your family, to those families. We can compare on any level, and for those of us who get really hooked by this, we’ll often go straight for the things that make us insecure.

You’re like, “Oh, I don’t know.” You used the word relevant, Glenn, and maybe you worry that your work isn’t relevant, or won’t stay relevant. So, that’s the thing that it just immediately hooks into you, and you’re like, “Oh, this is it.” For other people, it can be very appearance-based. For some people it’s very career-focused. This person got a book deal. Where’s my book deal? Will I ever get a book deal? Book deals are a big one I hear a lot about. And so I think that for a lot of people that feels awful, and it’s something we may think, well, this happens in everyday life, too. This happens in the real world. You can be on a sports team, and realize there are players who are better than you at things, and your job, you might realize, “Oh, this person is a better manager than I am.”

But there’s something I think about the scale of it on social media. It’s just so many more people. There are only so many people on a team, only so many people in your office to compare to. But on social media, it’s endless. And for those of us who tend to experience, or participate in more self-damaging, or sabotaging behaviors, it provides this endless path, and well for us to go down to start to feel worse, and worse, and worse, and it can be really hard to pull yourself out of. So, I think it’s unfortunately common, and something that I’m glad to see more people talking about because it’s so pervasive in our experience of social media.

Amanda Doyle:

And that seems pretty universally documented that that’s the case. So, why don’t people get off social media then? If you have a universe where everyone’s collectively being like, “I feel like here”, and everyone is like, “Yeah, I also do.” Why are we still there?

Amelia Hruby:

I think there are many ways to explain, or experience this. So, one is evolutionary. Social media didn’t use to be this way. A lot of people who’ve been on it for a longer experienced those early joys of I do get to stay connected with friends that are far away from me. I have had these really great personal experiences, or professional experiences. Our work traveled farther. For some of us, we may live in a physical community that doesn’t see us, or doesn’t see our identity, and we go to social media, it’s be like, “Wow, actually this is who I am.” And you discover it in those mirrors of other people. I never want to diminish the power that social media has in expansive possibilities for many people. We go there, we find joy, we discover ourselves, we build whole new lives through our social media connections, and that’s so beautiful, and powerful. But I think that what has happened over the past decade is that the apps have changed, the world has changed, and we have changed. And Glennon, and you’re speaking to it from that personal place. You have changed.

I feel similarly I changed, and I had to leave social media, but also the app changed also. The world we live in feels a lot different than it did 10 years ago when many of us got on these apps, and so why don’t we get off? Some of us are still grasping for those possibilities, that feeling of joy. Some of us are still finding it there. Some people have built their professional lives on social media, and so how do you get off when the only reason that you are an author, or a TV star, or whatever it might be is because of your social media presence? There’s a lot of professional expectation. You may have bosses, coaches, agents telling you, “You absolutely cannot leave. What do you think you’re doing?” I hear that a lot from other people, and I think for some of us we’re not. I mean, this is the hard one. I think we just gaslight ourselves, and pretend we’re having an okay time.

Glennon Doyle:

I agree.

Amelia Hruby:

I think we’re not honest with ourselves how detrimental it is to our wellbeing, and so we just mask that, and we stay.

Glennon Doyle:

And it feels very in line for me with all my other addictions. Honestly, Amelia, all of them started off great. I was having a great time with alcohol. I was having a great time with drugs. It went really well-ish for a long time until one o’clock in the morning every night.

Amanda Doyle:

Until it didn’t, right?

Glennon Doyle:

I do want to talk a little bit more about the negative things because it’s important to me now that I know already 60 days in how much my nervous system has calmed. It’s important for me to have people listening consider that some of the problems that they think are personal to them are not. So, when we talk about how social media affects you negatively in your real life, it’s not just that it’s upsetting when you’re there. What I’m trying to get at is when I get on social media, and immediately start feeling the scarcity, and immediately start feeling like I’m not doing enough, when a second before I thought I was, and however that reads to you. However you’re listening about your kid isn’t good enough, your job isn’t good enough, your marriage isn’t good enough, you’re whatever this thing is meant to make you feel.

What I noticed is when I get off social media, I change. I bring that scarcity to my team. I bring that scarcity to my wife. I bring that scarcity to my kids. The not good enough feeling translates into my real life. I also, I have enough things Amelia. I have enough cardigans. I’m almost 50 years old, and I understand that I am not one skin cream away from Nirvana. My hair is always going to fucking look like this. I’m never going to be like I am a fashion mogul. And yet I always, when I get off social media, think I actually am. I just need one more cardigan.

Abby Wambach:

When you get off, you need it?

Glennon Doyle:

Yes. When I’m on it puts in my mind, because it’s supposed to that if I just had that thing, I would be as comfortable, and confident as that person. It’s not rocket science to say that the social media exists to sell us stuff, and so we think we’re okay, and we have enough, and then we get on, and then we think in our brains that we need more things, and that negatively affects us, and the planet when we get off. Is this another thing you see often?

Amelia Hruby:

Yeah, absolutely. And that I would say is by design, and I appreciate the way you’re talking about it as I think a balance I always try to strike when I’m talking about social media is that many of us feel like we are personally failing, because of how it makes us feel, or because we can’t get off it even because we can’t close the app because we’re like, “How am I spending two hours scrolling?” We look at our screen time, and we go into a shame spiral about it. And while I do think there’s so many things we can work on personally to help with that, for some of us, it’s just the app does this by design, and we are so hooked, and we don’t have a lot of power at that point in our relationship to it. So, as you mentioned, Glennon, there has been plenty of research, and whistleblower documentation, and court proceedings that have shown us that apps like Instagram, and TikTok know exactly how many minutes it takes us to get addicted to them.

They know exactly how many videos you need to watch for the algorithm to have hooked you, and then they weaponize that against us to use some strong language. I think they’re weaponizing it against us to help them make more money by selling our attention to advertisers. And for some reason, similarly with addiction, some of us can wade in that water, and be pretty okay, we can go there, and we can be like, “Yeah, that’s nice. I see what’s happening, or I don’t, but it doesn’t impact me.” And others of us have suddenly bought 500 cardigans, and we’re like, “What happened?” It’s like we feel like we blacked out, and then it all arrives in the mail, and you’re like, “Who did this?”

Glennon Doyle:

And why is it a baby size? Right now, okay? I’m wearing a cardigan that I was bamboozled into buying. Now, Amelia, two more brief things. Number one, I believe that I was sufficiently polarized, meaning I really believe that the onslaught, and effort of social media to divide, and to dehumanize the other side, and to draw you into this feeling of self-righteousness that makes you stay. They are bad. I am good. That got to me. I really do believe that I became much too simple-minded, and confident in my us versus themness. Talk to us a little bit about that, and the purposeful campaign of social media to divide.

Amelia Hruby:

The documentary The Social Dilemma points to this really well, and that’s where I source a lot of my information from it. But essentially what they show with information from people who used to work at Meta, and Google, and other places is that social media algorithms have been trained to keep us on these apps, which theoretically could be sort of neutral. Their only mission is keep this user on the app. And so the algorithm’s job is to learn through pattern recognition what keeps people there, and this is where I think it appeals to some of our baser instincts that’s sort of like us versus them mentality.

So, they were able to show that if the algorithm is enraging you, and eliciting that self-righteousness, you are more likely to stay on the app, which is actually its only goal. The algorithm’s goal isn’t to make you angry, it’s to keep you online. And it learned that if you’re angry, you stay online longer. And every time I say this, some people are like, well, my Instagram is just kitty photos, and cute things, memes, and so that’s why I stay there. And that probably just means you’re not a person who is hooked by anger, and so it knows that that’s not going to work for you, and it gives you something else.

Glennon Doyle:

So, it knows that you are hooked, Abby, by Highland cows, and that’s why you… Wow, but that’s so interesting, because people say, “Oh, my algorithm is just fluffy, and nice, so there’s no problem.” But that is actually that they’ve decided fluffy, and nice keeps you there.

Amanda Doyle:

Yeah, it’s neutral. It’s just you happen to be a fluffy, and nice person, but 99% of us are big dumb assholes who want to get in fights. So, that’s why we get that. But this is so interesting, because you’re talking about, it’s like they don’t care how they get you, they just get you. So, if it’s fluffy, or if it’s like the world is ending, and your neighbors are evil, they will create that including with all the bots that make your neighbors look like they’re pretend evil people. You talked about codependency. Is hypervigilance part of this? Because I feel like there’s so much psychologically in our lives when you talk about anxious attachment, and how you have an anxious attachment relationship with social media, how does the hypervigilance state relate to this kind of seeking to find the evil people on the internet who will be fixed by us yelling at them?

Amelia Hruby:

I think some of this depends on our relationships with conflict. This goes back to do you have a fluffy nice Instagram, or do you get baited into arguments? I don’t think it’s like some of us are fluffy, nice people, and some of us like to argue. I just think some of us avoid conflict, and some of us step into conflict, and it knows this. I’m a conflict avoider, so it doesn’t serve that to me because I’m never going to comment. I’m going to close the app if I see people having a fight.

Abby Wambach:

Same.

Amelia Hruby:

That’s who I am. And this relates then to my attachment styles, and these other mental health frameworks we can think through with social media.

Glennon Doyle:

Say more about that. Mental health frameworks.

Amelia Hruby:

So, the way that I eventually got off of social media is that I realized I was fully codependent with this app, and I know you’ve had Melody Beatty on the show, and I love her early definitions of codependence when you’ve let yourself become obsessed with, or controlled by another person’s behavior. And I was obsessed with, and controlled by quote, unquote the algorithm’s behavior. And I actually think this is very common. I was really tapped into, “Oh, it’s not showing my posts to everybody I follow.” And I was always trying to game the algorithm, and get my posts seen, and shared farther, and it was even less active than that. I was constantly on this roller coaster. This is where the hypervigilance comes in. I would post something, and then I would hypervigilantly watch, did it get likes? Did it get comments? Did people troll it? Did it get affirmation? Did it get rejection?

And I was just watching, watching, watching. And sometimes it was awesome. Everybody loved me. I was on the best roller coaster ride in my life, and sometimes my anxiety would just ratchet up to 100, and I was suddenly on this death drop roller coaster, and the ground would go out from underneath me, and I would plummet. And I was on that journey with my energy, with my heart, with my nervous system, with my self-worth every single time I posted, which was often multiple times a day. And that, I think, is really what impacts people’s mental health, and wellbeing. It’s what impacted my health, and wellbeing over time, and it’s why I had to leave. And so I realized I was codependent because I was so obsessed, and I was really trying to control the algorithm.

And frankly, I went to a lot of therapy to get through codependency with other people, and I just wasn’t willing to do that again. I was like, Amelia, are you going to go to therapy over Instagram? And I did, but then I was like, “Okay, I’m just out of here. I have to leave.” I don’t want to pay for more therapy about my relationship with Instagram, which is not to shame anyone. Most people I know have talked about Instagram in therapy at some point.

Amanda Doyle:

Sure.

Glennon Doyle:

Totally. Okay. I’ve been doing a lot of embodiment work, which is of course, staying in your own experience, staying in your own life, and not living in other people’s minds. My exciting, and really doable goal is to just control the narrative in 60 billion people’s brains about me. Okay, so that’s been a good time. But one of the things we all know about social media is that when you see a picture of someone’s beautiful child at sunset, or somebody’s beautiful dinner, or somebody’s whatever, we think, “Wow, that person’s life is so beautiful”, what we don’t think is that person just was in a beautiful moment with their family, and they stopped that moment, and they stepped out of the moment, and they held up their phone to point it at the moment to put it out. It is a literal disembodiment. You’re in your body. You’re in the moment, and then you think, “Wait, let me leave this so I can make myself the object of this moment that other people will view as opposed to staying in it, in this being all for me.”

It is a split that now is so obvious to me. I will be in a beautiful moment, and think, “Oh, my God, I don’t even have to leave this. Oh, my God, this is all for me. Oh my God, I don’t have to stop, tell my family to stay where they are, where all of them know, oh, mom’s just doing that thing again because this isn’t good enough. So, she has to signal it to a million people so that they can tell her it’s good.” It is the ultimate disembodiment, right? We keep leaving our beautiful moments, and our beautiful lives so that other people can tell us if they’re beautiful enough.

Amanda Doyle:

And it’s such a theft. It’s like…

Glennon Doyle:

It’s a theft.

Amanda Doyle:

The more beautiful a moment, or more special, or more rare a moment is, this system has us fleeing from that moment to capture it. But that’s so fucked.

Glennon Doyle:

The better it is, the more important it is, you leave.

Amanda Doyle:

The better it is, the more we flee from it.

Amelia Hruby:

And not just flee from it, but perform it for other people. I think is the piece there, because people have been taking photographs of our lives since photographs existed, and there’s always something I want to hold onto. I love to capture a moment, and as someone who’s watching a family member go through memory loss later in life, I’m so glad we have photos, and that we can share those moments. So, to me, it’s the next step. It’s the like, okay, you took the photo, but now the purpose of that isn’t to have this cherished moment for you, and your family further down the line, it’s to go prove to other people that you had that moment to go perform it for them.

Abby Wambach:

And I also think there’s a kind of consciousness that you bring into some moments knowing that you’re doing it for Instagram, or for social media that also hijacks a moment. So, I do think that there’s a purity in trying to capture a moment so that you can keep it for your own family’s future down the line moments, or album, photo albums. But I do think that there are a lot of folks, and I’ve fallen into this trap, too, that I’m like, oh, this would be really good for Instagram. This would be a really good post.

Glennon Doyle:

And everybody can feel that energy. To recap, Pod Squad, there are more. But the ways that over time social media began to negatively affect my real life is that I always felt like I wasn’t doing enough, or my family wasn’t good enough, or my work wasn’t good enough, and that affected the people in my life. I did not build real community because I had enough faux community. I felt like I was always needing to buy more, look different, be whatever the social media was telling me that month would make me more attractive. It made me feel very othered from people who think differently than I do. And it took me out of embodiment. It took me out of my own life, and the praise was as bad as the criticism, I will say. Everyone telling you what you just did was amazing is as controlling as what you just did as bad.

Now, one would think that all of these negative consequences would mean, “Well, why the hell don’t you just leave?” And I didn’t officially leave, Amelia, until I realized that I was making so many rules for myself around, “Okay, so now Glennon, you’ll just do it two hours a day. Okay, now Glennon, you’ll just consume it. You won’t post on it. Okay, now, nope, nope. Now Glennon, you’re deleting it. Delete it, delete it, delete it.” I would delete it from myself, Amelia. And then the next day I would frantically text my team saying, “What are my passwords? What are my passwords?” And it reminded me of when I was quitting drinking, it took me five years of horror past the good part to admit to myself that I just couldn’t fuck with alcohol.

I was making all kinds of rules for myself. “Okay, I’m going to switch from wine to beer. I’m going to switch from liquor to wine. I’m going to only drink two a night. I’m only going to…” I’m hiding the booze from myself just like I delete the app, and then I’m finding a ladder the next day to find the booze that I have hid from myself. Do you find that people constantly make a bunch of rules around it, and that’s a sign that maybe it’s time to just stop it?

Amelia Hruby:

Absolutely. Very similar to you, the reason I knew I had to leave was because at the very beginning of 2021, I wrote this long list of my Instagram rules for 2021, and it was a lot of things like you just said. It was like, “I will get on the app on Monday morning, I will make a post. I will engage for two hours. I will delete the app. I will return on Wednesday afternoon, and I will engage with anything. In the meantime, I’ll reply to DMs.” I had this very clear list of behaviors that I was, and wasn’t allowed to do. And by the time I finished writing that list, that was the light bulb moment of, “Oh, this is codependency, this is all of these issues I’ve been having for so long.” Similar to when in past partnerships, I’d be like, “Oh, well, I can call this person once. I get one call.”

Glennon Doyle:

I have to wait exactly five, and a half hours to text them after I call them.

Amelia Hruby:

Yeah, exactly. I had all these rules. And so I think that this is incredibly common. And also another lens I think of it through is almost like the negotiation stage.

Glennon Doyle:

Yes.

Amelia Hruby:

For many of us, leaving social media is actually a grieving process. We had so much joy there, and that’s why I like to frame it as a breakup. For me, I had to break up with social media. I had to grieve how much I loved it, how much value was still there, and everything I was walking away from when I left. And I had to find the strength to do that anyway. And negotiation was a phase of that grief, just like anger was a phase of that grief. I was so mad at the apps at myself for a long time. I felt like such a failure. I couldn’t make it work. And then I was like, “Okay, well, I can make it work if I put these rules in place. Okay, I can do that.” And then eventually I was like, “No, this thing is just over for me. This relationship is over. This part of my life is over.”

And was able to move through that whole process. But I think that the more intensely you’re negotiating your behavior with the app is just a real flag for you that you may have developed an unhealthy relationship with it, and that that’s something to acknowledge, and try to work on. And again, like you’ve said, we’ve all said, I don’t think that means you have to leave, but I think it’s worth asking all of us to open our eyes a bit, and be like, “okay, how is this app supporting me, or serving me, or impacting my life? Have I developed any of these sort of tricky behaviors that I wouldn’t do with other people, so, why am I doing it with this app on my phone?” And then where do I go from there?

Glennon Doyle:

And does it feel like freedom to you? I think there was a part of me that felt like that is too good to be true. I could be off social media. I could not have to please tons of people. I could not have to serve them my life. If it feels like freedom to you to be there, be there. If it feels like freedom to get off of it, that is a sign. And I also started to feel like so many women, I have this terrible thing where I can’t really understand what I want until I think about what I want other people to have. And I started to feel, I don’t even think guilty is the word. I think ashamed is the right word. I felt I loved these people so much that have been doing life with me for 20 years through early days of monastery, through all the books, through the Together Rising, through We Can Do Hard Things, but I am hosting a toxic party.

That’s how I started to feel it. If I’m feeling all of these negative things from being here, why am I not creating something better for all these people? Why am I having them come here to this place that might be making them feel as bad as it makes me? And maybe that’s irresponsible, right?

Amelia Hruby:

I really appreciate this point. And I think that it definitely speaks to any of us listening, myself included in this conversation who are content creators, or who gather community. Because if we are participating in social media, we are asking other people to come to it. And that’s different if you’re just a user of social media, you don’t have that same responsibility as a facilitator, as a community gatherer, as a community leader. And I felt similarly. My work was all about freedom, and liberation. The things I was writing were all about gender, and identity, and feminism. And I was like, “Why am I bringing people to this app where I know they’re going to be surveilled? They might get hooked. It could be really bad for their self image, and I’m trying to help them liberate that. Why am I doing that here?”

And that’s why I decided to leave. And I think that just like there are different ways to do activism, there are different strategies here. For some people it’s like we go to where the people are, and we try to liberate them from that place. But I think for others of us, we also have to start creating what comes after that space, what comes after social media? What’s beyond, or outside of that, and how can we help people get there with our work, and with their lives, and how can we be helping everybody get free? And I do think that social media, and the way that it functions now is detrimental to our collective freedom.

Glennon Doyle:

Yeah.

Abby Wambach:

I agree with that.

Glennon Doyle:

With what you have seen, all the people you’ve talked to, and been through, and from where you stand now, what do you know about this kind of existential emptiness fear that if everyone we know is over here having this experience, no matter how toxic it is, if we opt out of that, do we even exist both from a relevance professionally to just personal people who are opting out of that? It feels like there would be this fear of disappearing figuratively, literally, from the space.

Amelia Hruby:

I think that when I have these conversations, the first thing people often say to me, and they typically whisper it, is like, “Do I even exist off social media? If I leave, will everybody forget me?” And it brings up their deepest wounding around abandonment, around rejection, around value, and self-worth. Do I exist if I’m not here? Will people forget me? Will I forget who I am if I’m not here? And these are deep, deep traumas for many of us, or just wounds. And I think it’s partially how social media hooks us so deeply because we’re being hooked at that level, that existential level of do I even exist?

And if social media gets its hooks in there on you, it’s so hard. You have to rebuild from the ground up, your self-image. Your self. You have to rebuild yourself from the ground up to step away from it often. But I think that there is so much beauty, and power, and joy in that process is what I found. I know myself better off of social media. I do the things I actually want to do. I care about the things I actually care about. I’m in conversation with people I actually know. The opinions that influence mine come from places I understand trust seek out. And so the process of breaking up with social media was a process of coming into myself. And that’s what I see over, and over again for everyone that I work with that decides to step away temporarily, or permanently. They’re able to do that work.

And then the other side of that that I always like to say, I like to be rosy-eyed, and it’s beautiful on the other side. And also we can be real. When you’re on social media, you feel FOMO when you’re off social media, you just miss out. I miss stuff. I don’t know what happened. That’s just true. I have missed parties, I have missed friends’ new partners. I have totally missed things that have happened because I’m not there, but I am so much more centered in who I am rather than all the things I am not, that that’s worth it to me.

Abby Wambach:

I just have a couple, I have one question for you. For anybody who’s thinking about testing their relationship with social media, what’s a good test to give us some feedback on whether, or not our relationship is healthy, or not? I took a week off of social media the week prior to the election. That was just a choice that I needed to make to maintain my sanity. So, what can people do to help?

Amelia Hruby:

Yeah, absolutely. I have two practices for you. So, the first I learned from my friend, Taylor Elyse Morrison. So, I like to credit it to her. And this one’s very simple. You don’t even have to get off social media to do it. In fact, you get on social media to do it. So, you get out your phone, it’s probably on you right now. Pull it out. Open whatever your app of choice is, right? Are you an Instagram person? Are you a TikTok person? Whatever it is, open the app, set a timer for five minutes, and then let yourself scroll for five minutes. And as you scroll, notice how you feel. And it can be helpful if you have pen, and paper to kind of write down some feelings. What did you see, and how did it make you feel?

And do that for five minutes, and then close the app, and then go to your list, and see, I saw puppies, and it made me feel happy. I saw my friends getting married, and it made me feel actually really bad that I’m still not partnered. I saw that the government did something again, and it made me feel like I was in a pit of despair. I saw this, and I think that that practice helps people start to realize, “Okay, this is what I’m seeing, and this is how it’s impacting me.”

And so, just a really reflective, simple five-minute practice I think is a good place to start. If you’re really not sure if you’re listening to this, and you’re like, “It’s just social media.”

Glennon Doyle:

Bless you, great.

Amelia Hruby:

Friends, this is just social media. It should not feel this bad. What are you talking about? Just try this five-minute practice, and be with yourself on how you’re feeling. And then the second practice, I think, Abby is exactly what you did. It’s take time away, and I would say stretch to yourself. Think about what’s the amount of time you think you could take away from social media, and then could you add an extra day? So, if you’re somebody that’s like, “Wow, I’ve never even been off for 24 hours”, okay, let’s try 48. If you’re somebody who’s like, I’m regularly take a break for a week. Maybe we take two weeks, maybe we try to take a month, we intuit our limit, and then try to take it to the edge a little bit, and see how being off of an app feels in that point, and then you can assess if you want to reengage, or not.

But I think starting with the scrolling practice, and the noticing practice is really helpful, and then we can move into breaks of different links that are really personal to how you use the app, and how hooked you might feel by it.

Amanda Doyle:

God, that rings so true to me, because I am not very good at identifying my emotions, so I wouldn’t notice, “Oh, I feel despair at this, and happiness at this, and anger at that.” I just generally feel exhausted, and depleted, and that’s probably because our bodies were not made to process that many emotion in a 15 second period.

Glennon Doyle:

And then we use it all up. I think that’s what happens. The way it affects us negatively off is we only have a certain capacity for anger, for rage, for love, for all of this, and then we use it up there, and then the rest of our lives we don’t have it.

Amanda Doyle:

Yeah, it’s opportunity cost of all of that.

Glennon Doyle:

It is. Amelia, I’m in this interesting stage now that I want to talk to you about because I am someone who can’t be off social media. That’s the story.

Abby Wambach:

Because of your job.

Glennon Doyle:

Books, podcasts, all the things. Everyone will forget about me, all these people’s, it’s all-

Abby Wambach:

Relevance, [inaudible 00:45:50].

Glennon Doyle:

…writing on people liking things, and remembering that I exist, and et cetera. Now, I believe I still would’ve believed that had it not been for this last round of recovery, I do not think that I would understand that I exist without all of that until now. That’s why I’m able to be off of it now. Well, I’m wondering about your take on this. Now I’m in this situation where I am not on social media, but I’m still through a team posting on social media, so I don’t exist there as a human being. I’m not checking on it, but an avatar of me that I send out into the world exists out there, and it’s interesting to me for two reasons. It feels a little bit like horse shit because I’m like, this place is not safe for me. I don’t think it’s good, but I’ll pretend I’m there. The rest of you still gather.

Amanda Doyle:

Yeah, it’s like the cell phone executives who make their billions of dollars on cell phones, but don’t let their kids have them because they know they’re dangerous as shit.

Glennon Doyle:

It feels that way. So, it makes me feel guilty, or icky. I don’t know that guilty is the right word yet. I’m sure that’s coming. Guilt for me is just the clarity after the ick, so I’m sure the guilt is coming. Right now, it’s just ick. But I also feel protective of myself, which Amelia, this makes me understand. I feel like I am sending, it is not embodiment because I am sending a version, an avatar of myself out into the wild West, and I’m not even protecting her. I don’t know what people are saying to her. I don’t know what is happening to her out there, but it feels like I want to, in this time of my life, gather all my selves back to myself, and just be oneself, but I’m sending her out in…

Does this sound totally insane, or is anyone tracking with me? It reminds me of, I’ve read a lot about indigenous cultures, some of them believing that when an image is taken of them, it steals their spirit. I feel like that. I feel like, “No, no, no. Why am I sending part of my spirit out into this world? Undefended, unprotected, and it feels a little bit icky.” Do you understand what I’m talking about?

Amelia Hruby:

Yeah, absolutely. And I know that some of those indigenous communities, and cultures will do practices of soul retrieval, and regathering all of the selves, and there are rituals for this that don’t come from my personal culture, but ways that people are navigating ways that communities like sacred ways that communities are navigating how the multiplicity of selves that we have to perform in the world may harm us.

I think that for me, there’s always a both, and, or a spectrum here. There’s stages of stepping back, and away from social media. There’s different strategies for being present there, or not, and I can understand why there are so many reasons to have a presence there, to be sharing your work, to be supporting all the wonderful people you support with it, and helping their messages travel far. And also at a certain point it’s like at what cost? And the cost to you personally may become too high. Your need, and desire, and I think your human need to be a whole person may step to the floor. That said, just because you may decide you don’t want to be on social media, your profile could still exist there. People could stop posting for you, but all the work you’ve ever done there could live on. You could have this team of people around you, some of whom probably who are doing the posting, love it, thrive there, have found ways to harness that for themselves.

Something I always appreciate is when there are people I think, who can ride these waves, and navigate them, and if you’re gathering those people, and they’re running profiles for you, or anyone else listening, I think that can be a beautiful thing. But I also talk to social media managers who are like, “I do this for other people, and now it’s just extracting from me.” I’m just put myself in between them, and social media to my own detriment, and so there’s a lot of aspects of this navigation, but I want to affirm that it would feel weird for me, or feel disruptive, and dysregulated for me to have this sort of image of myself, avatar of myself out in the world. But I think that if I know anything about your work, it’s that you always find a way to be whole again through the disintegration, and you’ll find your path back to that, or to that for another time through this.

Glennon Doyle:

Amelia.

Abby Wambach:

Bringing it home.

Glennon Doyle:

See, this is why we need people who have PhDs in philosophy talking about this stuff. You are so deep, and whole, and your approach to this is so unhacky, and so…

Abby Wambach:

Believable.

Glennon Doyle:

And beautiful. Yeah. I have a feeling that we’re going to get a lot of feedback, and questions from people.

Abby Wambach:

But you won’t know.

Glennon Doyle:

But I won’t know!

Amelia Hruby:

And I won’t either because I won’t be on social media

Glennon Doyle:

If questions fall in woods, are they even questions? But I do wonder at Pod Squad, I just want to say, we’re not going to leave you with this, and just drop it, and never revisit. If you want to send us questions, if you have thoughts, and feelings, call in. Write them to us. I will beg Amelia to come back, and answer your questions. I loved this conversation so much, and I think it would be beautiful to take it a step further at some point, and say, “Okay, then what?”

Abby Wambach:

Yes.

Glennon Doyle:

How, then, if we decide not this, what is the next test?

Abby Wambach:

How then, and what the fuck am I going to do?

Glennon Doyle:

Right, and do I exist, because we’re like those babies, right? We don’t have object permanence outside of social media. We’re like, “Oh, God, my mom’s gone forever.” Okay, so here’s the phone number, y’all (747) 200-5307. Bring us your questions. We will continue the conversation. Amelia, you are wonderful.

Abby Wambach:

Yes, thank you for being here.

Amelia Hruby:

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Amanda Doyle:

As you can see, Glenn has thought a lot about a transition away from social media, and since she is not there right now, we are thinking through a lot of ways to stay in touch with you in a way that feels integrated, and warm, and right to Glennon. So, right now, I’m going to tell you how to sign up for the newsletter. Okay? There’s two ways you can do it. The first way is you can go Glennondoyle.com. Then you click on the connect page, and there is a link to sign up for the newsletter. You just put your email in. That’s it. So, Glennondoyle.com, G-L-E-N-N-O-N-D-O-Y-L-E.com. Then the connect page, and then click to sign up for the newsletter. And then the second way is if you are on Instagram, you can click on the link in bio, and then scroll down till you see, sign up for the newsletter, and you can do it there. Thank you all. We want to keep in touch no matter what the road ahead leads us to. Thanks a lot.

Glennon Doyle:

If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us if you’d be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things. First, can you please follow, or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things? Following the pod helps you, because you’ll never miss an episode, and it helps us because you’ll never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner, or click on follow. This is the most important thing for the pod. While you’re there, if you’d be willing to give us a five-star rating, and review, and share an episode you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful. We appreciate you very much. We Can do Hard Things, is created, and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle. In partnership with Odyssey, our executive producer is Jenna Wise-Burman, and the show is produced by Lauren LoGrasso, Alison Schott Dina Kleiner, and Bill Schultz.