Spring Confessions

Reflections on turning bad habits into good productive, peaceful habits.

For the better part of a year I have been negotiating with my ego an honest desire to delete all of my social media accounts. Once or twice a year, I will delete all of the social apps from my phone, which makes a significant difference in how often I pick it up throughout the day. I am a pretty simple person and only have accounts on Instagram, Facebook and Bluesky—the latter two I rarely visit. But Instagram understands what will keep me scrolling. I am a sucker for short videos. Sheesh. I am now as much of a scroll junkie as I feared becoming ten years ago.

Continual scrolling for hours is akin to pulling a magician’s never-ending scarf; we keep pulling to find the end, to cease the madness. However, the madness is the pulling. The doom is not only in the content we scroll through, but mostly in our perpetuation.

To limit my interest in Instagram, I decided to stop following accounts that were not following me back. In theory, this would limit my feed to folks I have a personal connection no matter how brief/deep. Thanks to Instagram’s desire to keep us keeping up with everybody, there was no easy way to bulk unfollow 1,500+ accounts without paying some shady third party to do it for me. So I found instructions to downloaded my account info, which included lists of the accounts I follow and those that follows me. I added those to comparetwolists.com—a simple site that will compare the two lists and generate a list of accounts not following mine. Then I spent a few hours each day over several days MANUALLY DELETING ONE THOUSAND, FIVE HUNDRED–THREE accounts.

It was one of the most cathartic experiences I have ever had on social media.

It seems to have worked. I am far less interested in the app than I was prior to the purge. Admittedly, there were a handful of accounts I simply could not unfollow, like: friends who have left this mortal realm, Sigur Rós (one of my favorite bands), Pete Holmes and Sammy Obeid (two of my favorite comedians), Joshua Doss (political pollster), and any account that highlights animals, especially cats, birds and pigs.

How does one—in good conscience—unfollow a piglet on Instagram?

Where I get stuck with my desire to leave social media is my need to promote the events and projects I am organizing and hosting. (If you live/work near San José, consider attending one of my monthly events.) I will delve more into my past as a touring performance poet, a gig I do miss from time to time, and how incongruent notability and fame are in my life now. But over the last 12 years, I have built a local following here in the Santa Clara Valley (a.k.a. Silicon Valley) as a poet who hosts a variety of open mics and performances. I enjoy being a part of the poetry, comedy and music cultures here and I want others to engage in it with me. But the law of the land seems to be that one cannot promote an event without social media. I seek community over followers.

I ran across this post by Amelia Hruby detailing 100 ways to promote anything without using social media. It’s a pretty good list that has generated some neat ideas.

It’s all about me and You… Tube.

Thank goodness YouTube is not a social media app! Because of this certainty, it gets a pass when I am lonely and want to veg out. Oh, Hank Green! Oh, Derek Sarno! Oh, pantheon of ASMRtists! However-in-the-hell will I know the world and food AND fall asleep soundly without your warm faces and kind voices coming through my headband-headphones, which I only bought to wear in bed? No, really! How!? Reading books until I fall asleep? Okay. Wow, how dare you! To be honest, I have been implementing means to block YouTube completely, even though part of me has a “secret” desire to make many hilariously informative videos on my channel. For me, it has become anti-social media. Pure escapism under the guise of staying informed without any personal responsibility to those making the content.

Don’t get me wrong, I have learned so very much from YouTube, be it history, science, government, gardening, politics and society. How to edit audio, video, writing and more. How to repair electronics and household fixtures. I’ve discovered so many recipes. It’s been my Youniversity. I have often felt significantly less lonely thanks to some of the characters on the platform, but I worry about the impact that para-social interaction may have on my mental health. This is why I take breaks, but I think I truly want to break away from it completely. Right now, I am not logged into YouTube, which means I do not automatically see the content made by channels I am subscribed to, which is awesome, but it also means I see so much content I am not interested in or in which I vehemently disagree. This is why I am getting back into printed books. I read a lot every day, but nearly everything I’ve read since 2016 has required electricity and scrolling (like what you’re doing now.)

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” —Groucho Marx

See, I have this Ethan Allen chair I bought from someone on Craigslist. The seller told me how much they paid for it and I thought that was a wildly large number for a chair. Me and a housemate picked it up and I paid the seller $50. The chair was so lovely that I expected it to turn its nose up at the decor the very moment I brought it into my living room. I immediately loved what it did to the space. Then I sat in it. It’s a stationary chair, but the back leans into a reclined position. I would describe it as “easy lounge.” Always. Reclined. After trying it out a few times, I gave up on it and only used it when all other seats were taken. Two years later, I moved it to my bedroom and it became my cat Xena’s spot. It then went into storage, then back into the living room, then I offered it to a non-profit looking for chairs. They passed. In the summer of 2025, I held a yard sale and put it out at $40. On the second day, I put it back out at $20. At the end of the day as we were closing up the yard sale, a peruser sat in it and I told them they could have it for free. They got up, looked at it like it had insulted their family and walked away. So I took my desk out of my bedroom and put the chair in its place. I added a bunch of pillows to fill out the back, making it way more comfortable. I put my bookshelf and a small table next to it, under my favorite window. Xena and I now share the chair and I will probably pass it down to Xena’s kids.

Since creating a proper reading space, I have read more physical books than in the previous two years combined. I am glad for this shift in my life and to facilitate this, I keep books piled around my favorite places to read. My bedside table is now loaded with books I am “currently” reading. I also try to carry at least one book with me wherever I go so that I have a non-scrolling option during downtime.

Admittedly, no stack of books compares to the fact that my phone has come to bed with me a minimum of 300 nights a year since 2012. That is 4,000+ nights of sleep dictated by my phone. I hate knowing this knowledge.

They say to charge your phone at night far away from your bed. I could plug my phone in anywhere in my house and that is where I will sleep.

To quiet my mind and my environment, I open my windows and listen to rain and traffic and birds. San José is blessed with a bevy of birds. Early spring brings a chirping cacophony of hatchlings. I listen to them on my porch. I listen to my neighborhood. I don’t need silence. Thanks to John Cage, I don’t believe silence is possible on Earth. But I am so grateful for general quietude. Social media is a makeshift quietude sending folks like me into an imperfect meditation. A lulling disruption. Social media is rarely social and hardly media. Highly edited and curated blips made to entertain and/or enrage. Thousands of those blips each day almost feels like trauma to me. So I seek quiet, and the quietest moments in my life often happen to be the most fulfilling: whenever I am reading or writing.

I call myself a writer, but my writing frequency was that of a penpal who will respond sometime this weekend.

I have collected well over one hundred blank postcards, a list of recipients and enough postage for all of them. What I don’t own is the sword of will to smite the procrastination demon who possessed me in 2020. (I’ve named it Covy!) So, I rented a sword in April 2025 for the National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) challenge of writing one poem every day in April. You can read my 2025 NaPoWriMo poems here. Then, in August 2025 I signed up and completed the Poetry Postcard Fest. You register for a small fee, then you’re given a list of 31 other registrants who you shall write and send an original poem on a postcard. I wrote an impressive-to-me amount of poems in 2025. It felt great and has ramped up my desire to write again. I did/will not take on either 2026 challenge because I am writing stories and stuff like this thing you’re currently reading. Also, I have friends and family with addresses who deserve poems in their mailbox.

OK, I’m a writer, but I want to be a very good writer.

I suppose this leads me to the realization that my 50-year-old heart sits sadly in my chest whenever I aimlessly scroll, knowing I could be and should be reading and writing. My desire for quiet has been pulling me back into the practices I love most. I started this ‘stack with the intent of doing this exact thing. One of my favorite Substack accounts is updated regularly by my friend Wake Liore. You can read them here. They do this thing where they’ll post a 42-second video of a serene moment. So calming and divine. Wake is a tremendously good spirit with a knack for capturing honesty and calm.

I, too, aim to be calming and honest.

So.

If you have left social media behind or practice hard limits and boundaries to your social media for personal reasons, I am curious what has worked for you.

If you read books, which ones do you recommend? If you read online stuff, send me links.

For those of you who promote stuff via an email list, what works for you? What methods of getting the word out have worked for you without using social media?

How are you? I genuinely want to know!

Truly,
Mighty Mike McGee