Pie for Breakfast.

My take on living your summer offline and unobserved

A very personal fashion choice I made one summer …

“We owe each other the personal, but not the private - and places like Facebook cannot distinguish between the two.”

That was Sam. A teacher who shaped me more than most, and who held a deep, deep dislike for social media - not a polite well-I-just-don’t-prefer-it dislike. A real one.

What he meant, I think, is that the personal - the empathetic, universal stuff of being human among other humans - belongs to all of us. Our griefs, our joys, the way we fail and get back up with our dignity slightly askew: this is the shared territory of being alive. We need to offer it to one another. It makes us better at this wild, bewildering experiment called community.

But the private? The private is a different country entirely. It is ours alone to tend, to keep, to open like a door - and only when we choose, and only to those we invite across the threshold. The private is not content. It is not a post. It is not engagement bait dressed up as vulnerability.

To Sam, social media had no idea how to hold the difference between those two things. And bless its hollow little algorithmic heart, it still doesn’t.

I am nattering on about this today because I am contemplating something. A thing I’ve done before and survived, despite the pearl clutching it produced among people who love me.

I am contemplating leaving social media. **

Way back in the early Facebook era, I discovered I had a distinct distaste for that particular playground and left, sometime around 2008 or 2009. Instagram arrived around then and I genuinely liked it - the constraints felt good, the stories felt human. It felt like postcards.

Then Instagram was swallowed whole by the thing it wasn’t. Now it’s one enormous mosh pit of noise - not the fun kind where everyone’s looking out for each other, but the kind where you’re elbowed in the face by content you never asked for, algorithmically served by a machine that has decided exactly who you are and what you want to feel.

In seeking out guidance on how to leave social media, I found this:

“Without social media, I became an enigma, but I also became inconvenient. People forgot to invite me to things because the invite was sent via Instagram group chat, an app I no longer had. Friends stopped reaching out because I was no longer passively present in their feeds. The world, I realized, is built on passive connection - on the low-effort maintenance of relationships through shared content, mutual voyeurism, and the occasional emoji reaction. Without that, you become a ghost, haunting the edges of people’s lives but never quite materializing.”

Oof!

I would quit all the platforms to sit across from Sam once again and listen to him speak about our humanity. I would ask him what he made of “passive connection” - that phrase that makes my face scrunch up like when my dog farts. I’m confident he would look at me for a beat longer than was entirely comfortable, and then say something that reminded me of the essential need we humans have for one another. He had a habit of doing just that. Much as he had a habit of paying deep attention to the people in his world and seeking active connection - nothing passive about it.

And so, what are we to do with this mass epidemic of passivity - this low-hum arrangement we’ve made with each other to stay sort-of-connected without the inconvenience of actual presence? To me, it feels like one of the places we are most failing each other. Not just as friends. As humans. As people who are supposed to be practicing the ancient, difficult, irreplaceable art of showing up.

The algorithm is not interested in helping us show up. It is interested in keeping us scrolling. So here I am, scrolling past my own singular and amazing life.

There is something about the start of summer - even now, no matter how old I get - that produces a loosening. Pie for breakfast feels like a reasonable choice. Possibility feels less like a concept and more like an open door. This year, I want to walk through it the way I did as a kid: without documenting it, without sharing it, without checking to see if anyone noticed. Summer feels like the right season to find my way back to active connection rather than passive presence - to practice again the art of showing up when there is no platform to perform it on.

Anne Lamott said it simply and perfectly:

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes - including you.”

I am planning to unplug. Not forever. Maybe not even for as long as I think. But long enough to find my way back to what I owe the people I love - what is genuinely personal and therefore worth the gift of sharing. Long enough to remember the difference between the door I choose to open and the one I get to keep closed.

‘til next time. Love y’all!

**I do not consider Substack “social media” but more the place I committed to myself to show up once a week and write - and so I will be here, but not those other places.