We stood on a street corner in Amsterdam, and while we waited for traffic to pass I pulled out my phone and started scrolling through Facebook to see if perhaps anyone has posted anything interesting. “Facebook again?” he says to me. “Just like you’re on TSN” I tease. But we both know that in reality, we’re tired of seeing the other staring at a screen instead of enjoying the beauty of the world. And I know that I’m tired of feeling like I’m chained to my phone.

Earlier this year I was trying to stay on top of every single Social Media outlet I could be apart of. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Google+ and I was trying to be active on all of them. It was exhausting and time consuming. Probably around the beginning of spring I decided to stop updating and checking twitter. It is great for connecting but I spent at least 30 minutes of my day scrolling and checking but not actually having any connection with anyone. Not what I wanted to spend my time on. I stopped updating LinkedIn and hardly even got Google+ up and running. I started spending less and less time on Pinterest and only 2 times a day on Facebook.

Enter late June and we decide to move to Vancouver, but to surprise everyone back home, we chose not to announce it anywhere. I felt like I couldn’t update Facebook without giving something away or feeling like I was lying. So for almost 3 months I hardly updated Facebook, only uploaded some images to Instagram to remember where we had been, and lived an offline life. And it was WONDERFUL!

For the first time in years, I felt obligation free to Social Media. I didn’t have thoughts of “oh, that’s a great status” or feeling like people really wanted to see what I was doing. I felt like I was still able to live a beautiful life, but it didn’t need to be documented, and it was the most refreshing feeling. I stopped carrying a camera around with me and enjoyed seeing the beauty around me through my own eyes and didn’t feel the need to write detailed notes to write about it later. And my beautiful life continued.

I’m slowly easing myself back into blogging, because I truly missed writing, but I will be spending less time on Social Media to expand on living an offline life in an online world.

What do you do to help yourself feel like you’re still living a beautiful life, even if no one reads about it?