Off Social, Not Anti-Social

Some metaphor for cutting off social media

As the summer of 2024 continues to barrel along I have spent a lot of time reflecting on my life, what is important to me, and where I'm going. Currently I just turned 30, and Courtney and I are under two weeks away from closing on our first home here in Estes Park. There is a lot to be excited about for me these days, but as I continue to get busier with work and life obligations I've decided that my personal time is incredibly important to me and I prefer to not give that time away.

Ultimately what I am getting at here, is that social media, cell phones, "the great distraction" as the guitarist Tom Bukovac calls it, are things I have grown a significant distaste for and feel they are not contributing to my life in any positive manner. Thus I have decided that I will not be giving more of my free time to doom scrolling on these platforms, and I'm putting my time back in my own hands. I don't really care to make this blog post a full discourse on my feelings about social media, but I'll provide a brief explanation as to my experience. If you would like to have the full discourse over a beer sometime, let me know.

Quick cell phone shot of the moon over the ocean at Acadia NP during a recent work trip

I was an early adopter of Instagram, with my original account going back to high school in 2011-2012. What drew me to the platform was my love for visual media and good writing. Writing wasn't necessarily a part of instagram, but the ability to share photos and eventually videos and get inspiration from others posts was a real treat at the time. Eventually my love for creating photographs and sharing them grew and I made a half-hearted attempt to grow a climbing/outdoor photography account from 2016-2018. That ended when my first disgust with Instagram started to grow as hundreds of photographers all used the same editing techniques to appease the algorithm and create what I considered visual diarrhea. So I deleted my account for a while. Then Covid happened and in my boredom at home I downloaded Instagram to share photos I had been sitting on since I deleted the app.

We all know where instagram has gone from that point, short form content reels dominate the space and complex algorithms suck us in to our devices for un-godly amounts of time which we justify in the name of staying connected with friends afar, working on our business, or being inspired.

In my experience, since about 2018 my attention span, ability to focus on reading books, work on my creative hobbies, or even just positively engage in social interactions has declined, my anxiety has increased, and I run to my phone for entertainment far too often. These were all things I at one point had focused a significant amount of time on when I wasn't climbing. So now in an attempt to regain my ability to focus, and again, put more of my time into my own hands, rather than the hands of corporations I generally have a distaste for, I've deleted all of my social media accounts. In return I've revived my old guiding info website as a blog to feed my need to share words and photos and stay connected with friends and family in a more meaningful way.

I hope you join me on this journey and check out my posts when I make them. I have no plan to have regularly scheduled pieces of writing that I'll be sharing, rather I'm going to post when I have things to share or am feeling creative. This is an outdated and nearly dead method of creating online engagement, I have no illusions that it is going to be successful, but that's kind of the point. So many people are trying to get famous doing the same thing as everyone else, instead of just being themselves and doing what they love. So I'm going to do what I love and I'll leave it here for those that are interested.

This blog will largely be trip reports from interesting places I've climbed or skied recently, some guiding updates, musings and philosophies on climbing technical systems and whatever else in that vain pops into my head. I also have some plans for creating short, free, digital guidebooks to crags in the Estes Valley, and long term I have a vision for writing a How to Climb book focused on simplicity and lack of jargon. That all will hopefully end up on this site as long as I get around to actually making it. Which it is publicly in writing now so hopefully I follow through.

Anyhow, thats my monologue, If you've made it this far, thank you, I appreciate you, and I look forward to sharing more on this page in the future.