John & Nicole - Unplugged

By John R. Nocero & Nicole M. Palmer

John: One thing I have said a lot during the pandemic, and I may have told you this at some point, is that my life looks a lot different now, than it did when the pandemic hit back in March. There is a lot of my old normal, that I would go back to now – that includes people I hang out with, work with, interact with, and spend any sort of time with daily. It also speaks to routines. One thing I specifically did during the pandemic is turn off all notifications on my phone – that constant ding, da-da-ding, make me crazy. Plus, it always makes me wonder, does someone need me? Well, no it is just a distraction from life.

You are coming from a different place here because you have been off the socials for the last couple months. One thing I am curious about – what did you learn, what did you do instead, how was your life better or worse and what finally brought you back.

Nicole:

Dear John,

As you know, I deactivated ALL of my social media accounts a few months ago. The funny thing is, I cannot give you an exact date. Goodbye Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, and Pinterest. Like anything else, the first week is the hardest. You miss the updates, the pictures, which restaurants or stores are running sales or deals. I do not even have cable tv. I have not had cable in 7 years. Within a month, your close family and friends will notice that you have completely vanished from the internet. They will be looking for some sort of juicy gossip. The reality is, there was no juicy gossip. Still married, still have a child, still working at the same job, still living in the same house……I just deleted all social media accounts like going on a strict diet. I was fasting from social media.

After a month, I felt less stressed and more focused. I was practicing mindfulness. I had MORE time. It was a beautiful thing. When family and friends would call, we had something to talk about because I didn’t find out through social media. For example, hey I’m hiring, do you know anyone who is looking to get into clinical research? Which leads me to answer your question of what brought me back. I recently tried to reactivate my LI account and it didn’t recognize me….If you don’t already know, if you choose to deactivate your account with LI, they will send you a courtesy email saying you have 30 days to change your mind of else you account will be deactivated. They mean what they say! I had to create an account and start over. All of my connections, followers, groups, endorsements and recommendations were gone. I had over 30,000 connections. I know that if I got back on LI, I could find the right candidate to hire. So, here I am, building up my profile and posting an ad in the jobs section.

It’s been a couple of days since I’ve been back, and I am already in LI jail. What I mean by this, is they will not allow me to connect with anyone for about a week because I have requested too many in a short period. This part is a bit frustrating, because there are people that I want to connect with because they created great content. If I remember their name and they left an impression I want to connect. I had to research the difference between connect and follow. From what I gather, when you follow someone, you will see their content but if they don’t follow back, they won’t see your content/postings and they will forget about you. I started to follow the people I really wish to reconnect with, however, my newsfeed is showing me old posts from over a week to a month ago and from people I am not connected with or follow….. What am I missing? The lesson learned is, if you are sick of social media you always have the option to not log in or delete the app. This I failed to recognize. I don’t think I will go back to the other social media platforms. For LI, I will delete the app when I need to fast again.