Lent, 2025: Day 1 of 50.

How to start off a daily log of a fast from social media (but not LinkedIn, which I enjoy in healthy moderation) and (mostly) news during Lent of 2025?

With a question, evidently. ??

I want for this to be a part of a meaningful Lenten season. This is my first Lent as a Catholic, and it brings me full circle through the seasons of the Church year. I have savored them all, but because of the place Easter holds in Christendom, the weeks leading up to it should not be incidental.?

Nor should the sacrifice one makes during Lent be a token exercise in humorous self-flagellation (“I knew I’d never be able to give that up for 40 days! Oh, well!” or “I did it! – I held out for the entire season of Lent! Now I can start doing that thing I gave up, all over again!”). I want to make a meaningful sacrifice of something that has kept me at a distance from God, and I want to emerge in Eastertide a different person – not a person who stuck it out for 40 days and can now resume her regularly scheduled programming.

For starters… I'm Lucy, and I’m a social media addict.

It pains me to say that. Addicts are out of control; they allow their impulse for self-gratification to take over their lives. They are pathologically self-medicating their inner demons. They lack self-discipline and right priorities.?

Yeah, I just described myself.

I’m not that way in other arenas – I maintain a regular housecleaning routine. I pay my bills promptly. I have a large calendar with color-coordinated Post-It flags to organize my schedule. I return my library books on time. I never run out of milk.?

But social media has taken – I have allowed social media to take – over my life.?

It’s really not surprising. I love words and I love information. But if that were all it took to be an addict, I’d be hooked on the encyclopedia. (I actually did love the encyclopedia as a child – I was fortunate enough to grow up in a home with a set of World Book encyclopedias, and I could often be found sitting on the floor reading one article and then following a series of bunny trails through more articles, on a dizzying array of subjects. And yes, sometimes it was hard to close the book when one more article beckoned.)

No, there’s something peculiarly addictive about the words and information on social media. Maybe it’s that there are actual people behind them. And maybe this is an indicator that I am… lonely.?

For some reason I’m ashamed to admit that. Why, though? Studies show that most people today are lonely. And our collective loneliness pre-dates the Internet and other cultural phenomena that have so isolated us from one another. In 1854 Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” There is something more than cyberspace at work here.

In this terrible current climate of what I will politely call “unrest,” social media is even more addictive. It’s as if we are neighbors during some bygone period in history, gathering over back fences, on front porches, in the streets to share the latest news, frightened, agitated, but drawing some comfort from one another. Except that now we are – I am – doing so hunched over a keyboard and screen.?

Social media addiction has isolated me. It has stirred up emotions that were already in play, already perfectly understandable, and fed them as warm waters feed a hurricane. It has lured me to full wakefulness in the middle of the night, when I could and should have turned to a book instead. It has distracted me, a million or more times, away from more important thoughts.?

Mostly, though – it’s been my overlord. And I want my agency back.?

I don’t expect – and don’t want – subsequent posts to be this lengthy. Nor do I expect to post each and every day, though the obsessive in me tells me I should. I just want to write the journey as I live it.

With that, a few observations from Day 1:

• The quiet is palpable. The quiet in my mind, not to mention my field of vision, seems to radiate out into the house and even outside, and then double back and emphasize the inner quiet again.
• The sun seems brighter, the sky more blue. Maybe this too is illusion. Maybe it is the coming spring. Maybe I am simply more observant today.
• 24 hours into my social media fast, it seems deceptively easy. I do not expect it to remain so. It could turn out to be like a sugar fast, when the screaming headache doesn’t show up till day 2.
• There’ve been a couple of instances of panic, which I didn’t recognize as such until I stopped to examine them. This emotion stems directly from not having my cybercrutch to think for me, feel for me, speak for me, set my course for me. This is what children feel like when it’s summer vacation and they’re bored. They are (I am) so used to being directed and programmed by outside forces (theirs: school, organized activities; mine: social media) that it is a crisis to have to fall back on their (my) own resources.?

I should explain one thing – I started my fast yesterday, February 28, five days before the actual start of Lent. There was some news that was shocking in an already escalated political environment; I discovered I was not alone in describing a dual reaction of wanting to both vomit and cry. My heart was broken for our nation and our world, and I needed to get off the social media freeway stat and onto a quieter, less-traveled road to a different destination. You know how it feels when you’re on the highway and you reach your exit, turn on your blinker, slow down, ease onto the exit ramp, and to your left, the other cars go roaring on ahead? That’s what this fast feels like on Day One.

And Lent is not a strict 40 days anyway -- Sundays are not counted. My fast will end up being 50 days when you add in Sundays (I'm not counting February 28 because it was only half a day). Which means my count is going to look wildly inaccurate, even to me.

But I believe it will look exactly as it's meant to.

#Lent #Catholic #socialmediafast #socialmediaaddiction