A few weeks ago, my LinkedIn account was temporarily suspended. It had happened earlier this year already, and back then it took 1-2 days to be restored. This time however, the automated e-mail said that due to high demand, there might be some delay in responding to my query.
I started to panic. LinkedIn was one of my main tools for running my business, and it was going to be unavailable for an unspecified duration. How could I reach those people who I was in the middle of a conversation with? How would I run the promotion campaign for my next course?
Very quickly however, the panic subsided. There was nothing I could do anyway, so it was just a waste of my precious energy to worry about it.
And then, elation. How marvelous not to have to think about what I should post next! No need to keep up with my feed and see what was happening in my network. Gone was that feeling of never quite being on top of it!
Instead, I felt blissful calm. I started to think creatively about how I would get hold of those contacts who actually mattered to me (I felt quite happy to have a CRM system to fall back on!), and I started looking at in-person events I could attend to broaden my network rather than making online connections.
After about a week, my account was restored. Normal service resumed. Or did it? I now can’t quite shake that feeling of calm I experienced whilst disconnected, and want to hold onto it for longer. So I will attend more in-person events to meet real people in 3 dimensions, and I will worry less about posting calendars and schedules.
There are some great benefits to using online platforms: they allow us to connect easily with different geographies and expose us to a much broader landscape than we would otherwise have access to easily.
But they also create quite a lot of mental clutter (in the stories we tell ourselves about how we’re falling short, amongst other things), and emotional clutter (in how those stories make us feel), so let’s de-clutter some of that tech and reconnect with what an analog life might feel like.
And who knows what joys that might bring us!
I am now off to register for a netwalking event locally in a spot that I don’t know yet. It’s a vineyard, and there will be pizza, how perfect!