In August of 2016, I came to a crossroads in my social media use. We were in the last few months of the most contentious presidential election in my generation. Families were dividing along party lines. It seemed like everyone in the entire world was mad and wanted to tell everyone else about it all the time.

I’d had enough, so I stepped away.

Social media is neither good nor bad. It is, however, a bottomless pit of distraction that is engineered to suck away all of your free time if you let it.

Because of a mix of murky marketing that suggests that social media use is as normal as breathing, and the “any benefit” approach of looking at it (if there is any benefit, that must be enough benefit to keep using the tool), I had forgotten that social media is just a thing – a group of tools that can help or hinder depending on how they’re used.

We have the ability to decide how we want to live our lives and then see where, or even if, network tools fit into those plans.

In this white paper, I discuss how the rise of personal technology and our constant connection through network tools may be negatively affecting our ability to live a good life. I posit that the answer to reclaiming our lives is not to become digital puritans, swearing off all apps and network tools, but to make conscious decisions about how we decide to engage with technology, guided by the goals that we set for our lives.

So, if your main goal in life is to be angry about the government, only see one type of news curated by algorithms that decide what they think you’re interested in, fall victim to a catfishing scheme, and lose hours to clickbait, go ahead and keep choosing convenience and connectivity. If you want to reclaim your time through practicing critical use of technology – read on.