Both things are true.
I don’t like what my phone does to me. I’ve caught myself deep in other people’s lives — investigating, comparing, judging — and coming away feeling worse about mine. I hate feeling judged. I hate putting myself out there. Scrolling my friends’ feeds too long makes me depressed and frustrated and, honestly, judgmental in a way I don’t like being.
And I’m building a brand on it anyway.
Because that’s where you are. That’s where the woman with the fried hair is at 2am, looking for someone who’ll tell her the truth. If I want to be useful, I have to show up where the questions live. Pretending otherwise is just a prettier way of quitting.
So I didn’t quit the app. I set limits with myself.
These are mine — my actual ones, not aspirational ones. Steal any of them.
- My scroll has a syllabus. I’m not going to pretend I don’t look at my phone in the morning — I do, and I genuinely like waking up to parenting reels. But I’ve fed my algorithm on purpose: parenting, communication, sales psychology, long deep-dive conversations like Diary of a CEO. It’s literally how I found Chase Hughes. That kind of scrolling fills my cup instead of draining it.
- Friend-feed time is limited. Not because my friends are the problem — because watching everyone’s lives for too long turns me into a version of myself I don’t like. When I notice the judgment creeping in, I’m done for the day.
- 8pm is the cutoff. After that the phone is down. That’s bedtime with my fiancé, and no app is invited.
- If my kids are talking, the phone goes down. Even mid-video, even if it’s “educational.” I pause it. I want them to see, over and over, that nothing on that screen outranks them.
That last one matters most to me, because I’m raising a 12- and a 14-year-old who don’t have social media — and who are honestly kind of against it, which is cute. I don’t trash-talk it to them. They know I learn from it. They’ve also watched, in their own world, how kids with unsupervised access act differently. They’re drawing their own conclusions, and I mostly just try not to be a bad example while they do.
I don’t keep these limits perfectly. Some days the classroom turns into the slot machine and I lose twenty minutes anyway. The limits aren’t a purity test — they’re a fence, and fences work even when you occasionally climb them.
I fucking hate social media. I also use it to learn, to build, and to find the exact people I’m trying to help. The trick — the whole trick — is making it a tool instead of a crutch, and deciding who’s driving.
— Kay 🤍