👀 How to Feel Seen Off Social Media

Amelia Hruby [00:00:00]:
Welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast for small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their clients. Hello, and welcome to the season three finale of Off the Grid. I'm Amelia Hruby. I am the founder of Softer Sounds podcast studio and the host of this show where I share stories, strategies, and experiments for growing a successful sustainable business with no or minimal social media presence. Today, I am here to wrap up season three of the podcast, which takes us to 75 episodes of the show, plus a few fun bonuses. And whether this is your very first episode or you've been around for all 75 so far, I am incredibly grateful that you pressed play today, and I'm so appreciative for your time, your attention, and your care.

Amelia Hruby [00:01:12]:
As my gift to you, I have created the free Leaving Social Media Toolkit, which includes a five step plan for leaving any social platform, my list of 100 ways to share your work off social media, and a creative marketing ideas database that helps you plan seasonal marketing experiments to connect with clients and make some money without needing social media. So you can find all of that at offthegrid.fun/toolkit or linked in the show notes. If you haven't grabbed the toolkit yet, this is your fun, friendly reminder slash invitation to do so. What are you waiting for? Go get it my friends. It's there for you as my gift and gratitude for tuning in.

Amelia Hruby [00:01:57]:
One more thing before we dive into today's episode on how to feel seen off social media. As I said at the top, this is the season three finale of the show, which means that after this we'll be going on break for two and a half months. I will be taking the summer off from creating episodes for the public feed. But if you do love the show and you wanna continue to hear from me while we're on break, I have just launched the Off the Grid Clubhouse just for you. The Clubhouse is a private podcast feed and newsletter for friends and fans of Off the Grid. And while the public show is on break during the summer, I will be in the Clubhouse sharing weekly episodes on the private feed.

Amelia Hruby [00:02:39]:
So I will still be popping up there every Wednesday with some kind of lighter summer style episodes, my thoughts on different online business topics, some behind the scenes takes that maybe I'm not quite willing to share in public yet. And then in addition to those weekly private episodes, I will also be sharing a monthly digest email of all the online business things I'm reading, podcasts I'm loving, shows that I'm watching all summer, and there will be some other fun goodies there as well, including, I think, some community comment threads and surprises that I'm dreaming up. The clubhouse is hosted on Substack, so you can find that at offthegridclubhouse.substack.com, or it's also linked in the show notes. But for now, let's go ahead and dive into today's episode, our season three finale, which is all about how to feel seen off social media.

Amelia Hruby [00:03:36]:
I am creating this episode because earlier this season, I had a conversation with Becca Piastrelli for her podcast, Belonging, that I recently reshared here on our feed. And in that conversation, Becca shared that there are some aspects of her life that feel like they're only seen on social media, or she goes to social media to feel seen as certain versions of herself that she feels are not recognized or witnessed in other areas of her life. And we unpack what that means for her and what it means when social media feels really bad and she's still trying to get seen there and that gets all, like, muddled and mucked up and messy.

Amelia Hruby [00:04:14]:
And after I shared that conversation, one of our lovely listeners, shout out to Uma, reached out and asked me if I would create a solo episode about that topic. So here I am talking about how to feel seen off social media. You can all thank Uma for this episode. And it's a really philosophical one in one sense. It's a really heartfelt one in another sense. And I wanna let you know at the beginning that this is not a three step how to. This is not my five step plan for leaving any social platform that's actually five steps that you can like walk through and it's very linear. This episode is more of a reflection on what it means to feel seen, what it means to feel seen on social media, and then what it means to step back or away from social media and feel seen in our offline lives, as well as how all that plays into being an online business owner.

Amelia Hruby [00:05:11]:
So that's what we're gonna walk through today. If you stick around to the end, I do have some clear takeaways and reflection questions for you, but I hope you're excited to go on this journey with me. And in our exploration of how to feel seen off social media, let's start with a more basic question. What does it mean to feel seen? Well, as the good millennial I am, when I thought about this question, the first thing I did was Google it and read Google's AI overview of the definition of feeling seen.

Amelia Hruby [00:05:44]:
So what Google tells me is that feeling seen is a state of being recognized through validation, support, inclusion, or representation of one's identity, needs, emotions, and/or physical presence. It can also be described as a feeling of deep connection or being present that can lead to trust. Feeling seen is similar to feeling heard, but feeling seen is more about identity while feeling heard prioritizes a message. Some ways to make people feel seen include practicing active listening, being fully present, reflecting on what you hear, validating feelings, showing empathy, telling someone how much you value them, and telling someone you love them for everything that they are, which is super sweet from a robot, right? Or honestly, from whatever human the robot stole that from.

Amelia Hruby [00:06:33]:
But I really appreciate this definition as a starting point for our conversation around feeling seen because it brings in a lot of keywords that I'm going to kind of unpack today. You know, according to that definition, feeling seen is about being recognized, validated, supported, represented. We feel seen in our identity, our needs, our emotions, or our physical presence. Feeling seen is about feeling connected. It's about trust. We can already hear in this definition that there is a lot wrapped up in feeling seen.

Amelia Hruby [00:07:08]:
And so I think that the first step for any of us who are asking ourselves how to feel seen, do we feel seen on social media or off of it is to reflect on this question. What does it mean to feel seen? What is most important for me in feeling seen? What is at stake for me in feeling seen? And if those questions feel really resonant, I would invite you to pause this episode right here and take a moment to reflect on them. Pull out your notes up, pull out a journal. What does feeling seen mean to you? And then what does feeling seen on social media mean to you? And what does feeling seen off social media mean to you?

Amelia Hruby [00:07:44]:
These are really personal questions and I invite you to spend a little bit of time thinking about your own answers before we unpack mine. So now that we've gotten what does it mean to feel seen on the table, or we've at least started to talk about this definition, which is frankly, really broad, let's get a little more specific. What does it mean to feel seen on social media? Because we're not talking about feeling seen writ large. We're talking about what it means to feel seen on social media, so let's go to social media next. I think that feeling seen on social media happens in a lot of different ways, like through some different technologies of the platforms.

Amelia Hruby [00:08:22]:
So we can feel seen by making a post. We can feel seen by likes or comments on a post. We can feel seen by replies to our stories. We can feel seen by a DM from someone. We can also feel seen by another person's post. We can feel seen by a comment on their post that has the same take that we do on the post itself. We can feel seen by a meme. We can feel seen by a sound. We can feel seen by a trend. There are so many ways that we feel seen on social media. And I think when it comes down to it, what we mean there is that we feel recognized. We feel like something in that post comment, engagement, reply, meme, or trend is reflecting us back to ourselves. We're finding a little bit of ourselves out there on the social media platform, and that makes us feel seen.

Amelia Hruby [00:09:10]:
And sometimes, we find ourselves in someone else's expression through their post, through a comment elsewhere, and sometimes we find ourselves in the validation in something that we have shared. So going back to that original definition, validation and representation can be two pretty different forms of feeling seen. We can feel seen when someone else represents something we recognize about ourselves, and we can feel seen when someone validates something we've shared about ourselves.

Amelia Hruby [00:09:38]:
And I think in that way, feeling seen becomes kind of a loop. It's like a reciprocal circulation of, I find myself out in the world, I come back to myself and feel validated in who I am, or I share myself out in the world, that gets validated and makes me feel seen. And I think that's what produces a lot of the feel good feelings that we get from social media or at least many of us have gotten at some point on social media.

Amelia Hruby [00:10:03]:
Now, speaking of those feel good feelings, I think that a lot of us may not reflect on how we feel seen on social media until we don't feel seen there. We may not reflect as much on our visibility until we feel invisible. I imagine all of us can feel the acute pain of posting something and no one liking it and feeling really not seen, and even if you're not posting on social media, even if you're just using the platform, I think, often, we don't feel seen there when we're scrolling and we're scrolling and we're scrolling and everything we're seeing is just so different and, quote unquote, better than our own life.

Amelia Hruby [00:10:44]:
And this is something that I just hear more and more and more from other people. Everyone's talking about the pervasiveness of social comparison on social media apps and how bad it feels. And I'm sure this resonates in many of our personal experiences, and there's also research that has been done to investigate this phenomenon of social comparison on social media. So a 2020 research review published in Current Opinion in Psychology talks about how social networking sites provide a fertile ground for social comparison to take place because of the unprecedented scale of people to compare ourselves to.

Amelia Hruby [00:11:23]:
Additionally, because of the aspirational character of these apps, we're more often confronted with the successes of other people, their, quote unquote, highlight reel, than their failures. And so we're often stuck in what these researchers call upward social comparison, where we're comparing ourselves to people that we perceive to be better, further along, more successful than us, rather than looking at people who are perhaps a few steps behind on a similar journey. So because of the prevalence of this upward social comparison, these researchers argue that there is a negative impact to our social well-being. And in this particular review, they even go as far as to say that these negative feelings following social comparison on social media sites may, and I'm quoting here, "Ironically cause people to engage in further damaging social comparisons, creating a vicious downward cycle."

Amelia Hruby [00:12:16]:
I mean, who among us has not doom scrolled their way through a whole downward spiral cycle of compare and despair? I mean, I've certainly done that. I'm sure you can relate if you're listening to this. And stepping away from that research review, I think that one of the reasons this is so common is because social media quantifies what it means to be seen. Social media gives us specific metrics, the like, the comment, the follower count, and these metrics publicly declare, "I am seen." If you have enough followers, you're seen by enough people. You not only are like saying that it is out there in public. Everyone can see it. Everyone can see how many likes your post got. Everyone can see how many comments are there. Everyone can see how many followers you have.

Amelia Hruby [00:13:06]:
On social media, we're all out there declaring that we are seen or we're confronting these moments where we are not seen and that's happening in public, Right? You share the great post and it gets three likes and everyone can see that it got three likes or you turn the like count off so they can't see it. But they can see that your profile only has a 100 followers or 500 followers or 1,000 followers or 10,000 followers. We have all these numbers out there in public declaring "I am seen" or "I am not seen." And I think when we declare that enough, when we engage in this dynamic enough, what it means to feel seen gets disconnected from the actual feeling of support, presence, and trust that we started with. The metrics start to matter more than the connection. And as a result, feeling seen, a.k.a. connection, gets replaced by being seen, a.k.a. visibility.

Amelia Hruby [00:14:01]:
And now we go to these apps to feel seen, to find connection, but what we're met with is the impulse to be seen, to get more visibility, and that is a really murky, challenging, problematic conflation. To go even one layer deeper, I think this is especially challenging for business owners because business owners have another part of this equation. We have also been taught that more visibility equals more money. So we've got social media platforms training us to equate feeling seen with being seen, and business gurus is telling us to equate being seen with making money. And then through some fucked up transit of property, we end up with this idea that feeling seen equals making money. And that I think is a recipe for feeling unworthy, undervalued, and, frankly, just kind of lost in what we're doing with our work and sharing our work online and our lives more broadly.

Amelia Hruby [00:15:10]:
So just to recap before we take a very quick break, so far, we've talked about what it means to feel seen, what it means to feel seen on social media, and the recognition loop that we get there that can feel really good, sharing our work to get validated, finding other people who represent parts of our identity, feeling good in that process, and we also talked about what's happening when we don't feel seen on social media, why these platforms are rampant with social comparison, and how the quantifiable nature of that social comparison leads us to conflate feeling seen with being seen and how we end up replacing connection with visibility and perhaps even equating feeling seen with making money in the process if we're business owners. So let's take a quick break, And when we come back, we'll talk about how to feel seen off social media.

Amelia Hruby [00:16:11]:
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Amelia Hruby [00:17:48]:
So in the final part of this episode, I wanna talk about what I promised you in the title, how to feel seen off social media. And based on everything I've just said, I think there are two parts to this, or at least two parts that I wanna explore today. The first is more about our human selves and our need to connect, and the second is more about why it can feel hard to connect on the other side of social media due to this issue with metrics. So let's go to the human side first.

Amelia Hruby [00:18:18]:
I want to acknowledge that many of us go to social media for self expression and connection with other people that we don't have access to in our daily lives. This is where Becca and I started our conversation. If you listened to that episode, she shared about how there were parts of herself that she felt didn't get seen in her daily life, but that were witnessed and validated and recognized on social media. And that's why she wanted to spend more time there, which makes perfect sense to me.

Amelia Hruby [00:18:46]:
Many of us live lives where it may not feel good or even be safe to express ourselves in the fullest sense in our immediate environment. I think a lot about my queer community here. It may not be safe to perform your gender in your local community. It may be very hard to connect with other folks who eat, breathe, live, dress, and dream like you do, especially for those of us who don't live in urban centers that are full of many, many different kinds of people. If you go to social media to feel seen as your true self in ways that are truly not accessible to you in your local community, I support and celebrate you.

Amelia Hruby [00:19:23]:
But I also think social media will always be rampant with social comparison. So often when we go to that space for validation, we may be met with a lack of recognition or misrecognition that feels just as alienating as not feeling seen in our lives offline. So I don't think social media is necessarily the answer here. I understand the appeal of going there and I wanna validate the folks for whom it feels really good to be there, but I also think in that space, you will always confront these challenging dynamics of social comparison and the direct metrics that quantify our visibility, and as a result, our value to that space. And I think that that is a challenging foundation to build relationships and frankly, self worth on. I think that's really hard to do.

Amelia Hruby [00:20:18]:
But again, I think that many of us do seek and need to find connection online, and so for those of us wanting to feel seen off social media in different aspects of our identity, I would recommend that we find virtual spaces that are just less hierarchically and metrically oriented than social media. We can join Discourse. We can join paid communities. We can reach out to people for one-on-one connection. I think that we can step into spaces that invite us to connect more socially than parasocially. I think that rather than following a bunch of influencers who we admire and we get mired in these parasocial relationships with, we can join online communities where we're invited into non-hierarchical relationship and we can get to know people in that way.

Amelia Hruby [00:21:05]:
And in my experience, I tend to feel much more seen by my peers than by people I may be aspirationally paying attention to. I feel more seen in my relationships than I do in my parasocial relationships. And so I think that if you're listening to this episode asking, how do I feel seen off social media when it's this place that I go to to get seen in these very specific ways, I would just invite you to expand your sense of where you might go to feel seen in those ways. This is where you go back to that journaling. This is where you reflect on that question of, how do I feel seen on social media? And then you find alternatives to those ways that you feel seen. Maybe a slightly different version of that question is, what parts of myself feel most seen on social media or only feel seen on social media? And can I find ways for those to feel seen in other spaces?

Amelia Hruby [00:21:56]:
Even if you stay on social media, I think it can be valuable to find other ways to validate and support those aspects of our identity in addition to social media. Because again, I just think that we've learned that social media is not a safe or stable foundation to build on because your profile could get blocked and deleted and all of a sudden it's all gone. Right? And if you have no connections on other platforms or in your daily life, that can be really, really disorienting, not just socially, but also for your identity, if you're relying on social media to feel seen in certain ways. So I wanna encourage and support you in bolstering those identities in additional spaces or alternative spaces if you are off social media altogether.

Amelia Hruby [00:22:41]:
So this takes me to the second part of feeling seen without social media, which is that I think we have to reconnect with what it means to feel seen, and we have to define that for ourselves away from the metrics that social media has attached us to. Because even if we step away from social media, these platforms have already trained us to become really attached to metrics as the signs of feeling seen. And when that's happened, it's really hard to feel seen without the numbers. And that's why many of us, myself included, I think get really wrapped up in metrics on other platforms when we leave social media. So I check my podcast downloads probably more than is healthy for my mental health. Similarly, with email subscribers or with revenue.

Amelia Hruby [00:23:25]:
There are all these metrics, especially inside of a business, that we could turn to to seek out that quantifiable number of feeling seen. Again, maybe it's not a follower count now, but it could be podcast downloads, email subscribers, revenue, open rate, click rate, purchase rate. All of that could become your metric that replaces that sense of, oh, I feel seen now. And I think that is something that social media has done to us. We have lost touch with the feelings that were the guideposts of feeling seen because we outsource those feelings to metrics.

Amelia Hruby [00:24:02]:
And now we have to redefine what it means to feel seen for ourselves, and I think that means disconnecting connection from visibility again. I think it means distinguishing relationship building from audience building, That equation I talked about earlier where through social media feeling seen gets equated with being seen, we gotta make those things not equal each other anymore. Because I think at the heart of feeling seen is everything that we started with, recognition, validation, support, inclusion, representation, but I think even more so, I think those are all kind of different proxies for feeling seen, what it's actually about is deep connection, presence, and trust, and those are the guideposts to feeling seen. I know I feel seen when I feel deeply connected, present, and trusting and trusted. I feel seen in relationship, and I think that's what I'm seeking when I wanna feel seen. The number can't actually see me.

Amelia Hruby [00:24:58]:
When I really reflect on it, even with this podcast, an episode that has gotten more downloads will not feel better than an episode that got more responses from people. It's that relational quality that makes me feel seen. Now the more downloads may make me feel successful, so I think that, again, we have to add more nuance here. What does it mean to us to really feel seen? And I actually think we need to disconnect feeling seen from feeling successful in our business. That's what I talked about in my last episode, success is a cycle. I talked about redefining success on our own terms. And I also think we need to redefine feeling seen on our own terms. And I think this is a challenge to us as business owners, releasing the metrics and distinguishing feeling seen, being seen, and making money again.

Amelia Hruby [00:25:47]:
And we can still do all three, We can feel seen, we can be seen, and we can make money. We just need to figure out when, where, and how we're doing each one rather than mixing it all up in the mess of posting about ourselves and our business on social media. Because if I'm getting to the heart of what feels really bad about all of this, about going to social media to feel seen, especially as online business owners, I think it's because we're taking our innermost stories, we're packaging them up with a photo on an app, and we're trying to say "look at me, validate me, and pay me" all at the same time.

Amelia Hruby [00:26:25]:
And I think that feels pretty icky to those of us who really value genuine connection and care and being in community with other people. Maybe it doesn't for you, that's okay, but for me, that doesn't feel good when I wrap all that up together. And I wanna think about business and relationships in different ways than that, which is why I left social media. And, again, you don't have to do that. But I think that takes me to where I want to close this episode, Because I think the final part of feeling seen off social media, the final part of how to feel seen off social media is embracing this tension, the tension between being a human, sharing your work with the world that wants to be seen and doesn't wanna be seen, that wants to be out there and witnessed, and also that wants to be behind the scenes creating your thing and not having to market it.

Amelia Hruby [00:27:26]:
And as I prepared this episode, I saved two quotes from D.W. Winnicott that I wanted to share with all of you, especially for all my artists out there. And he writes, "Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide. It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found." And I think all of us face this in our businesses to some extent, at least those of us who are creative business owners, whose businesses are grounded in our creative process. We wanna be seen, and we're afraid of being seen. We wanna connect, and we're afraid of connection. We wanna hide, and we really, really need to be found.

Amelia Hruby [00:28:12]:
This is the marketing conundrum that so many people come to me with. You're like, I just want to make my work and make money and not have to do the sharing it part. But that's a piece of it. And I actually think it can be really generative when that tension is what holds the whole ecosystem together. When we recognize that we wanna be out there in the world and we also wanna be in our hermit cave doing our thing. And how can we embrace that as a generative tension instead of feeling torn apart between the two sides of it?

Amelia Hruby [00:28:47]:
So if I was gonna wrap today's episode up in a few key takeaways, if I was gonna answer this question of how do I feel seen off social media, I think that the first step is reflecting on how do you wanna feel seen, and what are the ways that you feel seen on social media? I think that we have to start there. And then from there, I think we go into connection. How can you create deeper connection around those ways that you wanna feel seen off of social media? How can you find spaces or people to feel seen with away from these apps? And then how can you embrace feelings of feeling seen that are not connected to metrics? So those three steps are all gonna help you redefine what it means to feel seen and to re-embed yourself in relationship in your community.

Amelia Hruby [00:29:42]:
And if I had a takeaway from the first three seasons of Off the Grid, it would be all about relationships. I think at its core, this podcast is about being in business in relationship with others, or it's about building our businesses on the foundation of reciprocal relationships and trusting that web to take care of us because we take care of it. And I think that's where I'll leave you this season, my friends.

Amelia Hruby [00:30:16]:
Thank you so much for tuning in to this final episode of season three of Off the Grid. I hope that if you enjoy this show, you will join The Clubhouse. Come get some fun summer episodes, some community combos, some curated link emails, and just support the show. The Clubhouse is also super affordable, $5 a month or $50 a year. It's meant to be a way that you can pour back into the show. And thanks for all the ways that I pour into the show, which I can tell you, this episode alone took hours and hours and hours of finding resources, curating ideas, writing a script. I recorded a whole 60 minute version that I scrapped entirely because it went really off the rails.

Amelia Hruby [00:32:06]:
So a lot of work goes into this show and I appreciate your support. If you've got some money right now, I'd love your support by joining The Clubhouse. If you don't, I'd really appreciate your support with a five star rating and review on Apple or Spotify. And as thanks, I offer you the Toolkit, I offer you all 75 episodes of this show that exists so far, and I promise to come back for season four. So I hope you have a wonderful summer. I hope we get to connect in The Clubhouse or on the Interweb while I'm away from this public feed, and until next time, my friends, I will see you off the grid and on the Interweb.

Amelia Hruby [00:32:08]:
Thanks for listening to Off the Grid. Don't forget to grab your free Leaving Social Media Toolkit at offthegrid.fun/toolkit. This podcast is a Softer Sounds production. Our music is by Melissa Kaitlyn Carter of Making Audio Magic, and our logo is by n'Atelier Studio. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby, and until next time, I'll see you off the grid and on the Interweb.