Writer and podcaster Amelia Hruby joins us to discuss the intersections in her processes of breaking up with social media and with diet culture, how being off the platforms has benefited both her mental health and her business, how to handle guilt over leaving, ways to get exposure to greater representation and body diversity without social media, and more.
Amelia Hruby is a writer, educator and podcaster with a PhD in philosophy. Over the past decade, she’s been a university professor, a community organizer, and a radio DJ. Now she is the founder & executive producer of Softer Sounds, a feminist podcast studio that supports entrepreneurs and creatives. She’s also the host of Off the Grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients.
Resources and References
Amelia’s podcast, Off the Grid
Amelia’s production studio, Softer Sounds
Christy’s latest book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Lauren Ash of Black Girl in Om
Subscribe on Substack for bonus episodes and more
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: This podcast is brought to you by my second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being, which is now available wherever books are sold! It's a great companion to this podcast because it explores the connections between diet culture and wellness culture; how the wellness space became overrun with scams, misinformation, and conspiracy theories, thanks largely to social media. I go into that a lot in the book and you'll hear me talk about that with Amelia here as well a little bit. And the book also discusses why alternative medicine can often be misleading and harmful even though it's really understandable for people to be attracted to it, given the pitfalls of the conventional healthcare system. And the book talks about what we can do instead to create a society that promotes true wellbeing and break free from these wellness traps. Just go to christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap to learn more and order it now. That’s christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap. Or just pop into your favorite local bookstore and ask for it there.
This podcast is made possible by my paid subscribers at rethinkingwellness.substack.com. Not only do paid subscriptions help support the show and keep me able to make the best free content I possibly can, like this podcast, but they also get you great perks like early access to every episode, bonus episodes (including one I did with this week’s guest), biweekly bonus Q&As, subscriber-only comment threads where you can connect with other listeners, and lots more, including great stuff from the archives that's not available anywhere else. Just go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com to sign up. That's rethinkingwellness.substack.com. And thanks so much to everyone who's become a paid subscriber already. Your support really means the world to me.
Now, without any further ado, let’s go to my conversation with Amelia Hruby. So Amelia, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to be talking with you today for my podcast. We first connected for your podcast and I loved the conversation we have there and just really excited to continue it over here.
Amelia Hruby: Thank you so much for having me, Christy. I am so pumped to be here.
Christy Harrison: Yes, I'm so pumped to talk to you. So I will have given a brief bio of you in my intro so listeners will know the gist of what you do. But what I'm really interested in talking about today is, well many things, right? Your journey leaving social media, but then also the fact that you were a feminist scholar and body positive influencer in your first career. Before we get into all of that, I'd love to just hear a little bit about your personal history with diet-culture and wellness culture, whatever you want to share of that. I know we all have one, and that sort of leads us to where we are today. I think.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, thank you for that invitation. And I have what I have started to think of as almost a prototypical journey with diet-culture with my experience in my body with growing up in the aughts as somebody who was 10 years old in 2001 and really moved through my preteen years in that sort of hyper saturated, low rise jeans crop top culture, I just really came into myself in an era of never believing I could be thin enough or good enough or pretty enough or anything enough. And I find it really interesting to see how many of my peers now and how much I see culturally, we are so saturated in this question of what is enough. And I often will say in my work or in different things I've created, I always felt like I could never be thin enough and I could never be rich enough.
And those are the two enoughs that really shaped my teens and twenties and led me down a path of a lot of dieting, of a lot of stress about money, of a lot of insecurity in all areas, and eventually led me to social media where you encounter a different enough of never having enough followers. And then I started using that as a space to learn to liberate myself by crafting images of myself in a different way. And I think that social media there also becomes this really, I don't know what the word I want to use is. It was a very liberatory place for me, but I see it be a really challenging place for other people. So maybe is what I'll say. It becomes a space where we can go to judge ourselves as never enough. But for me it was for a time a space where I could go to actually get in touch with myself as I was and share that with other people, by which I mean take selfies of my fat body and love them and share them and be present in that space in that way. And while I was doing that, I really learned a lot about myself, and that's where I was hosting these small practice groups that I called selfies for radical self-love and leading other people through a curriculum of how to take selfies that resist some of the visual narratives that we find on social media rather than try to conform our bodies or retouch our images into those sorts of body types that are held up as, I don't even know what words like the best, hottest, richest, most wonderful.
Christy Harrison: The ideal.
Amelia Hruby: Ideal, yes. Thank you. So that was doing that work and it was really powerful and really changed my life and the lives of some of the people that I worked with as we were going through those curriculums together.
Christy Harrison: That's really interesting that it was such a part of a liberatory process for you, and I think that's true for many people, or at least some people in this sort of fat positive body liberation eating disorder recovery kind of spaces that there is this element of being able to reclaim something or just seeing bodies, seeing larger bodies and diverse bodies existing in the world, and an alternative to the media images that we're constantly fed and bombarded with. I think there's something really freeing about that and really healing about that. And there's such a double-edged sword to social media. It's so complicated and can become so complicated. I think the more time you spend in that space.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's why a lot of people talk about curating your feed so that you're seeing more of those liberatory images, you're seeing more representation of diverse body types and identities and lived experiences. And I do think that social media was one of the first places, Instagram specifically, where I saw other fat women and non-binary folks, and I was like, wow, they look amazing. I can look like this and not only look like that, but feel like that in my body that's a possibility for me and that I don't want to understate how powerful that is. I think representation is very powerful. I don't think it's the only thing that we need to liberate ourselves, but I do think that it is one of the first steps toward realizing that we can enjoy our bodies live in them, happily even love them. I know some people have trouble with self-love narratives or Rhetoric, but for me, just seeing other people love their fat bodies specifically in my case, really helped unlock something for me that that was even possible for me.
Christy Harrison: So you have a history as a feminist scholar. How did that play into relationship with social media and your journey as an influencer for lack of a better term?
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, so throughout all of this, I was doing my PhD in philosophy. I wrote a dissertation on feminist aesthetics, which combined some historical studies of the history of art and representation with more contemporary understandings of feminism, particularly based around identity, particularly coming from the perspectives of a few women of color who are feminist theorists and poets and scholars. And so all of that was in my head as I'm just scrolling through Instagram, and it kind of gave me, I think a unique perspective on how we create images as well as how we experience them. And so I was able to start to think through and apply things I had learned through my studies and I was teaching at the university while I was doing my PhD. I was there talking about teaching about the male gaze and the female gaze and the oppositional gaze as it's theorized by bell hooks.
And I was really bringing that to the classroom and then able to see on Instagram like, oh, it's interesting how as I scroll through these photos of people sharing selfies, who are they taking this for? What gaze am I bringing to this image? Am I looking at this in a certain way? Is it evoking a feeling in me or some type of understanding of what this person is trying to get across through this picture of themselves? And just I was able to wrap all of that up in how I used or consumed social media and then kind of think through that lens of, okay, if I'm looking at all these other people and how they're presenting themselves and what's at stake there, how am I presenting myself and how can I perhaps take, my goal was really to take photos of myself that disrupted some of the things that I thought were ways that I should be showing myself.
So I had always been trained with this sort of in a picture, you should smile you. I really had this narrative, you should try to look as thin as possible and all of your photos, so you should contort your body in certain ways so you're like, your posture is high and your stomach is sucked in. And all of these narratives I had and I really tried to take selfies that rejected them. And so I was always slouched over fully belly relaxed. I often smiled because I enjoy smiling, but it wasn't the sort of saccharine like say cheese smile, it was often a laugh or a different sort of look or facial expression I was working on. And that was the beginning. It was me learning all of these different ideas of representation and philosophy and then trying to apply resistance to dominant narratives through my selfies.
Christy Harrison: It sounds like such an interesting project. How was it received? I mean, you obviously built an audience. I'm just curious, were you sort of cultivating that? Did it grow organically?
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, so over the course of I think two or three years, I grew a modest audience of roughly 3000 people who were there for selfies, for radical self-love that work I was doing as well as some other things. I had a feminist mantra project where I shared feminist affirmations that was also kind of marrying my academic work and my practical or social media work. And on the whole, I would say the selfies were very well received. I think that we see selfies get the most likes on Instagram. And so I guess when I say well received, I'll be more literal. What I mean is they got the most likes of my other photos. I definitely, I think my platform was small enough that I wasn't trolled by trolls or I didn't get a ton of really negative or fat phobic or threatening or derogatory comments.
They did show up occasionally I would have people I'd never heard of who didn't follow anyone I followed kind of parachute in and say mean things or say really veiled things like how they're worried about my health. I'm like, I don't know you. You're obviously not worried about my health. And we know that concerns about health are just a way of that sort of language in that space. I was like, this is a dog whistle for fat phobic sentiment. So I did get a encounter some of that, but I think for the most part what ended up happening is I heard from a lot of people who would describe what I was doing as brave or inspiring or uplifting to them. They were starting to see it as a possibility that they could experience their body in a different way, that they could share photos where they didn't look like the ideal and they were really interested in thinking about that together.
And it didn't that they necessarily were going to take a picture in their underwear and put it out there like I did, but often it just meant that I might get selfies in my dms where they're like, look, I took one this. They're like, look, I am thinking about what you said about that. And I always stood by sharing them publicly is a really private choice that you get to make. It was a choice I made, but I think you can still get so much out of a selfie practice even if the photos stay private and just on your camera roll.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that's helpful to know. I mean, I'm so curious about your journey from that space to leaving social media. You also have a professional background in social media. I've heard you say that you manage the socials for various companies for a decade. And so given that background and your own career as a sort of influencer, micro influencer perhaps, and then just having gotten a lot out of being on social media, what led you to break up with it and leave social media?
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, I think they're two parallel paths. So I got my first job in social media while I was still in college, I was working for a sort of agency, so this would be, gosh, 2011 I think. So early days of Instagram, I mean early days of brands being on Instagram. At that point, I was actually running Twitter and Facebook accounts for brands. So I worked for this agency and I ran accounts for a lingerie store outside of Baltimore and a global shipping company. And I was writing tweets and Facebook posts because these companies were just starting to think about having a social media presence. Gosh, yeah, that was 12 years ago now. And then I stayed on that work for years and then eventually left the agency, transitioned into grad school and just did some things on the side mostly for local orgs in Chicago.
Eventually somebody would need someone to take care of their Instagram and I would get tapped to be that person. And then I took some of that and started to grow my own account and think about what I wanted to accomplish there. And most of the time I was just trying to share my writing, share my selfies, sell this selfies for radical self-love practice group that I taught three or four times. And then I also did some influencing work. So I did some brand work with Parade, the underwear company. I did some work with Bando and did some lives and got paid to do some partnerships with them and really was kind of living, I think the micro influencer dream of you get free stuff and you get paid sometimes and you don't have a big account, so you're not open up to all of the, there are different set of challenges when you're talking about tens of thousands of followers or hundreds of thousands of followers and when you're talking about thousands of followers.
But what eventually became really clear to me is that the fulcrum point for me leaving social media had to do with publishing my book. So in the fall of 2019, I heard from a publisher that had found me actually on Kickstarter through a Kickstarter campaign for my podcast at the time. And they found me there and then found me on social media and realized I had self-published a book I think a year or two before that, and they wanted to work with me to re-edit the book and publish it through their company. Andrews McNeil was the publisher. And so I did that with them. And throughout that process, all I heard from the agent that I got and their team was that I needed to grow my social media following. They were basically like, it's great that you're like a micro influencer, but that's not going to sell enough books, so you need to become an actual influencer.
It's not the words they use, but that's what I heard in my head. And so I really invested time, I invested money. I invested so much energy into trying to grow my platform. And a year later when my book came out, I was so excited to share it with people. My book came out in October, 2020, so I definitely had a pandemic book launch. It was all online, so much of it was on Instagram. I did so many lives the week that my book came out, I can't even count how many I did for every single person that could convince to talk to me basically on their platform. And the book was like, I don't even know if I would call it a modest success. It wasn't a failure. I think I sold 3000 copies of my book and considering I only had 3000 followers, that seems great to me, but it's not enough to be meaningful to a publisher.
And I was just kind of processing that experience toward the end of 2020 and the start of 2021 and realizing that I had made this deep investment in social media and it really felt like all I got out of it was lower self-esteem, way less energy for my creative practice and so much stress about whether or not the algorithm was going to favor what I was doing at any given time. And I started to create a list of rules for how I would show up on social media. I wrote this very long list of, I'm sure everyone listening to this will relate to this list. It was like, I'll log on Mondays, I'll post this thing, I post every Monday. I will engage for 30 minutes, then I will log off. I will delete the app. I will redownload the app on Thursdays. I will look and engage on comments.
I will post these stories. I will get off the app, I will leave it on my phone through Friday. I will delete it for the weekend. It was just such a convoluted process. And in that process, I wrote the whole post about the rules. I shared it on Instagram to tell people what I was going to be up to. And then I had this light bulb moment where I was like the last time I needed this many rules to engage with something. I was in a really codependent relationship that was really harmful to me, and I am not going to do that again with an app. I was very clear. I was like, it took way too much therapy to heal that relationship pattern. I am not doing this with Instagram and that light bulb moment, it was so liberatory and I was like, wow, I can just leave. I had to leave the relationship. I can just leave Instagram. And I decided then that I would, and I kind of put a process in place, and then I ended up leaving April 9th, 2021.
Christy Harrison: That is really powerful and actually resonates a lot with some of my experiences with social media. I've been thinking a lot about this career I have as somewhat of a public person influencer in some way, although I don't partner with brands, but I have a big account and the headaches and difficulties that come along with that and stuff in my past that I've had to work through around accommodating people and staying in relationships I shouldn't have stayed in that weren't good for me. And also having to go along to get along, going along with other people's opinions needs just over accommodating in so many ways and I just refuse to do that anymore. And I'm trying to figure out a way to have a career that's different than that that doesn't demand that kind of thing of me. And I think one big way is to step away from social media.
I haven't been able to totally let go of it yet for various reasons. I think because I'm still in the traditional publishing industry, I feel like this pressure, even though nobody's said to me explicitly, you can't delete your Instagram or anything, it just feels like not the thing to do at this point. And honestly, having had a book launch recently without using social media as much, although I had someone go back on it for me and post things on my behalf so that I had sort of a presence around the book launch, but I wasn't as present or interacting with comments or anything as I was with my first book. So I very much resonate with what you said about recognizing those patterns and how it was playing out with an app and just knowing that that was not going to serve you. I think that's really powerful.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, it was rough too as we're recording this, it's been over two and a half years since I've been on social media and it feels great, but at the time it was definitely challenging to realize and I had so many stops and starts before that sort of eye-opening moment of being like, okay, I'm done. And I think I see that a lot with other folks. Too many of us have taken a social media break or we've left and come back or had this undulating relationship to social media. And it's interesting just in the space of this podcast, I think for me, the eye-opening moment that leads me to make a really big shift is a pattern in my life. And it also showed up in my relationship to diet-culture. So there was a really clear, I mean it was literally an overnight thing in my life where I had this sort of awakening experience of literally waking up one morning and I had just gone through a period of intense exercising and ended up injuring myself.
And I had this moment where I was like, okay, am I going to keep going down this path or am I going to make different choices about my body and stop pushing so hard and stop trying to lose weight? And literally I woke up the next day and I was like, I'm going to quit. And I did, and I haven't mean that. I think that was almost five years ago now, and I have not been on a diet. I've not over exercised. I have not restricted my eating in any way since then. I think my tendency is these real slow burns and it's really churning and it's bothering me, this sort of place where my values and my behavior aren't aligning, where they're getting really misaligned and I'm really not treating myself well, and I'm really not loving myself in those spaces. And then something will happen that'll make it really clear to me normally with some amount of journaling or reflecting, and I'll have this moment where I'm like, wow, this is really how it is. Am I really doing this to myself? And I'll choose to answer no. And then from that place I step off that path onto a new path. It happened with diet-culture and it happened with social media as well.
Christy Harrison: That is so interesting. What are some of the parallels you see in people's relationships with social media or in your relationship with social media and in our relationships with diet-culture?
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, I think a big one comes up in where I started in this conversation. It's the never enoughness. I felt so strongly, and I see in so many other people this with diet-culture, it's that never thin enoughness of it. And with social media, it's the never enough followers or likes or engagement of it. Those kind of go and they feel like they go in opposite directions because one, you seemingly want less than another, you want more, but I think it's the same, not enoughness that really when that seed is planted in us, and I can say as a feminist scholar that generally people socialized as girls, like that seed is planted in you by culture and society. If it's there and it takes root, I can see it's so clear to me how it leads us down these path parallel paths of diet-culture and social media.
I also think both those paths are saturated with images of ideal body types that become this measuring stick of the not enoughness for us. And I think that both of those paths, they just have so many embedded cultural values and norms and expectations that we have to learn to root out and confront in our own thinking and in our own habits and behaviors. And that's, when I say liberatory or liberation, what I mean is kind of surfacing and releasing those and letting go of that so that we can even start to begin the work of cultivating relationships and behaviors and thought patterns that actually feel supportive and caring to us.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I totally identify with that. I think both diet-culture and social media really trap people in this relationship with themselves that is so denigrating and so not enough. So feeling less than is kind of the currency of those milieu because when you feel less than in diet-culture and in wellness culture too, it's like, and in capitalism generally really it's so much easier to sell people things that supposedly make them feel better about themselves. And when you feel less than in social media culture, you spend more time on the app, you spend more time checking back, engaging with comments, sharing, posting, doing the work to try to build your audience, to try to build your followers, to try to get that sense of enough, which is always elusive and recedes into the distance, but that benefits the platforms that helps them serve you more ads and that helps them make their money. Their business model really is capturing our attention to monetize it. For me, when I think about that piece of who benefits from me feeling like this, I think that really helps me take a step away. I don't want to benefit these industries. I think these industries are really harmful in so many ways, and I certainly don't want to do it at the expense of my own wellbeing. So that can be a helpful reminder for people too. Not like a conspiracy theory, but actually how these industries are structured, how their business models work.
Amelia Hruby: And that's something that I definitely try to explore in some episodes of Off the Grid. Definitely the one with Vicki Curtis, who's the writer of the Social Dilemma comes to mind where she,
Christy Harrison: I love that one.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, she's just so researched in this area and they did so many interviews with people who were at Meta and who were really involved in creating these products and who then make that wonderful documentary. And Vicki Curtis is talking to them and writing the social dilemma and understanding this. So I think for folks who are interested in that, it's a great episode of Off The Grid to go to and kind of hear Vicki unpack how social media works and how the attention economy works and how that changes our behavior on the individual scale and on a sort of global population scale. It's interesting, Christy, I think you and I are similar in that the sort of intellectual unlocking is what makes things really clear to us. And I will also add though that I hear from a lot of people through Off the Grid that the reason they actually leave is they just feel so horrible. It's less of the, I have to think through it and figure out why it's more of the social media is making me hate myself and I can't be here and I have to get off. And I think that both are powerful reasons and ways to step back from the platforms.
Christy Harrison: I totally agree. And I think they can sort of feed each other too. I know for me, I spent years really feeling not great about myself because of social media. And I shared this in a newsletter recently, but I fell down the stairs once because I was checking the app.
Amelia Hruby: Oh geez. Yeah, yeah. I could relate. I could relate.
Christy Harrison: It's like, what am I doing? And yet that moment was not the moment that made me, it actually took some other things. It took a building up of things just feeling bad about myself in so many different ways and having it robbed me of time. I think that was a huge one, seeing how I would just reach for the app before I was even out of bed when my eyes were barely open or sometimes I'd wake up with my phone in my hand, I'd be like, oh, I thought I put that in a drawer. What is it doing here? And my thumb would just be reaching for Instagram before I even knew what was happening or I'd be checking in the bathroom getting ready and be late going somewhere because I was like, I couldn't just focus on getting ready. I had to do it while multitasking and responding to some comment that felt so urgent.
That's just a buildup of all that. And then watching the social dilemma I think really crystallized a lot of that stuff for me. But it was building already. It's like I wish I had listened to some of those feelings earlier. I wish that I hadn't had to fall down the stairs and still keep going. I wish that my bottom had come sooner, I guess. But we all find our way to it when we do, if we do, and I'm grateful now to sort of see how harmful it was to my mental health and to have taken some steps to really insulate myself from that harm.
Amelia Hruby: We have different paths toward change in our lives. We all do, and I think that for anyone listening who's struggling with social media, something that came up in a recent conversation for Off the Grid was, I think it's a Cheryl Stray quote where she's wanting to leave a relationship is reason enough to leave. Wanting to leave social media is reason enough to leave. It may not get you there, it didn't get me there, but wanting to leave is reason enough. Feeling bad is reason enough. Realizing that it's totally taken over your life and you have to leave is reason enough. Any of these reasons are enough. And I think that I have also, I think you brought up some of the parallels with addictive behavior, and I've seen some really interesting conversations happening in more sobriety spaces around people drawing parallels between quitting drinking and quitting social media as both quitting addictive behaviors or breaking up with addiction.
Maybe I'll say, and that's not my personal experience, but I do find it really exciting and I'm planning an episode of Off the Grid next season with a group called ITAA, which I believe stands for internet Technologies at X Anonymous, and they are, it's a global organization applying 12 step principles to social media and social media addiction and internet addiction more broadly. And I just find it really, I interesting and eyeopening and powerful that people are going to these shared resources, these are all different paths to liberation from social media if it's something that really is taking over your life or our lives.
Christy Harrison: So much there that I want to unpack, I feel like I have several different threads that I want to pull, but the one that sort of jumped out at me first I think was this idea of wanting to leave is reason enough. I feel like for me and for people I know who have somewhat of a platform in the anti-diet space, but I think it can happen even for people who just have people they're connected with in real life where they feel like they're maybe sharing important messages on their social media or something. There's this sense of guilt, well, if I walk away, I'm not going to be pushing back against these systems. I'm not going to be calling out diet and wellness culture there anymore, and what's going to fill that void is probably just more of the stuff I'm trying to push against. And so there's this sense of, well, I have to stay for the benefit of my followers or something like that. Do you identify with that at all, first of all, as someone who had sort of a platform in a similar space, and what would you say to someone who's struggling with that piece of it?
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, that's a great question. The resonance I'm hearing in the question really has a lot to do with organizing work, and I've worked, I've been involved in a few organizing efforts, particularly when I was living in Chicago during grad school, and I think in those spaces people feel like I can never step back from this work. I need to be always present, always on, always pushing to benefit the work and the community and what we're trying to achieve together. And as the antidote to that, I've loved seeing how many prominent organizers we have coming forward talking about the importance of rest, talking about the importance of doing activist or organizing work or change work more broadly in a way that is embedded in the values of the change we're trying to bring about. So I think of the NAAFA ministry or I think of someone like Prentice Hemphill or all these people who are really saying, the only way we will make change is by living in the values.
Adrienne Marie Brown is also someone's stepping forward into this space. And so that's what comes to mind first is I don't want it to be the change you want to see in the world that feels so such a cliche quote at this point, but there's a way that the work has to be done with the same value system that we're trying to bring about and what you were saying, there's a concession that I hear that is where I want to kind of scratch at, which is that you didn't say, but that's underlying it, which is like everybody's on Instagram and they're going to stay on Instagram and be on Instagram no matter what. Therefore, I need to be in that space pushing back against diet-culture and how it's showing up there. But the work I'm doing is all about getting us to question that initial assumption and is about getting us to say, if we are all going to be on social media and we believe it's inherently embedded in diet-culture, maybe the change we actually need is to get off of social media.
Can we do, I guess there's a sort of master's tools. We'll never fix the master's house scenario here. And so for creators in the anti-diet space feeling that way, I would wonder would being the example of someone leaving social media actually help potentially help more of your followers step back from this problematic space and could it, I'm not saying it, I think it's a question mark there. I can't determine that for anyone, but I'm also thinking of a conversation I just had with Lauren Ash of Black Girl and Ohm for Off the Grid, and she talked about how she left her platform. She shut down her Instagram account of over 50,000 followers because she realized that the work she was trying to do in the world, Instagram was actively working against that, creating genuine community for women of color and wellness. She was like, this is not the space where that can happen anymore. And so she chose to step away and I just think that's a really powerful reckoning that happens in that moment, and I just wrapped a lot of things into the response to that question, but I think there's so much to unpack in even thinking that I have to be here to push back against something. There's so many questions to ask before we even get to that sort of sentiment.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I think that's also powerful and important and so many of the people you mentioned, I also love their work and how they're advocating for embedding the values that we want to see in the world into our activism work and not doing activism in a way that burns people out or throws them away or just recreates the hierarchies that we see, maybe inverts them or changes them, but ultimately keeps hierarchies in place. That's all been part of my own reckoning as well. Stepping away from social media and not doing activist work on social media anymore and just not wanting to contribute to a space that I think is so toxic and just treats people as disposable in so many ways, treats people as just these cogs in a machine that exists for the benefit of tech companies really. That's also helpful to hear as sort of a follow onto that and something that I was thinking about earlier too, when you were mentioning liberatory aspects of being on social media and seeing representations of different bodies, how do you reckon with that or invite people to think about ways to expand their visual and aesthetic environment without necessarily having to be on social media without diversifying their feed? What if there's no feed? How do we do that then?
Amelia Hruby: I love this question. I think that something that social media has done in my mind, it's kind of opened our eyes to the fact that we don't just have to consume what dominant media presents their visuals or narratives or stories and that there's so much more out there, but I think once you've had that awakening or that eyeopening moment, you don't have to go to social media to get those things. There are so many amazing independent media platforms out there. There are so many amazing independent Magazine's and websites and podcasts and YouTube channels, whatever it may be, although YouTube is sometimes associated with social media and definitely algorithmically oriented. So I think it really just comes down to being creative and what I love about this and I can hear myself getting excited, but it's just like once I got off social media, I wasn't just consuming whatever it gave me and I just got really more adventurous and I was seeking out things that I felt excited by and I really started.
For me, that meant that I've had this whole renaissance and newfound love of film since I left social media. I watch all of these independent films and short films and I've gotten super into that space and world, and I also read so much more, so I read all of these books and I spend a lot of time going to independent bookstores, seeing what they're recommending, looking up interviews with an author. I love to see who they're reading and then going and reading those books. Same with filmmakers, seeing who they admire, what films inspire them, how can I go to those spaces, and so I've become such an active participant in the visuals and narratives that I'm consuming and I'm not just taking in the algorithm is Feeding me. And so it's really been a joyful process and so many, I have more opinions. I have more to say. I have more just thoughts. I have more thoughts, but it's like I'm not just kind of taking in and regurgitating the same whatever's on my feed that I'm scrolling through. Instead, I'm really seeking out different things and different representations and honestly, I encounter a lot more stuff that I absolutely hate and a lot more stuff that I absolutely love instead of just a constant feed of things that I'm like okay about.
Christy Harrison: That's so interesting. I can very much relate to that too. I think for me, being away from, especially Twitter is where I got this sort of steeped in conventional wisdom thing I think the most, right? Where it's just like, these are the talking points. Here's your daily list of talking points. Here's the enemy of the day, here's the hero of the day. Here's what you're supposed to think about this thing that's going on. Stepping away from that I think has been so helpful for just trusting myself, getting back in touch with my own opinions and what I really think and feel and the nuanced levels of that too. Not just these hot takes that fit into 240 characters or whatever that are the low hanging fruit. I took a really great op-ed writing workshop with a writer named Ja Bolina who talked about this sort of low hanging fruit aspect of Twitter and how when you're writing op-eds, we want to go beyond just this kind of lowest common denominator take, and it's often people will labor over writing these takes on Twitter that they'll be funny or they'll, they'll distill something that's kind of an opinion.
Some people, maybe a lot of people are feeling and they'll get a lot of likes, but then they'll disappear. It's sort of part of that disposability culture I think of social media. It's not really built to last. They don't have staying power and even op-eds, I mean he made the argument too that even a good op-Ed, you don't necessarily remember. It's more these longer form crafted arguments in a book or in a longer form piece of journalism that maybe will really stick with people, and that really resonated. I think for me with how I've started to feel about the media that I create and just the sort of content I create in general that I want what I do to have some sort of staying power. I don't want to be expending my creative energy on these things that are going to just disappear. That might go viral for a second, and that's sort of the unstated goal.
I think of a lot of tweets or Instagram posts or whatever, and certainly on TikTok that's the hashtag for you page or whatever is literally saying, I want this to go viral, but what are we really wanting when we're wanting that? It's this sort of quick flash in the pan, like 15 minutes of fame kind of thing. I have never really been one for quick fame. My career is very much a testament to that. It's taken so long to really achieve whatever sort of external metrics of success I've achieved, and I have not had anything near overnight success, and I used to want it. I used to think like, oh, if I could just have this thing that hit and just make a living from what I'm trying to do, I feel like it's so important and I wanted that sort of quick rise, but I've started to really appreciate how slow burning everything I've done has been. And not to say that everyone has to feel that way, that's just my experience, but I've connected that to I think my rethinking of social media and sort of how disposable it all feels and how I don't want to be a part of that. I want to be a part of something that is more lasting and how can I put my energy towards that?
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, I really appreciate this reflection on virality as a motivating force because I do think it is what drives so many people, so many creators on social media is the promise of virality, and I think that that promise is becoming more and more hollow, especially in the world of TikTok where you're seeing just everyday people make viral videos. And I think on Instagram, it used to be that going viral meant you would get this flood of followers and then you could potentially be an influencer and start down that career path, but now on TikTok going viral doesn't mean anyone will ever follow you.
It means that you have to keep chasing that over time. It becomes this really, I think of it as a chase and you're just constantly chasing the algorithm and chasing the whims of the users of the platform, and I think that for any value centered creator, it just takes you really far afield. The most successful influencers are the ones who are doing whatever their audience and the platform desires, and I'm not here to critique that behavior necessarily. I can see the appeal of it to some degree, but I just think it's really unsatisfying for people who feel driven by their core desires and values and needs and beliefs. You really have to hand yourself over if what you want is ongoing virality and fame,
Christy Harrison: And I think it stands in the way of people discovering their core beliefs and values too. I think if you're someone who stumbles into it and you don't necessarily have those values sort of dialed into your compass and you're still exploring to figure out what those are, I think it can easily pull you in whatever direction the algorithm pulls people, which is usually controversy, outrage, novelty, one-upmanship, popularity contest. It's all this stuff that isn't probably core to most people's values and it can distract and detract from the process of actually discovering who you really are and being able to listen to your inner voice.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, I think that's very true, and I think that while I have a background in academia and theory and art and all of these things, I'm also, now, I spend most of my time as a business owner running my business, which is a podcast studio, and so I also think very pragmatically about the role of social media and what social media means in our society and our professional spheres and what it can bring us and get for us and our social status in the world. I think something I just want to add to this conversation is when I left social media, I had to give up and grieve certain dreams. I gave up the dream of another book deal that was a part of my leaving process in my mind, as long as traditional publishing is focused on requiring a large platform to get a book deal, I've let go of that dream for myself.
I'm not willing to be on social media, and so maybe that's not on the table for me anymore, and that was definitely something I had to grieve because I wanted another book deal. I always had this image of myself as an author and a writer, but I just wasn't willing to compromise everything I had to give up to be on social media, and when we choose to liberate ourselves from these normative systems, there may be trade-offs, things that we're going to come up against. I don't want to sound naive or I don't get that. When you step off social media, there are opportunities that I have given up because I am not there, but I made that choice. There are things that I launched a podcast, I quit going down the route, the path I was going down. I don't offer myself views for radical self-love course anymore.
I started this fully separate business of a podcast studio because I needed to be, and I knew that my selfies courses, I didn't have a big enough audience off social media or on social media frankly, to sell them and make enough money to support myself. I made all these really pragmatic decisions based off of this choice, and I think that is a piece of it, and I think a lot of the reason people don't leave is I'm hearing this even in your story, Christy is like, there are things you want that require this, and so we have to sit in that tension and sometimes we eventually make a different choice and change our careers or change our efforts, and sometimes we stay in the tension and that's okay too.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I feel like for me, it's been this process of turning a giant slow moving ship around because I had been going full steam ahead in one direction and accumulated all this stuff, built out this ship of my business, I guess, to have people that I contract with and have things that I do that people have come to expect from me and all of this stuff. And so thinking about shedding some of that stuff or reorienting such a large ship, I mean, let's not trying to self aggrandize here. I'm a very small business with I'm the only employee and have a few contractors or whatever, but still it feels like a responsibility and I do. Up until recently, I have been the primary or sole earner in my family. There's a weight of responsibility to that and figuring out how to turn it around, whatever success that I sort of stumbled into financially and culturally or whatever has been in one arena, it's been really tough.
It's been really tough to think about reorienting, and I'm still in this slow process of reorienting, and I think my values have been really at the heart of it, having this sort of values compass of who I really am and what I really believe in to guide me in a direction, but to get everything to line up in that direction has been a whole other thing, and I have always thought of myself as a writer. That's all I ever really wanted to be. That's whether it was journalism or being an author of books or a podcaster, but writing the scripts and the content to some degree and whatever, it's always been writing, so figuring out how to do that and make a living with that, that's sustainable without having to have social media as a big part of it and eventually maybe without having to have social media at all.
That's the goal, but it's been a challenge. Here's a good place for a plug to be a paid subscriber to Substack. That's honestly part of why I went to that platform was to try to see if having people directly pay for the work could potentially help offset some of the cost of losing the social media presence. It's been an interesting journey for sure, and your course, I just started really diving into your refresh. You do these courses on helping people leave social media and rethink their relationships with it, and I watched the first module and just was in tears at the beautiful visualization that your friend Grace led. It was just really powerful and I felt something shift there For me, this work is very present and ongoing, and I'm not sharing too much publicly about it, but there's a lot in my mind at least happening behind the scenes.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, I mean, I love the metaphor you shared of turning the ship. That feels really powerful to me, especially as a counterpoint to my swift decisive shifts. I tend to make really big changes really fast, or they seem really fast from an external perspective, but I don't think everything works that way. And so I love this idea of yeah, you have to really turn the ship and also maybe it's also a little bit of a sailboat and you have to wait for the winds to shift as well, and you're just kind of hanging out, and I think right now the winds really are shifting around social media. We're seeing so many creators start to step away. When I launched off the grid in 2022, I would say the first season kind of had minimal success. Some people were into it, it wasn't really catching on, and I had a conversation with a good friend of mine at the end.
I was like, I don't know if people want this. Maybe it's just a thing I did and it's not a big deal and I won't make another season. And she was like, I think you're just ahead of the curve. And so when I did season two, it has been an astronomical difference. I mean, I'm doing 10, 20, 50 x the number of downloads on my episodes because people are so much more ready. The winds have shifted, I guess to continue the metaphor. People are really more ready to think about life without social media or work or business without social media or creating things or art without social media than they were even a year ago. And so I think that's really a piece of it too, is some of it is our choice and our control, and some of it is kind of waiting for the world to shift and we'll each find our own right timing on this.
I am never here to be someone to say, you need to get off social media. I think of it as a very personal choice, and I think that is also what comes up in that visualization that you've mentioned. So whenever folks are hearing this, it will be a part of something As we're recording, I will be launching this soon, probably by the time this comes out, it will be out, but through off the grid, I have a membership offering called The Interweb that you can join and you'll get access to my course where I help people step away from social media and build business foundations or offering foundations in different directions. And then a part of that is also Grace's visualization that really helps you step into a space of addressing all the fear that arises and sitting with it and releasing it so you can step into a space of new possibility and just thinking of stepping back from or stepping away entirely from social media.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it's beautiful. It's a really powerful activity and just I love that you're doing this work. I think it's so important. We are talking about the winds shifting. I think you're part of that shift, and it's hard to be an early person to a trend or a movement or not to belittle it by calling it a trend, but to a shift, a cultural shift. It's hard to be early to it, and yet we need those people. We need the people in the vanguard to be showing the way or to shed light on something that maybe a lot of people haven't considered. So I really appreciate your work in doing and your commitment to sticking with it. I'm so glad that Off The Grid exists for another season that I was able to connect with you and discover your work, and yeah, I think it's really powerful and anyone who's listening who is curious about leaving social media, I definitely recommend that they check out your work. So I think it's wonderful and just feels very aligned too with my values. There's a lot of different ways people can talk about leaving social media, and I feel like your way is just so gentle and compassionate and feels really good to me, so thank you.
Amelia Hruby: Well, thank you. I appreciate it. I have heard from other people that I and yourself, now that I have a pretty gentle but no nonsense approach to this work. I left social media over two and a half years ago, so I don't need this work personally anymore, but I feel very committed to supporting people through these transitions and seeing them where they're at in that space, because as it's evolved, Christy, I'm meeting and working with more and more folks like you who really have careers that are somewhat dependent or just straight up dependent on social media and how do we engage this work from that space? And I mean, I find joy in creating resources and thinking through creative solutions to these questions or creative invitations to take steps in different directions. So yeah, I'm so glad that on the show to talk about how all of this relates to wellness and folks want to explore off the grid. They can actually go check out our newly launched website, which is at Off the Grid Fun.
Christy Harrison: Amazing. Thank you so much. I didn't even have to do my typical wrap up, so thank you. We'll put all that in the show notes. Actually, there's one last question I want to ask you because I've been asking it for everyone who's on the show, which is the show's called Rethinking Wellness. And I'm curious how you're rethinking or how you have rethought wellness in your own life in light of your work.
Amelia Hruby: Well, I think in the context of Off the Grid, I have really been thinking a lot and just spending years now in meditation with this question of what does digital wellness mean and how do our digital activities, behaviors, spaces impact our wellbeing and impact the wellness of our bodies, our minds, our spirits? And so for me, rethinking Wellness has been a lot about rethinking not only what I'm doing in the material realm of having a body, being a person in the world, but also what I'm doing in the digital realm and how my behavior and my practices online really impact my mental and physical wellbeing. And so stepping away from social media was obviously a big step toward rethinking my wellness. It has done so much for my mental health and also for my physical health, I would say in different ways. And it's just another piece of this puzzle that you're so beautifully constructing for us around what wellness even means in this age, and I'm just grateful to get to be a part of that conversation.
Christy Harrison: Thank you so much. Yeah, digital wellness I think, or digital wellbeing is really such a key part of it that I have wanted to explore with this podcast, and it was part of the genesis of this podcast. I knew that that was going to be a pillar of content I wanted to have here because I think it's so important and so often overlooked. And there's so many ways that social media drives people to do things that are harmful to overall wellbeing, mental health especially, but also physical health and other aspects of wellbeing, social connection, and self-acceptance, et cetera. I really appreciate that you're doing this work too in the digital space and just really grateful for this conversation.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I really am just overjoyed to be here as a longtime Food Psych fan. I just am so happy to land on your new show.
Christy Harrison: Thank you so much. And can you tell people where they can find your work and learn more about what you're doing?
Amelia Hruby: Of course. So you can find me personally at ameliafreebie.com. If you're interested in some of the selfies practices that we talked about at the start of the episode, I do have a free self-guided email course on selfies for radical self-love. That's kind of the last instance of that social media work I was doing years ago. So you can again find that at ameliafreebie.com. If you're interested in listening to Off the Grid or learning more about the show or resources like the Interweb, you can find that online at offthegrid.fun. That's our new webpage.
Christy Harrison: I love it.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah. Believe it or not, almost all of the off the grid domains are taken. So we landed at Off the Grid Fun, which I think does bring the spirit of that gentleness, that supportiveness, the no nonsense, and also it can just be fun and creative and sparkly and enjoyable. So that's all there too.
Christy Harrison: Amazing. Yeah, we'll put links to that in the show notes. Lots of resources to share from this episode. So thank you again, Amelia, and you're going to be sticking around, I hope for our bonus episode, so paid subscribers can check that out. And for everyone else, thank you so much for listening. So that is our show. Thanks so much to our amazing guest for being here and to you for tuning in.
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Rethinking Wellness is executive produced and hosted by me, Christy Harrison. Mike Lalonde is our audio editor and sound engineer. And administrative support is provided by Julianne Wotasik and her team at A-Team Virtual. Our album Art is by Tara Jacoby, and our theme song is written and performed by Carolyn Pennypacker Briggs. Thanks again for listening. Take care.
Digital Well-Being and Leaving Social Media with Amelia Hruby