Back in early 2024, I stopped by the West Hollywood studios of The Minimalist to record an episode of their popular podcast.

Now, if that name sounds familiar to you, but you can't quite place why, it's probably because you've seen one of their Emmy Award nominated Netflix documentaries.

All right. So I'm doing the show.

I'm recording an episode of The Minimalist.

And the conversation takes a surprising turn when one of the hosts, Joshua,

floats the idea of the minimalist taking a break from social media.

Well, of course, me being me, I jumped in and began pushing him to encourage him to follow up on that idea.

Jesse, let's play the clip to see what happened next.

Well, platforms. I think there are a few problems here with social media as we talk about walking away.

And I think we'll give it a 30-day shot. We can just, even with the minimalist, we can walk away for 30 days. You should do this, by the way. See what happens. Do it for 30 days.

Talk to me about it. Yeah, try this. Let's do it. Do it for 30 days. Sean can go discover

himself without having to post it. He's going to like, here's this opera I wrote with all my brain cells.

And see what happens with your numbers. See what you hear from your listeners and your readers.

I might want to do it. What if we do it for the rest of the year? Yeah. And they did. So right there in

the room, Joshua committed the minimalist to abstaining from social media for the rest of the year.

Now, keep in mind, this was March of 2024. So it was actually most of a year they were going to abstain from social

media. Now, I have a name for this strategy. I call it the social media pause. And it's something that

you can do with your own company or your own team or even in your own personal life.

Here's the key thing about the social media pause strategy.

It is not about detoxing.

It is not about just rejecting the tech overlords.

It is instead intended as an experiment.

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