90 Days Away: Takeaways

A friend saw that I had posted some bird photos on Facebook this week and commented, “Hey! How are you? It’s been a minute!”

129,600 minutes, to be exact.

From early January until the day after Easter, I was off social media completely. This was one of the requirements for a program in which I participated at my church called Magnify 90. It involves prayer, discipline, fasting and fellowship—all designed to help you turn your attention to God and strengthen your faith, among other things.

Along with nine other women, who ranged in age from their late teens to their seventies, I traded off conveniences and comforts for prayer, meditation, silence and a bit of a deep dive into our Catholic faith.

In some ways, it was easy. We had to give up watching and streaming TV shows for 90 days and use that time for prayer. Jimmy and I don’t have a TV, and I don’t stream series anyway. We had to fast from sweets and snacking in between meals as a way of decreasing the pull that these things have on our lives. I’m gluten- and lactose-intolerant, so I had already stopped eating a lot of fun stuff in 2025. I had also stopped eating in between meals and at night in order to drop some weight last year.

In other ways, it was hard, at least in the beginning. Social media in all forms was off the table for three months. I deactivated my Facebook and X accounts. I deleted Instagram altogether. I wasn’t on any other platforms.

I quickly learned how much time I had been spending/wasting online. It felt weird not to be scrolling on my phone when I was eating lunch and in the evening. I began to wonder what was going on with people and if they’d notice I’d dropped off the face of the earth online. (Hm. Did I have a problem with pride? Looks like it.) I’ll admit it was hard for the first couple of weeks. No dopamine hits. No peering in on the good, the bad and the ugly on my feed. Just prayer. And silence.

But after that first couple of weeks, it wasn’t hard anymore. It was a relief. I felt freed from something to which I had chained myself for years.

I began to notice a change in how I responded to life’s speed bumps, difficulties and eruptions. My problems didn’t go away. I was just becoming better equipped to deal with them. I became stronger, less shakeable.

As part of this new discipline of fasting and prayer, I turned away from the news and politics completely. I didn’t open the X app once. I deleted all the news apps on my phone, even if I seldom opened them. I disabled Discovery, the news feed that appears on the page when you open the Google app. If it was news or anything masquerading as news, I recoiled from it. I eliminated it from my life immediately.

Pretty quickly, I didn’t know what was “going on,” and I was absolutely fine with that.

After about a month and a half of living news- and politics-free, I knew I would not be going back. Because I saw a huge difference in my life when I was suddenly not chronically angry.

I didn’t know what was going on in the country and in the world beyond what people told me. And guess what? It was okay. It was beautiful, in fact. I stopped obsessing about all the stuff I couldn’t control and that made me miserable, and I dove into Scripture, Eucharistic Adoration, familiar prayers, and new ways of praying for people I know and people I don’t know.

I felt peace.

Stripping away the comforts, the old habits and the things the world insists are important reveals what is truly important:  Your walk with God, the love you give God and your neighbor, and your path to eternal life.

Here’s the biggest thing I learned from 90 days away from “the world”:

Your soul is the most valuable thing in your life—your most important “asset.” What you feed your soul matters. Don’t feed it anything that will not get you to heaven.

I have a sense of urgency about this because I am 65 years old, and it took me about 64 of those years to realize this. I pray that it won’t take you as long to know this as it took me.

So, yes, I’m back on Facebook. But with a completely different approach. I have unfollowed people and companies who engage in non-stop spleen venting and politics. If it doesn’t feed love to my soul, I am not engaged with it. I am not scrolling for thirty minutes at a time. I’m in and out once a day. And the minute it stops feeding my soul, I’ll be gone.

I still enjoy the dopamine hit that comes from someone I know enjoying a bird photo. In fact, here are some photos of the purple finches that have migrated through our tiny corner of the world in the past couple of weeks.

What an amazing spring migration it’s been for us with this bird species. I’ve been spending a lot of time watching them outside and thanking God for the chance to see them and hear their songs.

I still don’t know what’s “going on,” beyond what people bring up in conversation and what’s obvious around me. All I can say is that this afternoon, the hour I used to spend online consuming toxic, manipulative content was spent inside a church called Our Lady of Fatima—a place that’s open all day here for quiet conversations with Jesus Christ, who is there inside the tabernacle. It’s a tradeoff that I know in my bones is right.