Breaking Up With Strava
“This place is a prison. These people aren’t your friends.”
The quote in the subtitle is from a Postal Service song, where the songwriter, Ben Gibbard, talks about the feelings of regularly returning to a bar for solace and interactions that ultimately don’t amount to deep connections. While the song lyric is about drinking in a bar, I feel like the analogy very well carries over to my experiences with social media over the years.
And, over time and after various periods of engagement, I’ve gradually but eventually decoupled from all of it, breaking free of these social media prisons and re-discovering what it feels like to live in the real world, interacting with real friends and real people. In the case of Strava, it gets even worse because the tendency to compare and keep up not only affects the psyche, but it can also (as it did in my case) negatively affect one’s physical health.
One of my good running friends recently broke up with Strava and has had nothing but good things to say about that experience. Those exchanges with him and several others recently about the ills of social media (both in general but also especially for sport), really have gotten me thinking seriously about what this next chapter of training — and life — should look like for me.
