Why I'm Stepping Back from Social Media in 2026

Last year I did a ton of experimenting with social media. I used it to test my messaging to see what did and didn't resonate with folks and I used it to gain visibility.

I wrote a bit about my ups and downs with social media last year, but let's just say that by the end of 2025, I didn't have much to show for my effort. While my follower count was up, my social media wasn't really getting people to go deeper with my work. My newsletter growth didn't come from social media and my revenue didn't really come from it either.

Plus, I find social media exhausting. It's a lot of energy and time and easy to fall into the habit of doom scrolling.

But that's not the only reason I'm stepping back from social media in 2026. The other reason is I don't love the way the astrology is looking. This year's astrology is a big shift from earth and water energy to air and fire energy. That means our creative juices will be flowing, but it also means that people will be quick to fly off the handle. More than they already are (if you can believe that).

In this post I'm going to:

• Break down what I'm seeing with the astrology
• Share how I'm thinking about discoverability for my business this year
• Share some reflections on my mini experiment with stepping back from social media over the past few weeks.

This Year's Shift to Fire and Air Energy

So for a long time now, we've been existing in the water and earth of it all. If you've listened to any astrologer talk about 2025 and 2026 then you've probably heard them talk about how all the outer planets are changing signs. Here's a short breakdown:

• 2025: Pluto officially moved from Capricorn (earth) to Aquarius (air)
• 2026: Neptune officially moved from Pisces (water) to Aries (fire)
• 2026: Saturn will officially move from Pisces (water) to Aries (fire)
• 2026: Uranus will officially move from Taurus (earth) to Gemini (air)

The shift from earth and water to fire and air is a big one. If things felt like they started moving really fast in the summer of 2025, then you probably felt this shift. I wrote my early observations about living under the fire and air regime last year. But the gist is things move faster, ideas and action spark faster, and there's less sitting and noodling on things and more getting an idea and trying to make it happen.

It also means there's markedly less time spent thinking things through or filtering your ideas into appropriate actions (or inaction). Instead, people are proverbially, and unfortunately literally, shooting straight from the hip.

The fire and air combo is generally more reckless in my mind than water and earth energy. On the one hand, a lot of cool stuff will probably happen, but on the other hand, a lot of deeply unnecessary and regretful stuff will probably happen too. Especially in the beginning as we're adjusting to our new astrological world order.

This is exactly why I'm not interested in being on social media. It's already a pretty nasty place, but I think this astrology is setting it up to get even nastier. I think there's going to be more mean comments for the sake of being mean and people are generally going to be less discerning about what they post online or how they respond to others online.

We've already seen an uptick in bots who are intentionally there to agitate you and bait folks into arguments to keep you on social media longer. It's also increasingly becoming a hotbed of mis- and dis-information and I'm not interested in being taken down any of those rabbit holes.

So this year I'm looking to take a different approach. One that's slower, deeper, and more intentional.

Being Discoverable Without Relying on Social Media

First, if you don't already follow the work of Dani Gardner, I invite you to check her out. She's been walking this talk for years now and I'm always following her work even if I'm not directly engaging with it.

This year, I've decided to work on more passive channels of discovery such as blogging and Youtube and I'm specifically working on creating what Regina Anaejionu calls Return on Investment Publishing Projects also known as impactful thought leadership.

That means I'm focused on creating content that goes deeper than social media ever can. Writing well researched and outlined essays, publishing long-form videos that go deep on a topic from the jump. In other words, I'm abandoning the surface level bullshit. If you know me well, you might wonder how I ever found myself there in the first place considering my Scorpio and Virgo placements. The truth is that the lure and/or "promise" of social media feels really appealing and there's simply a lot of social pressure as a business owner to be on active social media channels to do the "marketing right." Even when you know that promise isn't really true, it's still very hard to pull yourself away from.

I'm looking forward to my new approach of producing high quality content at a slower pace. I miss writing essays and I miss the deep thinking through thorny issues that it involves. My first juicy project is called Minimally Viable Legal. It's a pay-what-you-can offer designed to show consultants that getting the legal right in your business need not be a heavy lift. It can be simple, easy to implement, and effective. It's been both fun and challenging to work on and when I announced the waitlist for it, 6 people signed up for it immediately, which is always a nice sign that you're onto something.

The other thing I'm continuing to do is show up at in real life events to build community and network. My goal this year is to do one work-related in real life event each month as well as a just for fun event and a political/community organizing event.

My Mini-Experiment with Limited Social Media

Logging out of Meta

While I've been working on Minimally Viable Legal, I logged out of all my Meta platform accounts and changed the passwords so I can't easily log in. Since I started the year sick, I was spending a lot more time scrolling in bed or on the couch and my social media time had spiraled out of control.

When that's happened in the past, I've found the easiest thing to do is to change my login passwords to something I'll never remember and then log out of all my accounts. Then I have to go look up my password and type it in to login to my accounts. Adding those steps to login makes social media harder to access and it makes me think consciously about what I'm doing.

I made the password switch in the middle of January and it's been great so far. The first few days I definitely clocked my "need" to see what was happening, but after 5 or so days that went away. Now I'm in a space where I log on once a week to check my favorite accounts for events happening near me. I check each account, get the links to events I want to sign up for, and then log out.

Staying on LinkedIn for Now

The one platform I didn't log out of was LinkedIn because that's where my ideal buyer is. I can directly track revenue to connections and posts I've made on LinkedIn so if I put any effort into a social platform this year, it will probably be that one.

But even there, I'm posting a lot less. In 2025, I was posting on LinkedIn daily at one point. It wasn't that hard, but it didn't feel like the best use of my time. And now that I'm in my world of well researched and outlined content, posting daily there seems foolish. I don't know what my LinkedIn strategy will be this year, but I'm excited for it to be significantly scaled back from last year.

Reclaiming My Time

The biggest and best change from stepping back from social media is getting so much time back. I knew my doomscrolling was bad, but I didn't realize how out of control it had gotten. My days immediately felt more spacious. I had more time to read, be bored, and just think.

I've also been taking a simultaneous break from AI platforms and I've noticed my creativity slowly returning as well. Between these two things, it definitely feels like I'm living in a different timeline. My thinking is sharper, my nervous system is more regulated because my screen time is down, and I'm getting back into some creative projects I had abandoned because I "didn't have time for them."

Conclusion

Overall, I'm pretty excited to set a slower pace for my year this year and measure the results as compared to last year. If I stay on top of things, I'm going to try to do quarterly updates about how it's going on a personal and business level.

How are you thinking about social media these days? Are you active on it or have you pulled back? I'm always interested to hear about other folks experiences.