Off the Grid: Leaving Social Media

I broke up with Amazon and Google when I left social media in 2021, and this year I decided it was also time to quit using Spotify.

Why? Well because my values are not aligned with enriching billionaires like Jeff Bezos, letting Google track my behavior everywhere, or supporting Spotify in paying artists pennies.

So in this episode, I share a bit more about my decision-making and how I’ve managed to stop using the services and tools that these companies create.

To be clear — I’m not making a case for why you “should” quit any of these platforms. But if this is a shift you WANT to make, I am offering a few suggestions.

Tune in to hear:

• The 3 mindset shifts that make it possible to leave Google, Amazon & Spotify
• My 5-step process for breaking up with these companies & their services
• All the tools I used to replace Google
• The ways I still use Amazon even though I canceled Prime years ago
• How quitting Spotify changed my music-listening (more on that here)

 
For a quick summary & links to my fave tools, check out the blog post I wrote when I first made this decision: http://www.ameliahruby.com/blog/getting-off-google-facebook-amazon

RESOURCES + LINKS

👋 Download the FREE Leaving Social Media Toolkit

🌐 Get on the Interweb waitlist for creative business courses + community

💓 Join the Clubhouse for bonus episodes + emails

 
OCTOBER COMMUNITY SPONSOR:
✨ Stop scrolling and start shuffling. Come home to your mind, body, and business with Be With Your Body Tarot. Get 25% off the deck and/or autumn planner with code OFFTHEGRID at: bewithyourbody.com/off-the-grid

Today on the show, I’m joined by art psychotherapist Amelia Knott to explore and untangle the intersections of mental health, social media, creativity, and small business.

We specifically take on the concepts of “digital wellness” and “ethical marketing.” And we have a nuanced conversation about how we really feel online and what it means to market with care (and without coercion).

Join us as we get into:

• The problem with “wellness” & the possibility of cultivating well-being online
• How to do an attention audit & figure out how you really feel about social media
• Our thoughts on the major cultural shifts around social media this year
• Ethical marketing frameworks from a mental health practitioner perspective
• Practical tips to make your marketing language more trauma-informed

 
And if you enjoy this episode, make sure you get a copy of Amelia’s book, The Art of Thriving Online!

 
RESOURCES + LINKS

👋 Download the FREE Leaving Social Media Toolkit

🌐 Get on the Interweb waitlist for creative business courses + community

💓 Join the Clubhouse for bonus episodes + emails

 
OCTOBER COMMUNITY SPONSOR:
✨ Stop scrolling and start shuffling. Come home to your mind, body, and business with Be With Your Body Tarot. Get 25% off the deck and/or autumn planner with code OFFTHEGRID at: bewithyourbody.com/off-the-grid

Edgar Fabián Frías is an artist, therapist, educator, curator, witch and so much more.

Today, they join me on the podcast to talk about the decision they made to quiet quit Instagram at the start of 2025.

Together, we explore:

• The works of art that changed our lives & nonlinear psychic collaboration
• Being impersonated on Instagram & how that can impact your business
• What happens when Meta starts suspending queer artists
• How Edgar blended career paths & built new channels away from social media (including their podcast Your Art is a Spell!)
• Feeling safer after stepping back from so much public sharing
• Why the era of social media is dying

 
Tune in for an inspiring conversation in the spirit of Toni Cade Bambara, who teaches us that — “As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people, my job is to make revolution irresistible.”

 
 
RESOURCES + LINKS

👋 Download the FREE Leaving Social Media Toolkit

🌐 Get on the Interweb waitlist for creative business courses + community

💓 Join the Clubhouse for bonus episodes + emails

 
OCTOBER COMMUNITY SPONSOR:
✨ Stop scrolling and start shuffling. Come home to your mind, body, and business with Be With Your Body Tarot. Get 25% off the deck and/or autumn planner with code OFFTHEGRID at: bewithyourbody.com/off-the-grid

Cher Hale is one of my favorite people on the internet, and her newsletter Doing It For the Attention has taught me SO MUCH about getting my work in front of new people in a way that aligns with my body AND my business.
 

In this conversation, we dive deep into the roots of attention and all the ways we can build community around our work — including how to amplify attention for ourselves and others.

Tune in to hear Cher’s wisdom and advice on:

• How to be comfortable asking for attention
• Ways to get more attention for your business
• Divesting, directing & demanding attention as liberatory tactics for building new worlds
• 20 Ways to Amplify Attention for Under-Recognized Voices
• Fun ideas for shouting-out and h/t-ing your friends
• Childcare trades & a new way to mastermind that I learned from Becky Mollenkamp

 
RESOURCES + LINKS

👋 Download the FREE Leaving Social Media Toolkit

🌐 Get on the Interweb waitlist for creative business courses + community

💓 Join the Clubhouse for bonus episodes + emails

 
OCTOBER COMMUNITY SPONSOR:
✨ Stop scrolling and start shuffling. Come home to your mind, body, and business with Be With Your Body Tarot. Get 25% off the deck and/or autumn planner with code OFFTHEGRID at: bewithyourbody.com/off-the-grid

Come on down for the 100th episode of Off the Grid!!! 🎉

To celebrate this milestone, we're returning to our roots with a fresh conversation about how to leave social media (if you so choose).

Today Deanna deBara from Season of Stuck podcast joins me to explore:

🫣 why we get stuck on social media
🥸 how to stop doomscrolling & feeling trapped on the apps
🤠 & ways to decide what YOUR next best step is online or offline

If you're feeling stuck in any aspect of your business, marketing or life, this episode is for you! Thanks for tuning in and celebrating 100 episodes with us. 💛

RESOURCES + LINKS

👋 Download the FREE Leaving Social Media Toolkit

🌐 Get on the Interweb waitlist for creative business courses + community

💓 Join the Clubhouse for bonus episodes + emails

 
OCTOBER COMMUNITY SPONSOR:
✨ Stop scrolling and start shuffling. Come home to your mind, body, and business with Be With Your Body Tarot. Get 25% off the deck and/or autumn planner with code OFFTHEGRID at: bewithyourbody.com/off-the-grid

OMG CROSSOVER EPISODE! 🫶 

Today on the show, I'm celebrating our 99th episode (and my four-years-off-social-media anniversary!) by sharing a conversation I had with Rebekah Taussig and Caitlin Metz for their podcast Scratch That.

We get into things I've NEVER talked about publicly before, including:

• How my three-year-old self picked my present-day career path
• The four-minute version of my leaving-social-media story
• What Instagram has meant to Rebekah as a space to share her life & disability advocacy
• How social media supports introverts like Caitlin with relationship-building & belonging
• Ways to express your (queer) identity without social media
• The value of breaking out of our echo chambers & building local community
• How to stop using social media to numb out 🙃

 
Tune in for an amazing, multi-faceted conversation, and if you're one of our parents listening, make sure you go subscribe to Scratch That: Parenting & ReParenting Off Script on Apple and Spotify for more incredible episodes!

   
RESOURCES + LINKS

👋 Download the FREE Leaving Social Media Toolkit

🌐 Get on the Interweb waitlist for creative business courses + community

💓 Join the Clubhouse for bonus episodes + emails

 
OCTOBER COMMUNITY SPONSOR:
✨ Stop scrolling and start shuffling. Come home to your mind, body, and business with Be With Your Body Tarot. Get 25% off the deck and/or autumn planner with code OFFTHEGRID at: bewithyourbody.com/off-the-grid

How do we imagine new possibilities when it feels like our well has gone dry?

This week I'm joined by author, tarotist, and Jungian creativity coach Sarah Arantza Amador of Hawthorn Mountain Tarot. 

Together we explore:

• The lineage of radical imagination
• How to move through creative blocks in your business
• Ways to (re)connect with imagination even when the world is on fire
• Why collaboration might be the answer to everything
• How to bend toward change + embrace new ways of working
• Refusing to treat ourselves like spreadsheets

Let's un-slogify our lives together, friends! Tune in for a thoughtful conversation full of practical tips that will help you reinvigorate your creative business.

🫠 Do you ever feel stuck, like you’re caught in a loop of self-doubt and not sure how to move forward with your ideas? Get the FREE Creative Confidence Toolkit from Pascale of Dear Creative Mind today. (sponsored)

RESOURCES + LINKS

👋 Download the FREE Leaving Social Media Toolkit

🌐 Get on the Interweb waitlist for creative business courses + community

💓 Join the Clubhouse for bonus episodes + emails

 
OCTOBER COMMUNITY SPONSOR:
✨ Stop scrolling and start shuffling. Come home to your mind, body, and business with Be With Your Body Tarot. Get 25% off the deck and/or autumn planner with code OFFTHEGRID at: bewithyourbody.com/off-the-grid

ESCAPE THE TRANCE  ⁕  REMEMBER YOUR AGENCY  ⁕  BUILD COMMUNITY

Today on the pod we have a very special guest — Elise Granata of GROUP HUG!

Elise is here to chat with me about how social media erodes our agency + community building efforts — even if these platforms started as supportive relational hubs.

Join us as we wind through our teen years on Tumblr, how we dissociate on the apps, what inspires us to get offline, the dangers of optimized communities, adjusting our aesthetic expectations, "sweatshirt-level friends," and how to start your community practice.

RESOURCES + LINKS

👋 Download the FREE Leaving Social Media Toolkit

🌐 Get on the Interweb waitlist for creative business courses + community

💓 Join the Clubhouse for bonus episodes + emails

 
OCTOBER COMMUNITY SPONSOR:
✨ Stop scrolling and start shuffling. Come home to your mind, body, and business with Be With Your Body Tarot. Get 25% off the deck and/or autumn planner with code OFFTHEGRID at: bewithyourbody.com/off-the-grid

What if selling didn't have to feel sleazy? And the words on your website could cast a magical spell for your ideal clients/customers instead?

Today, I'm joined by copywriter and podcaster Nicole Cloutier to talk about how to be more specific in our messaging and simple tips to write better sales pages.

Tune in to hear about:

• Nicole's journey from poetry MFA to copywriter
• Pain point marketing + if it's (un)ethical?
• How asking "so what?" can turn boring writing into compelling copy
• Ways that better messaging can improve your product sales (not just services!)
• The value of embracing "pleasure point marketing"
• How to write your first sales page (ever!) 
• 3 ways to improve your existing sales pages so you can (hopefully) make more $$$

And make sure to grab Nicole's FREE sales page bundle, exclusively for Off the Grid listeners!

RESOURCES + LINKS

👋 Download the FREE Leaving Social Media Toolkit

🌐 Get on the Interweb waitlist for creative business courses + community

💓 Join the Clubhouse for bonus episodes + emails

 
OCTOBER COMMUNITY SPONSOR:
✨ Stop scrolling and start shuffling. Come home to your mind, body, and business with Be With Your Body Tarot. Get 25% off the deck and/or autumn planner with code OFFTHEGRID at: bewithyourbody.com/off-the-grid

Leaving social media isn’t always the most profitable decision… but maybe it taps into something even more lucrative?

In this episode, I’m joined by Leah Kern, an anti-diet dietitian who left social media a year ago and has experienced ups and downs in her business since.

For the first half of our conversation, we explore Leah’s path onto and off of social media, including how she used to get clients on Instagram and how she finds clients now.

Then in the second half of our chat, we discuss how intuitive eating actually led us both deeper into our values and why breaking up with diet culture was an important step toward breaking up with the apps altogether.

Tune in to hear a new perspective on what it's really like to leave social media with your business. And if you love this episode, be sure to tune in to Amelia on Leah's podcast Shoulders Down as well!

 
RESOURCES + LINKS

👋 Download the FREE Leaving Social Media Toolkit

🌐 Get on the Interweb waitlist for creative business courses + community

💓 Join the Clubhouse for bonus episodes + emails

 
OCTOBER COMMUNITY SPONSOR:
✨ Stop scrolling and start shuffling. Come home to your mind, body, and business with Be With Your Body Tarot. Get 25% off the deck and/or autumn planner with code OFFTHEGRID at: bewithyourbody.com/off-the-grid