What To Do When It Is All Too Much :: Part 1-Why I Am Leaving Pinterest

Do you ever feel like you want to live your life a certain way but it is your own actions that keep you in the way from living that way?  Like it is all just too much.  I have been feeling this way a lot lately...and have been feeling it for awhile.  But today it really hit me.

It is all too much.

Today I got blocked on Pinterest.  I know, how does that happen?  Well, let's start from the beginning.

I took a little while to jump on the Pinterest bandwagon but when I say awhile...I mean in blogger speed.  Pinterest hit the blogosphere big awhile ago and I didn't want any piece of it.

But then I saw that I was getting traffic from Pinterest to my blog...like in top five referrers kind of traffic.  I figured something that was getting me this kind of exposure deserved a little bit of my attention.  So I joined and it's been a love hate relationship since.

I look at Pinterest a lot like I do with Facebook.  I love connecting with my like minded friends there but there sure is a lot of extra "noise" out there that would leave me feeling not good enough, empty, and disconnected.

But because ultimately Pinterest became my new Tumblr, I had a place to store great ideas online.  If Pinterest was invading my emotional life, I could choose just to pin things myself and not spend any time in the whole repinning realm.

Until when I got blocked.

Last night and this morning I decided I wanted to pin some of our photography from Urke Photography.  And I pinned like 10+ posts in a short period of time.  And supposedly when you do that from the same main source, Pinterest flags you as suspicious and needs to check you out to make sure you are not spam.

As you can imagine, I was extremely irritated and inconvenienced as I was trying to pin something I read from online to save for later and I no longer couldn't.

And then it was like some life changing moment that this came to mind...what would life be like after Pinterest?  What if for some odd reason they did mark me as spam and I couldn't get any of my pins back?  All that time I took to save things trusting I could find it again one day...is gone.  

And then I realized...I would probably be better off.

I noticed some of my other pins that I pinned from blogs that were no way connected with spam or affiliate programs were getting marked as spam.  Like someone I have never met didn't like my pin and marked it as spam.

I have gotten blog comments from people hopping over via Pinterest saying they were dissapointed with my post as however it was pinned did not meet the expectations of what they found on my blog.

When did my blog...and me...have to be upheld to Pinterest expectations?  I tell you all...it's too much.  Too much pressure.  Too much confusion.

And then I read posts like these, about people stealing photos from blogs, editing them into pinnable pictures, and then linking it to their own site giving no credit to the original author.  Scary stuff.

So after all this weighs me down in my head, I think, man, I have better things to do than stress over Pinterest.

I remembered reading a post from Small Notebook about a free software called Evernote.  It's like Pinterest but it's private.  I can save all my ideas.  I can "pin" all I want without being worried about being spammed, comparing myself to perfectly beautiful images, and obsessively checking how often my blog is getting pinned.

Because Pinterest feeds into the egotistical me.  The me who wants more fame.  More attention.  More hits.  More adoring fans.  More ego boosts.

And it's too much.  I don't like the me who craves this.  So I am going to be walking away from Pinterest in the next few weeks.  I am going to attempt at the exhausting task of moving some of my most important pins over to Evernote instead.

There is nothing wrong with Pinterest.  I think it is a great idea, website, holder of information...but for me it has become too much.  So I need to do what's best for me and choose a different road to take. 

And while I am at it, I might wrestle with this whole Facebook and Twitter thing...we will see. 

This whole little occurrence is really challenging to reconsider my online voice and what I want it to look like.  I will share more about that in Part 2 next week. 

Is it just me or are you feeling the summer online blues?  Need a break?