This week on North of Normal: Written & Read, Amanda McKeen shares a dream she had that may prove to be uncomfortable and controversial, yet she’s sharing anyway. This week’s blog The Leap the North Country Needs is Amanda’s latest writing, read here in her own voice.
Follow along below as Amanda reads:
I remember always trying to be a dreamer, but never really dreaming. Wanting, but never actually having. Believing that if I just hang on for a little bit longer and keep doing what I’m doing, things will open up for me.
Stay the same, be consistent, over and over again. I’m good at that. I’ve always had robotic tendencies. Even my former coworkers would joke with me about that, and on more than one occasion it got me into trouble because I didn’t have enough feeling or empathy.
I appreciate technology and find something incredibly exciting about it. I always have. I remember the first computer that we had in the home when I was a child, and just wanting to be on it and understand it.
By the time I was a teenager, there was a program called ICQ where you could chat with anybody in the world. I was taught to fear it. It was dangerous to talk to strangers. But still, there was always a curiosity there.
I remember when Facebook became a thing. It became a thing way before I knew about it. I was always a little behind the times. Once I joined, all the people I had gone to school with and knew in my past were already there, and so excited to see my profile.
I remember it being fun. I remember static pages. I remember the ability to send nice messages or post something publicly to someone’s profile. I remember being able to poke somebody. Who knows what the purpose of that really was? But nowadays, if you get poked, it’s kind of creepy. So don’t do it.
I remember there only being a like button. There was no angry face, no heart emoji, no sad face, no dislike button, just a like button. I do not remember any ads.
If you had asked me at that time if I was addicted to social media, I would have said absolutely not. It wasn’t an addiction. I enjoyed communicating with my friends, but there was not this insidious need to be on there or to post. Or to scroll. That wasn’t a thing.
I woke up this morning from a dream, and I’m going to share it. Because I think it’s powerful, and it’s the reason why I’m writing this piece.
This is not to create any sort of pressure or drama in our community. This is truly what I dreamt.
I dreamt that Rek-Lis Brewing made the decision to get off social media. They realized that the problem that social media is perpetuating is not something that they wanted to be part of, and so they made a statement by getting off of it altogether.
Now, imagine if that were not a dream and it really happened. That would send shockwaves through this community. That’s not anything negative about Rek-Lis. They post just like the other businesses up here post. But Rek-Lis is well known. They have a large audience. There is potentially a lot to lose with that decision.
Imagine if they made that statement to the world, that they were no longer going to use social media. That would be pretty bold.
I woke up from that dream and immediately grabbed my phone because I didn’t have a pen and paper nearby. So I started typing a note on my phone. All of the thoughts that were flowing steadily from my mind at that moment.
This was as soon as I woke up. This wasn’t after coffee.
Things are changing in my brain. It’s only been nine days since I disconnected from social media.
I also removed all the apps on my phone that were things that I liked to check, like email, Strava, etc. It’s only been nine days, yet there’s so much changing in my mind that I want to document with the hope that people understand the lies that they’ve been believing.
You’re probably going to read this and say to yourself, “Amanda has lost her mind,” and that would have been semi true over the span of the last few years. But please believe me when I tell you that I have regained my mind.
It is operating in a way that I haven’t known. I’m having my own thoughts, uninfluenced by anything but what’s coming from inside me.
I’m having my own dreams. Not weird stuff because I saw some random post on Facebook before I went to bed. Vivid dreams. Visions.
And the fact that I woke up this morning with this dream and desire in my heart—that’s been stronger than anything I’ve felt in a long time—tells me to keep going.
I’ve been reading a lot about the mindset of fear and what that looks like. If you read my blog last week, you’ll see. I wrote about the fear of poverty. I wrote about the characteristics that come with the fear of poverty.
And the more I read about it, and the more I mull it over in my mind, the more I’m seeing it.
This is going to be an uncomfortable truth that readers may reject immediately, and if that’s where you’re at, that’s okay. Maybe come back to this when you’re ready to consider.
When I decided to disconnect from social media, the biggest fear I had, and one I acknowledged at the time, was the fear of missing out.
I called that its own thing, but I understand now it’s just the fear of poverty, or the fear of lack. Whether it’s financial or social or emotional, the fear of poverty can touch any and every aspect of our lives. It’s so sneaky. It’s really hard to see unless you’re looking for it.
What I’m realizing now is that the fear of poverty is being perpetuated through social media, whether that is missing out on “friends”, missing out on “community”—or a lot of business owners will understand this: the fear of missing out on customers.
I had two prior blog posts pop into my mind as I was thinking about this this morning. Posts that I had written myself.
One of them was called, “Stop Posting, Start Leading.” I wrote it at the time because my former boss had resorted to social media to air an issue that had been between him and I, and I didn’t feel like he made the right decision in doing that. I felt like he was using social media for his own gain. Attention, praise, whatever it was.
But there’s a second blog that I wrote in December of 2025 called, “Something Is Wrong with How We’re Running Businesses Up Here”.
And as I reread those blogs, I thought, “Wow, Amanda, there was something in you that knew back then. You knew. But you didn’t know enough to take the leap.” And that’s okay. I wasn’t ready to. I’m not upset or sad. But I think it’s interesting how sometimes our own words can come back to us and speak to us in a different and deeper way. A great benefit of writing down one’s thoughts!
What’s happening in the world is that we’ve become addicted to social media. There’s actually a physiological addiction component to it. There’s brain chemistry. There are dopamine hits that occur when we get notifications. All of that has been proven, and for some reason, there’s only attention about its negative effects on youth. I don’t know why adults haven’t talked about it in the way that they’re admitting to also being victims.
So there’s a physiological component to this addiction, but it’s also perpetuating a component much worse: the fear of poverty.
If you’re suddenly faced with the suggestion of removing yourself from social media forever, what’s your response? Ask yourself right now. Out loud.
Since I got off social media, many people have commended me. Yet they say, “Oh, I could never do that,” and that’s where the conversation ends.
But what I really want to say after is, why couldn’t you? Why couldn’t you disconnect from social media?
Because that’s the part that you need to look at, that we all need to look at.
Is it because you think that you are going to lose customers? You’re going to miss opportunities? What is it that you’re afraid of losing?
And that, my dear friends, is the fear of poverty, right there, in all its nakedness. That ugly fear of poverty is controlling the masses of the world—billions of people are believing in this fear of missing out. Billions. And fear perpetuates more fear.
When I was on social media, right before I made the decision to get off, I started realizing all of this, and feeling so overwhelmed and disgusted by that thought.
The more I posted personally, or even under my business, the more I saw that I was voluntarily contributing to that system. I was perpetuating people scrolling, people looking, people checking.
If I commented on somebody’s post, if I liked somebody’s comment, I was giving them a dopamine hit. I was keeping them on social media. I was perpetuating this fear of poverty and physiological addiction that I think many more people have than are willing to admit.
I no longer wanted to enable that. And yes, I realize it’s just me making this decision among billions of people in the world.
But I still think that matters. I think this experience of mine matters. What I’m seeing matters, and I think that my message is going to be so effective that people won’t want to see it. People will want to hide it.
No one wants to face this.
Plenty of people want to complain about the state of the world and how there’s so much division and polarity in the world. Even I’ve said it on North of Normal recently. There’s so much fear and darkness.
Why do we think that is?
It’s not that human beings have suddenly gotten worse, although I know it feels that way.
It’s that we now have a technology that magnifies and accelerates the fears in people’s hearts and minds. And when somebody has a thought and they express that thought online for other people to see, other people pick up that thought and carry it forward.
Do you know how powerful that is? Do you know how much power we each possess in our own minds to be able to do something like that, to have that kind of influence with our thoughts?
I’ll admit that for a while, I thought, well, if I’m being light and making sure that I stay positive on social media, then I’m not part of the problem. But I still was, because I was still feeding that addiction. I was still giving people a dopamine hit, keeping people there when they could be spending time outside, watching the leaves change, noticing a spider in the window, and admiring its handiwork.
I had convinced myself that I wasn’t part of the problem, but I still was. That may be uncomfortable for some people too.
I like to imagine what would happen as a result of Rek-Lis getting off social media, declaring that they are no longer going to be part of the problem. I imagine that their sales don’t go down. Their sales will actually go up.
People start paying attention and realizing how much we have been controlled by the fear of poverty. People start understanding the power of our own minds and start taking steps to protect that power.
I imagine a movement, a shift in the winds here in the North Country. It becomes a place where businesses choose to be off social media to help protect the minds of those who live here. Where people choose to be true, unconforming leaders in a world that desperately needs them. Leaders who are going to speak the truth, make the hard decisions, and show people a better way.
Imagine a place where people are no longer controlled by fear.
Imagine what it would feel like to step outside and to have people see your face and wave.
Imagine what we can create together when we regain our minds, when we have our own thoughts and inspirations and dreams.
-Amanda
