2022-08-30
My 2022 kicked off with the deactivation (and later deletion) of my Big Social accounts. Capitalism and worldly ills aside, my social media use (though not excessive on paper) seemed to coincide with poor mental health. It had to go.
The subsequent weeks and months entailed all sorts of introspection, learning and experimentation to establish and cement better habits, and generally help me make the most of the time and SOMETHING (my brain? my soul?) I was taking back.
Here are some of the things I tried and how they're working out. I'm writing this in case anyone out there needs some solidarity and validation.
Even with social media apps gone, the urge to tap on those habit-forming icons was still there. Note: I didn't actually want to use the app. This was an automatic physical habit I had developed.
So, I set up a new "if this, then that" process in my head. Every time I felt the urge for a social media app, I would open my ebooks app instead. I'd have a book lined up and read a bit, which helped me develop a familiarity with a more information-rich type of content and its method of delivery. That's really all those SM apps boil down to, after all — a type of content and a method of delivery.
Over time, opening my ebooks app and reading became a pattern, and then a habit. I'm not comfortable saying I had a social media addiction (it feels disrespectful to people who go through it much worse), but reading books felt like an alien activity at the height of my addictive tech use. I wanted to reconnect with my pursuit of learning, and this helped a lot.
What compounded my efforts was being selective about the books I would read. I'd pick books that would touch on my curiosity, teach me something I was fired up about learning, or help me understand more about the situation I was in. Nothing boring, nothing obligatory, nothing that people or society told me I "should" read — only stuff that sparked for me.
If dopamine really was behind a sticky detructive social media habit, I needed to harness this dopamine to develop a better habit. Over time, this and the ebooks app trick worked very well.
Just so this doesn't come across as a fix-all (because it wasn't), there were patches where I'd zoom through books the way I used to tumble down a scroll hole. What made it not as bad is that books are a slow, static medium with natural rest points where you can pause, reflect, put the book down and get some sleep. Unlike with endless scrolling, if you're smashing chapters and realise you haven't retained anything, you'll know it's time to take a breather and slow down.
Mess, visual clutter and the anxiety of choice can add to the stress we may feel but not consciously perceive. The digital minimalism crowd have trick for this — decluttering your devices. Delete the apps you don't want to use. Clear your desktop and home screen. Keep all those icons less accessible to you, except for the bare essentials.
I found this helpful in reinforcing my ebooks habit. If you make a habit easier, you facilitate yourself doing it more. You also make other habits harder as a way to do them less. Clearing away clutter that distracted or detracted gave me more focus on what I wanted to lean into.
And on the note of stress and anxiety, I wonder if exposing ourselves to extra unnecessary stress in the form of digital clutter might make us susceptible to "self-medicating" with the anticipated dopamine hits that come from social media and addictive tech. Stress hurts, after all, especially the useless unproductive kind. Sometimes you just want the pain to go away. Maybe it would help to limit or avoid that stress to begin with.
This is another trick I borrowed from the digital minimalism playbook. There's this idea that tech companies design beautiful, enticing graphics and interfaces with colours and shapes that trigger our primitive appetites. Think cute birb shapes, rich pinks and purples, the smooth curve on the arc of the letter F.
The idea is that going greyscale interrupts some of that trigger, cuts the tube feeding those lusciously coloured photons into our optic nerves. It makes us see our devices as tools instead of toys. It sounds a bit tinfoil hat on one hand, but the mechanisms involved are probably no different to the ones used in the marketing, fashion and beauty industries for decades. I set my phone and computer to greyscale, turning colour back on only when I'm shopping or doing colour work.
Unfortunately, looking at stuff in black and white felt really swanky and nice, so even though it didn't inspire social media cravings when on my phone, it definitely didn't help me use my devices less. If anything, I'm using them more because I'm vibing with it — but maybe that's not silly? Digital minimalism, after all, is about meaningful (rather than mindless) use of digital technology.
I didn't seek therapy for a social media problem, but I did have other things I needed help with. Unprocessed trauma, unhealthy coping behaviours, the usual things adults accumulate after being alive for a while.
Going back to the idea that social media might be a form of self-medication, I suspect solving adjacent issues could go a long way to reducing one's need for a hit. Therapy also creates an opportunity to hold space for ourselves, to prompt us to make time for our thoughts and feelings, maybe even as an incentive to seek a rare and wholesome kind of solitude that allows us to grow into people who can appreciate and create the life we want.
It's a shame that therapy can be inaccessibly expensive for a lot of people. Where I've not been able to access help (this year and prior), I've turned to books, sought out wise high-empathy friends, and read School of Life articles.
Oh, also learning to be a better high-empathy friend to others had some unexpected benefits come back. It got me out of my head and gave me a break from thinking about my own problems. I learned a lot about other people's insecurities, which helped me deal with some of my own. And becoming the sort of person who could offer some emotional support reduced the guilt and self-loathing playing into my unhealthy thinking patterns.
The hardest part about leaving social media was the idea of losing connection with my friends. However, accepting the loss of such friendships turned out to be really easy. I supposed that if a friendship was so flimsy that being on a different platform could destroy it, then maybe it wasn't a friendship worth worrying about to begin with.
In the end, good friends, close friends, and even new friends I'd met on social media who wanted to become real-life friends, found other ways to stay connected. I won't judge the ones who didn't, because there's probably time privilege and tech privilege wrapped up in all this. Plus other people have their own lives, habits, choices and addictions going on that are bigger and more immediate that me disappearing from their feed and inbox.
This isn't about you "culling friends" or "upgrading friends". It's about deciding to re-center yourself and give incompatible friendships space to prune themselves. It's okay to grow apart. You might find each other again later and have it be better.
The loss of weak links and circumstantial friendships freed up my time, mental bandwidth and emotional capacity for investing more in the meaningful relationships that followed me.
Online, there's a lot more intimate conversation going on via "cozy internet" mediums (eg. texting, friend-only Discord, other backchannels). Offline, therapy and other tweaking gave me back the energy I needed to do stuff like meet up with people, build friendships the old fashioned way (conversation and shared experiences), and make time to write letters rather than just fall back on rapid-fire ephemeral chatter.
Getting to slow down, take more care, ponder things, and find space to process people/relationships/communication was engaging and interesting. I do not miss scrolling my feeds instead of doing this.
The digital medium can be rich and interesting, but we're still analogue creatures with sensory needs. I found my solace in paper notebooks, quality pens, cuddly animals, and face time with people whose friendship has a restorative (non-toxic) effect on me.
One strong narrative I've noticed is that all this tech is antithetical to being happy, healthy and fulfilled. It seems a bit extreme to me, but all things happen on a spectrum, don't they? I got into tech because I like it, not because a throbbing pink heart icon gave me dopamine feels — that came much later.
So, I didn't pressure myself to give up technology, no white-knuckle, cold-turkey type stuff. The aim was to rediscover my intentions for using it. That meant using it in ways that stoked creativity, curiosity or conversation.
Life is a work in progress and I'm fine with this. That's one weird thing, actually — to be fine with it. Disconnecting from hyperbole culture and the attention economy puts me more at ease with life being a process.
I don't use my devices any less. If anything, I may be using them more because I'm actually enjoying it now. It doesn't take anything from other areas of my life (if anything it's made them more interesting cos I can apply what I'm learning), but bloody hell my eyes get tired. And the top of my head often feels physically hot from all the reading and learning and thinking.
But this is a problem I'm happy to have for now. It's a smaller, more manageable problem than the one I had before, with a lot less anxiety and depression involved.
Love Note to the Small Internet by benj
Vodka and Cigarettes Sustainability by solderpunk
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