Increasingly over this past year, I have been feeling this general sense of overwhelm with the internet. I find myself not wanting to spend time online, or on my phone - playing Wordle is an exception. The news feels hard to take on and live with. Every app including this one is filled with ads and/or people wanting to sell you stuff. It feels exhausting. Everyone is trying to make a living so no judgments here, with that tho, comes the realization that connection is not part of this kind of business model.
I’ve learned to love being away from my phone. It’s when I get to hear my thoughts, process life as it happens, and observe what comes up without the distraction of the constant stimuli that lives in the palm of my hands aka my phone, plus, I don’t have to compare my life with the ones of the 966 people I follow on Instagram. I could be following the wrong people and my experience would be completely different, sure, that’s an option, regardless, I don’t like to lose time behind a screen with all sorts of triggers that come with it. We all know that feeling, the one of getting lost in a scroll that ends up eating way more time than we thought, and that sense of anxiety that very quickly creeps in afterward.
The benefits of not drowning oneself in social media are endless, by now we know them all, but there is one big downside that I keep going back to: missing out on your friends’ lives, especially when they don’t live nearby. The solution to that is to keep up with the closest ones via text or email and that somehow requires effort. Intentional effort. Which is not as easy as passive consumption.
I was listening to a podcast with Andrew Huberman and Martha Beck and at some point, they talked about why they are not on social media:
Dr. Huberman
“because so many people are on social media nowadays where you can almost feel yourself getting pulled down these trajectories, like the gravitational pull of a battle or a video or even something that’s delightful but then you find two hours went by and you over consumed and under created”
Martha Beck
“I can barely look at Instagram because I will watch a monkey nursing a kitten and then I will be down that rabbit hole so far and eight hours later I am still scrolling and I will start to suffer. I will start to physically feel cramped, my eyes will start to hurt and water, and I will start to feel what you were saying, the grinding of a gear that is wrong. The machine is not in structural integrity. It’s like when your car starts making a funny sound and you’re like ‘I should not ignore that’, and it always feels like discomfort, tension, anxiety, anger, any of those things, and then, the practice of my life is to notice those sensations at a finer and more granular level so that the moment I am off true, I can stop and say ‘woh, I’m out of integrity and into anxiety’ because a divided person is always anxious’ so, to get away from that, away from anxiety and back to true, I use the body.” cont.
It’s a battle. One for staying present with yourself and your life. One for keeping up with your friends and loved ones. One for your wellbeing and mental health.
I have a friend who has been living her life away from social media for a couple of years now. She deleted her Instagram account and hasn’t regretted it since. Our friendship has survived physical distance just with each other’s efforts to keep up with our respective lives via voice memos and photos on ‘old school’ iMessage. It takes time and thought. All of which social media removed in the name of practicality. Anyone can keep up with their friends without having to interact with them just by consuming the content they post, which if you think about it, sounds crazy. Well, because it is crazy.
It creates this false sense of connection and friendship that only social media can fabricate.
Say you are watching the stories of your friends (who, by now, we have established, don’t live in your proximity), you keep up with their kids growing up, and you are even a part of a few big milestones like births, first days of school, birthdays, holidays and so on. You exchange a few messages here and there, then reactions (those emojis or hearts that you can send by pressing on a story) and, for the sake of this example, after a year of just doing that, you have kept up with their life, felt like you ‘participated’ without making any effort, on the contrary tho, they know nothing about you. You haven’t gone through the slightest of frictions, like trying to schedule a call or messaging to organize a get-together. You have this very practical and convenient sense of connection that hasn’t done anything but keep you and your friends further away.
I have recently listened to this series by Oliver Burkeman called Inconvenient Truth and it brought so much reflection and questioning, especially the Optimised Living episode (the whole series is worth a listen). Convenience doesn’t always mean better. He says
“Contrary to what Silicon Valley might have us believe, optimization and ever greater convenience, don’t just make it easier to do more of what we want but they take things away that most of us do want: contact with other humans and material reality, a sense of the world as something we can come to grips with. Convenience even meddles with our sense of what to value in the first place. To use a phrase from the philosopher Harry Frankfurt “It disrupts our ability to want what we want to want”.
Does it come down to Intentional effort vs passive consumption?
It’s impossible to think in absolutes and pinpoint where the roses or thorns lay. Technology is not inherently good or bad, you can use it to connect with your friends and loved ones or you can use it in a way that makes you feel ever so alone and disconnected. With all considerations of this nature, all I (we) can really do is reflect on them, try to challenge the way I used to think about a subject, challenge the way I use technology altogether, and ‘try on’ a new way of doing things to see what rings true for me.