![]() ![]() I found myself going to more community events and subscribing to newsletters of things that interested me. Those long term projects and hobbies that I told myself I would eventually get to when I had more time got done. When I had work to do, it got done without hour-long breaks of meaningless scrolling interrupting. I could wake up and go to bed without a series of meaningless audio clips playing on loop. My head was the quietest it had ever been. I didn’t notice a “lack” in my life and I didn’t feel the sense of emptiness that I expected to accompany this change. My screen time decreased hour by hour and oddly enough, I didn’t notice a difference. Slowly, ever so slowly, I checked my phone less and less. This continued for a good month before I was able to fully remove myself from email lists and stop feeling like a fish swimming upstream.Īfter I was gone from the email lists, I stopped wanting to view my feed in browser and then it was like I did not have an account at all. Then, they sent me messages in other ways, including advertisements and notices on different mailing lists. They became a nuisance, pestering me, tempting me to cash in on a few seconds of bliss before feeling frustrated and empty, so I unsubscribed from them. I began to grow irritated by these emails. I was left with a distinct feeling that I was going against the grain. Then the pop-ups would hit: “open in the app store to continue viewing” and I noticed the subliminal messaging: get back in the system. Everything seemed so new and interesting now that I was checking my feed once a day instead of every few minutes. For a few minutes, I would hungrily devour my feed. At first, these emails worked and I logged into the sites via web browser. The messages began trickling in after company algorithms saw that I was inactive for the longest period in my entire user history. It seemed brash to undo all of that in one fell swoop just because I was feeling anxious, lonely, and overstimulated.Įven though the apps were gone, my feeds were not. I had invested years into curating feeds, following niche accounts, and making a profile that was unique and sparkling. I didn’t want the decision to be permanent because I felt like I had spent so much time on my accounts. Knowing that I was a young person, living on a college campus in a digital age, I figured I would feel lonely and cave after a few days. How would I feel if my emotional pacifier was not there? If my screen time went down, would my overall mental wellbeing increase? Now, correlation is not causation, so I wanted to do a little experiment. I have a hypothesis that I created during the pandemic: the worse my mental health is, the higher my screen time will be. After starting therapy, I realized that I didn’t want to feel this way anymore, that numbing my senses was not the solution to overstimulation. ![]() Any time I felt sad, alone, anxious, or stressed, I would open up an app and start scrolling until I didn’t feel a thing. A freshman in college, alone in a new city, I was using my social media like an emotional pacifier. Keeping you on the app is what keeps them making money. ![]() This is much trickier since these companies do not want to see you go. In order to permanently remove your digital presence, you need to delete or deactivate your account. They will probably send you more just because you’re not as active. People can still message you and view your profile and the company will still send you emails and messages. If you delete a social media app, your account is still active. Like anything else in life, it is a system. To be clear on the semantics: deleting an app is not the same thing as quitting cold turkey. Systematically, one by one, I watched the boxes disappear and part of me knew I was never going back. Sitting in my stinky dorm room (because let’s be honest, all dorm rooms smell so bad), I deleted social media apps. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |