I, like many others, suffer from social media addiction.
I swear every few months that I can handle just having it for occasional use, and I will reduce my screen time for a while, but then the habit slowly ramps back up until I’m losing hours to scrolling again.
The sad thing is, I use it to attempt socializing, but it never quite scratches the itch. Hours will pass and I don’t feel any more connected, honestly I often feel the opposite. All this time devoted just leads to feeling less understood, more anxious, and my attention span has become so fried that I take little pleasure in doing anything else.
This story is all too familiar lately and I’m sure you feel it sometimes too.
The beginning of the year, I vowed to prioritize longer form content and taking time to reflect on what I’ve consumed after. I felt an almost immediate increase in my attention span and, dare I say it, productivity. I fell off this routine when February rolled around, like many resolutions it’s fate was sealed when I had a series of illnesses and allowed myself to go back to my old ways for comfort. Now that half the year has gone by, I am feeling re-motivated to tackle this addiction. When I start closing my instagram app, just to immediately re-open it, I know something has to give.
What has kept me on the apps for so long is a web of reasons that I’ve been too lazy to untangle myself from.
Keeping up to date with my friends?
Honestly, this was the least of my concerns. If we like each other enough to keep up with one another’s lives, social media is the worst way to do that. Call, text, or email is much better, it’s a dialog and not just a witness heart react.
Keeping up to date with local events and happenings?
This is the hardest thing to replicate without social media as so many venues just post stuff on facebook and insta, forgoing a website all together. But, I go to local events often enough and chat with people there, they let me know about other things I might like to go to. It also gives us something to discuss and I might even work out a carpooling situation with them. Venues, coffee shops, and the library also almost always have events on some kind of bulletin board. In other words, I just need to be more motivated and proactive about events instead of relying on the algorithm to feed me things.
Sharing my thoughts and art with the world?
Enter, this website. I know blogging and personal websites are a bit out of fashion, and in order to get people on here I’ll probably have to post links to social media for a while, but this feels like the best solution to this issue for me. I can have complete control over what I share, how I share it, and what happens to my stuff. Not being able to opt out of AI training on social media is a little upsetting to me. I don’t want my work used in that way, especially for free.
I’ve already gotten myself down to checking facebook about once a week, but instagram and youtube are my two toughest opponents in the battle for my attention. Right now I have a timer for my insta and I haven’t gone over it in a few weeks, maybe it’s time to decrease the time limit again? Deleting my accounts all-together sounds so daunting to me, I have so many memories on there… but at the same time that’s just data being used by meta and google to sell me shit I don’t need, so the long-term goal is to just delete everything entirely and go back to the 90s with most of my tech. Until then, a 30 min a day cap on my scrolling sounds do-able… and maybe even downgrading my phone in the near future. We shall see.
Thanks for reading š
mani 
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