On the 1st October 2021, I decided to try something I’ve been meaning to do a long time; to delete all of my social media apps, and go a month without. I said it was part of the great ‘Stoptober’ event, that thing in which people decide to give up smoking, or chocolate, or something else highly addictive, but for me it was simply, a few apps. 30 days later and I’m sat here wondering if I actually learnt anything. The last few weeks were largely predictable. I missed a lot of birthdays (some very close friends too), I stared at my phone’s home screen blankly for far longer than I should have and I, at times felt irrelevant in the world, like I knew I would. But was I happier in life? Calmer? More liberated? I still don’t know.
The internet and social media (where it spreads) is a horrible place at the minute, isn’t it? In the last few years alone we’ve had the rise of Trumpism, a disastrous Brexit decision and now the Covid pandemic, which has seen a ridiculous amount of misinformation shared across the globe (exactly the reason why the WHO put ‘the spreading of misinformation on the internet’ in their top 10 ‘threats to humanity’ only a few years ago). A decade ago, a younger naïve me seen the rise of technology and the ability to receive actual live news through apps like twitter as a new, exciting thing that was going to revolutionise the way people got access to ‘the truth’. But very quickly, this has been hijacked by the right, and turned against those seeking social progress. It’s got so bad that it’s hard to know what’s ‘true’ any more on the internet.
Quitting though, I thought would be harder than it sounds, mostly because I’ve always had this fear that if I disappeared from the internet completely, people would forget about me (which is pure ego, I know). But the last 30 days haven’t been that bad. OK there’s been moments where I’ve felt like I’ve been missing out, there’s been moments where I read something, or watched something great (like MAID, one of the most important TV series released this year) and been frustrated that I haven’t been able to share anything about it, and at times I’ve felt ‘lonely’ and ‘unimportant’. But if I’m totally honest, nothing changed in those 30 days I was ‘offline’. I still spoke with friends daily (via whatsapp and messenger), I still got all the news I needed (which is very little) via TV and one newspaper website, and I still went to work, had a holiday, lived life as normal. The only thing I didn’t do was crane my neck a few times a day to ‘scroll’.
word gets around; 