Yesterday marked my 30th day without a smartphone or social media. It started after I read the book digital minimalism and decided to do the 30-day challenge it proposed. I had bought a flip phone in October of last year, so it wouldn't be too hard of a transition. I couldn't do social media or my iPhone, but I allowed myself YouTube (for now, I imagine I'll limit that in the future too, I often get carried away on there)
It was weird being so out of the loop on everything going on. My friends would bring up trending stories on twitter and I wouldn't know anything about it. One big example of this is the live action remake of the old animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender. There was some news about the directors leaving the project or something along those lines, and my friends were talking about it like crazy. I hadn't heard anything about it, and considering I never watched Avatar as a kid I really didn't… care. Why worry myself about something that I don't care about?
Now, sometimes those things I'm missing out on are more important, like the presidential primaries and the war in Palestine, but do I need to see the most atrocious things every 30 seconds? Once or twice a day, fine, but it makes it hard to function when my whole feed is depressing, and I'm taking that in for hours at a time. These are things I should (and do) care about, but constantly caring about everything 24/7 isn't good for the mind. Checking the news once a day is a pretty good alternative, I frequent NPR and AllSides, plus the local independent from back home.
I do miss some of the well made, thought out content I was getting on TikTok, but I'm doing just fine without it. For example, a multi-part travelogue about someone going back to South Korea for the first time since childhood and dealing with their relationship with the culture is really interesting, and overall good content. The problem is that that's only about 15% of the stuff I was getting on TikTok, the rest was sludge like everyone else. It's weird seeing coworkers 2 or 3 times my age glued to their phones during every break, watching bootleg movies split into 40 parts in portrait view.
If I go back to social media, I worry that I'll get hooked again. Even for a bit, even if I try and control the amount of time I spend on it, I'll get hooked and the whole cycle will start all over again. Do I recommend you do this? Yes, absolutely, but don't starve yourself of the good things on the internet. Seek out well made, well researched content that enriches your life and makes you feel good for watching it. Use all that extra time to learn new things, discover things on the web. Have fun, and don't let other people tell you how to do it!