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bettsfic · 9 months

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Hi betts! Hope you're doing good! Do you have any advice on how to distance yourself from social media? I saw that you've done so with success and the older I get the more I feel a bit trapped by the internet.

social media certainly has benefits: keeping people connected, giving a voice to those who otherwise wouldn't have a platform, and it allows you to meet new people in the context of interest rather than location.

at least, these are the things social media set out to be, and over time those benefits, to me anyway, haven't been able to outweigh the drawbacks: compulsively checking apps, doomscrolling, content appearing by algorithm to attempt to cater to my interests, and just generally a lot of wasted time.

i don't necessarily believe that if you stop using social media, suddenly you'll be able to devote every minute of your day to a higher pursuit. the brain doesn't work like that. it always needs downtime. before phones, we had television. before television, we had radio. lacking glowing screens and people telling us things from far away, i think we'd all spend a lot of time looking at the things humans are built to look at: fire, water, mountains, sky. we'll listen to stories or read them or watch them.

during your mind's downtime, i don't think anything you decide to do is fundamentally better or worse than any other thing. but i do think social media is designed to manipulate our attention toward it during that downtime (and honestly, all other times) and that pisses me off. it also pisses me off that even though we impose cause-and-effect sequences to our interaction with social media, it doesn't often provide us with a narrative the way reading, watching tv, or listening to a podcast would. stories are a psychological necessity; without the mind's ability to perceive sequences of events and connect them, we wouldn't have memories. we would have no concept of time, of thinking into the past or casting our thoughts into the future. social media, in its drive to keep us scrolling, looking at posts with no narrative connection to one another, deprives us of the stories our minds seek during our downtime.

this got super long so i'm putting it under a cut. tl;dr you need to remove social media as a positive stimulus and build immediate positive stimuli into other aspects of your life. in other words, social media feels good immediately but neutral or bad over time; most other things like reading feel bad or neutral initially but good over time. so you have to find ways to make the latter feel good with the immediacy of the former.

i don't mean to be "old man shakes fist at cloud" about this. i'm a millennial. from facebook's widespread release through the beginning of the pandemic, i raced to every new social media platform. i was an early myspace adopter. my high school graduating class was the very first year people outside of college could use facebook, and so we're the first cohort to have all befriended each other before graduation and never lost touch, completely removing the appeal of a reunion. i joined twitter in 2008 but never used it, and i joined tumblr in 2012 and never stopped using it.

i remember the day i got a smartphone. i was a few years behind everyone else. it was 2010 and i'd just gotten my first office job and i was desperate to be able to look at social media, scroll through stuff or read something, when i was bored. it was an iPhone 4. and as soon as i got it out of the box, i sat and played on it for 10 straight hours.

for those of you who are too young to remember a time before smartphones, i can't emphasize enough how much they changed things. in my life, i went from waking up and eating breakfast and reading for a little bit, to waking up and eating breakfast and getting on my computer to look at facebook and read my daily webcomics, to waking up and reaching over to my nightstand and looking at my phone.

and i don't know, i just decided i didn't want that anymore. last fall i was at this artist residency with no cell service and barely any wifi. and one day the wifi went out. i had a visceral negative reaction to that, which made me step back and go, oh wow, i am way too tethered to the internet. that day, wandering around the property with nothing to do, i got this intense urge to read an old paperback novel. you know, the mass market paperbacks with the pulpy yellow paper and the misaligned typeface. and so i found a very old copy of fellowship of the ring, cracked it open, and read it all day.

the thing about getting away from social media is that it's slow. i don't think you can really go cold turkey. when i got home from the residency, i went on a long hiatus and had all these strict rules for myself about when i was allowed to look at my phone and when i wasn't, but that didn't really work for me. but i did delete all the social media apps from my phone, and on my computer i logged out of all of them and deleted my saved passwords, so if i wanted to check them, i had to go to that extra step of logging in and even typing in my password. and that doesn't seem like a lot, but when you're checking social media out of habit, muscle memory, something to attend to that might give you a brief blip of dopamine, having to type your password is just one step too far. the brief pleasure i would get from checking my notifications was less than the hassle of logging in.

and that's what it all comes down to: feeling good. in the moment, it feels good to check a social media app, to see that somebody has interacted with your content or maybe with you directly. it's that tiny subconscious exclamation point, the feeling we get when somebody politely smiles or waves at us, when a dog comes up to us wagging his tail, when a well-meaning stranger compliments your outfit. that's the social part of social media. but that's also the part that keeps us cycling through our apps out of habit and boredom.

so you have to take away that stimulus from yourself, and you have to create positive stimuli elsewhere. to take away the positive stimulus of social media, you have to stop posting content on it. content is the mind killer. when you tweet something, your impulse might be to check that someone has interacted with it. but if you step away from the great conversation of social media, nobody speaks back to you, and you develop more patience for the longer-term good feelings of reading a book.

of course, that's complicated. i guess the first step that i did a long time ago was losing interest in traffic and developing the internal validation skills that make interaction on social media a bonus, not a need. before that, though, i had a drive to be seen and listened to. i think i just grew out of that. regardless of the existence of the internet, all people throughout history have spent their lives developing their relationship with themselves, learning who they are and coming to accept it. i'm not sure there's a way to rush that inner journey along.

creating positive stimuli is a matter of adopting a kind of little-treat attitude toward things. you have to really pay attention to yourself. the day i picked up the fellowship of the ring, i remembered that paper is important to me. vitally important. i like to write on it. i like to read from it. and it's kind of weird to say "paper is my special interest," but it is. all tools of writing interest me. so acknowledging that, accepting it and choosing to accommodate it, was my first small goal of building immediate positive stimuli.

some of the connection we have to social media (and phones in general) is the physical habit that develops from it. when smokers quit smoking, their hands feel empty. they're used to having something between their fingers, and so they replace that with something like a pen or a straw.

for me, i replaced the physical habit of phone-checking with paper-holding, either in the form of a book, or a notebook and pen. i set about finding my perfect notebook: the one that feels best to hold, the one i'm eager to fill, the one whose paper is quality enough that i love to write on it. the one i found and that kind of changed my life was a Rhodia A4 spiral bound. i take it everywhere with me. in fact i went to the doctor earlier this week and because i was holding my notebook, it didn't even occur to me to look at my phone while i was waiting for the doctor to see me, even though it was in my pocket (and i did download tumblr again, and instagram to support my sister, who is kind of a local influencer). the positive stimulus of looking at it had become less than the positive stimulus of holding my notebook. the potential to easily write something or doodle felt better than the distraction of social media.

did my doctor probably think it was weird that i was taking notes? maybe. did i look weird sitting in the theater before seeing oppenheimer, brainstorming barbie fic ideas? definitely. but i just don't care anymore. sometimes making healthy choices for yourself in a world built to manipulate your attention makes you look weird.

my advice is to spend a week without social media apps on your phone, logged out of them on your computer, and pay very close attention to the things that make you happiest. find ways to interact with those things continuously, and see what happens.

#writing advice #reading advice #social media

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