I spent an absurd amount of time in 2022 scrolling through Reddit. I openly disdain most other social media platforms. TikTok is cancerous. Every time I hear that robotic narrator voice echo from my girlfriend’s phone speaker I have a visceral reaction to it. Instagram is an obvious ego-trap but I often return to it because I have the most connections on it. It’s my most social social media. I love the communication medium that Snapchat provides but every time I open the app I find myself scrolling through their toxic Discover page full of clickbait. Twitter is a virtue signaling competition.
Reddit feels different because of the anonymity. There isn’t an incentive to create a following and become internet famous because there’s not much for anyone to follow. And yet its still very much an echo chamber. I’ll spend hours scrolling through the site in a week in blissful ignorance. It feels like I’m taking in information and entertaining myself. Then, every once in a while, I’ll come across a comment section where people are vehemently making statements that I know to be false and their comments are the top ones of the post. If this unsubstantiated comment is being hailed as the truth, is anything on this site true? Maybe. But probably less than I think.
And so I’m taking another step away from social media. I took the month of January off last year and I’m upping that ante to both January and February this year. Maybe longer. We’ll see how it feels.
The only concession I made to my social media uses last year was I still logged into Instagram every week to share the link to my newsletter. Sharing this link publicly was one of the commitments I made when I began writing Ware and Why. But I think my commitment to being off the social grid is more important to me so I’ll be overriding that. You, dear reader, are going to be one of the few getting these exclusively to your inbox. Congratulations.
Last year in the absence of any accessible social media I got really into playing chess on my phone. This year I’m going to try to focus more on reading, whether a physical book or through the app on my phone. Hopefully a two month rest period will give me plenty of space to retrain my brain to not reach for an app the moment I feel a touch of boredom.
I welcome you to join me in the disconnection. Let’s make 2023 the year we focus on what’s really in our lives.
Cheers!