quitting social media

A little someone is 1 month old today, and I have been thinking a lot about my attention and what I am paying attention to. I have already been online less than usual, but I notice how easy and subconscious it is to pick on that app for another hit of something new or passively interesting.

This makes me rethink the inevitable sleepy Monday morning. I have been intending to watch the Social Dilemma, a movie that poses the social media user as the product, not the consumer. 

What would my days in these first precious months of a life be like --struggles, sleeplessness and all-- if I actually deleted everything?

'I get better sleep': the people who quit social media

Soo Youn is considering giving up the apps. She speaks to those who have already taken the plunge – with liberating results

My memory and recall are alarmingly good – borderline photographic. But when I used Instagram, I found it would short-circuit my recall in an alarming way. I’d be describing something mid-sentence and I’d just stop speaking, unable to finish. So I rarely use it.

But my attention span – and my posture, eyes and sleep – are still being degraded by other technology and my dependence on it. In my pandemic life, technology is a lifeline – 90% of my social and work life happens on one of four screens.

I’m flirting with the idea of giving up social media and maybe even ... texts. I am fascinated by people like Justine Haupt, a quantum communications engineer who has never owned a smartphone. She also builds and sells rotary cellphones. Yes, rotary cellphones.

What would my life be like if getting in touch with people required me to communicate with purpose, memorize numbers again, and dial with my fingers, instead of, accidentally, my butt?

For my sake – and yours – I sought inspiration from people who have already crossed into a more analog life.

Morgan Richardson, 30, nurse in a Covid unit in Los Angeles. Has no social media.

Man, the stories I could tell you of being a young woman with no social media. People get crazy, they get so mad at me! [...]

I get better sleep. My attention span, I think, is great. I definitely see my other friends reaching for their phones, looking for their phones, looking on social media, even in nursing school. I would just study for hours and hours and they wanted a break. I got a 4.0. I would just work hard and I wasn’t distracted. [...]

Click below to read more.

via {the Guardian}