So, I deleted all the social media apps from my phone. I think my life is better without them. Before you protest, "But JB, I just saw that photograph of a black cat dressed as Darth Vader that you shared," I didn't delete my accounts. Just the apps on my phone and, for good measure, my iPad. Having done so, I feel a lot less stressed and I'd like to talk to you about why.
First though, some rigour. By social media I mostly mean Twitter and Facebook. I have accounts on other platforms but rarely use them. Still, I deleted those rarely opened applications as well. (So long, Instagram. What was I ever thinking, Path).
I was an early arrival on Twitter and I recall those early days fondly. The microblogging platform was a party. Specifically a cocktail party with excellent finger food and name tags for everyone. It could get rowdy, but people were enjoying themselves and mostly everyone behaved well.
This is no longer true. Most days my timeline reads like the script notes for a 1970s dystopian sci-fi flick, something starring Rutger Hauer and set in the howling wastelands of a post apocalyptic world where everyone is dressed up as porno gladiators.
Facebook is worse.Â
Facebook has always been worse.
Facebook was the choice of the overwhelming majority of respondents who took last week's viral online survey asking which tech product they'd be most likely to give up if they had to.
There are researchers in psychopathology carving out careers investigating whether Facebook addiction should be added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a harmful behaviour, like compulsive skin-picking or binge-eating.
Still, they're useful platforms. Twitter is now the place where news breaks. And Facebook is a turnkey advertising solution for everybody from giant multinational brands to single mums selling mismatched tea cups and saucers. For authors like me it provides a scalable, measurable marketing channel far beyond anything a publisher is likely to offer.
And yet for all sorts of reasons, they both suck like the cold hard vacuum of space.
One of the main reasons is the addictiveness of their mobile apps.
It wasn't until I deleted them that I truly understood just how badly I'd been hooked on the sugar hit of constantly checking in. I'd begun to suspect, over the last few weeks. I'm on a couple of book deadlines at the moment and I'd often find myself falling down a rabbit hole, reflexively refreshing one app or the other.
Sometimes I found myself staring at the time line with no idea of how I'd got there. I must have taken a break from writing, mindlessly flipped open the app, usually Twitter, and zombied my way through 10 or 15 minutes of gape-mouthed scrolling.
I'm willing to bet many of you have done the same thing.
Some of you will have walked into telephone poles or heavy traffic because you were so distracted and elsewhere.
What's worse, although I might have hit up Twitter or the Book of Zuck as a little mental health break from deadline, when I finally pulled out of the refresh spiral, I felt immeasurably worse for having gone there in the first place.
Feeling like garbage after checking your Facebook feed is a recognised feature of the human condition now. Things reach a nadir on Monday night, on Twitter if you happen to stray too close to the #qanda hashtag.
So I quit; not the platforms themselves, which remain both useful and necessary for my work, but the mobile apps. They had become inescapable. Like our phones, they were always at hand. There was no point relying on will power to just not open them. Half the time the act of checking in was unconscious. It had become a blink reflex.
So I deleted them.
What was that like?
Easy to do, hard to live with. It wasn't until I found myself automatically reaching for the phone again and again and again to open an app which wasn't there, that I realised how bad my addiction had become. There was real unease and anxiety there.
But it passed, and surprisingly quickly. Took about four or five days.
To help ease the passage out of addiction I downloaded half a dozen copies of The New Yorker and every time I found myself reaching mindlessly for the phone, I'd open the magazine and read something that was actually worth my time. After a week of doing that it felt like a fever was breaking, that my mind was clearing of a toxic fog that had shrouded it.
I could sit at a table with family or friends and not feel that hot, crampy compulsion to pull out the phone. I could watch TV without needing to live-tweet the insanity of Steven Seagal's terrible, awful not very good sniper movie on Stan. I could go to sleep at night not caring about the outrage of the day.
I just felt better. A lot better. About the world and about myself.
So, I dunno. I'm not one for telling you what you should do. But I did this, and my life is definitely better for it. I'm still on both platforms. I still use them every day. But I no longer feel like a prisoner.
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