The Feed Was Always On
Prior to starting this journey, I didn’t think of myself as addicted to social media. It was simply a mechanism to unwind. I had accounts, I checked them, I mainly browsed Reddit to read about topics I am interested in, and scrolled reels as a ‘low brain power’ activity.
Except, the issue is I did not notice the habit had become invisible, woven into every gap between every task; the two minutes while waiting for my coffee machine to heat up in the morning, while waiting for others to join a meeting, while the ads played on YouTube.
When I deleted the apps, I expected boredom. What I didn’t expect was the sensation of space; it felt something in between relief and panic.
The Trigger
There were two explicit triggers I encountered in a single day that resulted in an immediate plan of action.
If you spent 3 hours a day, over your lifetime, you’d spend 13.4 years of your conscious life on social media.
Calculated without including the time you spend asleep, from 10 years old (the average age a child currently receives their first smartphone) till 82 (a conservative estimate for current youth in developed nations).
Notifications do not matter. Over the course of a whole day, I found myself dismissing almost every single notification I received. The Digital Wellness application on my phone told me I had received 171 notifications in 24 hours. No phone calls, no urgent requests from work, no disastrous worldwide news.
It was a further acknowledgement to the fact that every application is working tirelessly to keep us online, to ensure that they can keep serving us advertisements and through a more ‘evil lens’; curating our algorithm to occupy our gaps in cognition.
Why Does This Matter?
Continuing on the train of thought that applications are designed to get you hooked, and re-hooked, this is what we call a PICNIC problem. In SaaS organisations, PICNIC is an abbreviation for “Problem in Chair, Not in Computer”, simply meaning; it is the user’s fault, not the system. Funnily enough, this accounts for 80%+ of data breaches worldwide.
If you open Instagram to reply to a message, the chances you’ll end up scrolling once, twice, endless times is a lot higher than we care to admit.
Remove the chance of distraction.
What You’ll Lose
The ambient awareness of others
You’ll no longer passively know what people are doing. Birthdays, engagements, holidays, new jobs; all of it disappears from your peripheral vision. You’ll hear news late. You’ll feel out of the loop, because you are.
This is the trade.
The low-effort friendships
Some relationships, it turns out, had calcified into mutual observation rather than conversation. Social media lets you feel connected to someone without ever actually speaking to them. When the feed disappears, those relationships either evolve into something real or they quietly fade.
Both outcomes are more honest than the alternative.
What I did not expect was how fast the discomfort turned into something else. Not knowing what everyone is doing, all the time, is quiet. The kind of quiet that lets you hear your own thoughts for possibly the first time in years.
That quiet is the whole point.