Episode 3: Social Media

Do you ever find yourself sat in public surrounded by zombies glued to their phones and you realise your chances of randomly interacting with anyone, nevermind people your age, seem to gravitate towards exactly zero?

I find it a little bit depressing. I sometimes feel like I live in a society of one.

Howdy loyal readers. This will probably be the most consequential entry I think. There is a lot to unpack here, so let’s get into it. The main objective here is to spend less hours glued to your phone, and more hours spent with people.

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Second question, do you find yourself a little junkie for those little short videos on your tiny screen?

Scrolling through the emotional casino.

Happy-sad-happy-enraged-curious-motivated-enraged.

Me too.

Thing is, short-form video content, tiktok/reels/shorts, trains our brains to race to the most extreme forms of these emotions. The consequence of this is that over-time we lose the ability to regulate our emotions as we have trained them to go 0-100 in less than a second.

In my view, it’s a reason why our politics is so enraged. Why our culture finds itself so polarised. Why we can’t seem to debate anyone anymore without offending someone so deeply. I also think it’s why we can’t focus. It’s why our baseline happiness is on the floor. Finally, I think social media, amongst other issues, is a cause of the death of in-person hang outs and the death of the pub. A great travesty.

Now. I think short-form videos truly are the devil. But I’m weak to them myself. Just yesterday I was having an emotionally tough day and the temptation beat me. Constantly adding more time onto my timer to roll the dice for just five more minutes.

For me, the journey started with questioning social media in general.

Why the hell was I even on these stupid apps? Why has socialising been reduced to me being alone in my bedroom reading the opinions of people I don’t care about, watching holidays I wasn’t on, being outraged to politics I have no influence on. Oh and being told I was a piece of shit for not being a ripped-millionaire-patrick-bateman-gigachad who hates women and roars at alpha wolf motivational videos.

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So.

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In light of social media companies being extremely unlikely to police themselves and retreat from what social media has become: a constantly accelerating race of who can produce the most extreme content in each domain (happiness, envy, lust, motivation, rage etc).

The question for My Analog Life readers is this:

How do we kick social media to the curb, but stay engaged with our mates?

Here’s how I’ve tried to do it:

1) First we need to know our situation. Install an app like ‘ActionDash’ which will track your total screen time and your screen-time in each app.

When I started this journey, I was looking at anywhere between 2-5 hours screen-time per day. With 1-3 hours vegetating on IG reels. That’s no life at all is it? That’s addiction.

Another tool in your arsenal here is to use any parental controls available on your device in order to constrain yourself as a starting point.

2) Then you are going to go cold-turkey for three months. You need to reset your relationship with social media.

Going cold turkey is the best way in my opinion to ask yourself why you use social media.

You tell yourself it is to stay connected with your mates or informed of the world. Bollocks. You are doing it because you are sad/lonely/bored/lusting. And that’s okay, we are all little primitive monkey-brains at the end of the day. So quitting cold-turkey for a short period will help reset why you do it.

3) Phased re-introduction (if you want).

There’s a bunch of methods here. The best I have found is having nothing with infinite scrolling or personalising algorithms on my personal phone. It’s just too tempting. You aren’t weak willed. These things are designed to break you. So that means no tiktok, no instagram, no reddit, no YouTube, no twitter. nada.

If you are going to have apps on your phone, a rule of thumb I would insist is to have notifications off for absolutely everything aside from important messages. You are no more informed by having BBC News ping you a headline, Instagram remind you of your inadequacy or TikTok trying to sell you something. You are just a stressed out little human.

Now some accounts you will want to keep. For me that’s LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube. I use them solely on my computer. But we need something to contain ourselves even here.

I use LeechBlock.

It’s an extension to my browser that allows me to ban certain sites altogether (mainly news sites for me), ban sites during certain days or periods, and/or allow set timers on individual sites.

For me, two minutes for Instagram (enough to check any messages and check any close friends highlights), five minutes for LinkedIn (enough to check notifications, messages and connections and a couple posts) and 25 minutes for YouTube (enough to watch one long video during a lonely meal break).

My screentime on my phone these days is 30 minutes – 1 hour, usually split between WhatsApp, Signal and Firefox.

4) Actually start hanging out with friends

Admittedly, I have been finding this the hardest part of all. I managed with effort over the past year to kick my social media addictions to the curb. Put the phone down. Read more. That sort of stuff. But I have still found myself bored and alone. Wanting to do things but unable to make connections and groups and make such things happen.

Part of it is structural I think. It’s hard to make connections when the people around you are scared and glued to their phones. It’s hard to make connections where there has been a cultural shift towards the rather gloomy concept that we aren’t allowed to talk to strangers in any context.

Some efforts I have made ranked worst to best.

1. Attending a ‘London Social Club’ event arranged on Reddit. Unfortunately for the stereotypes, it was indeed attended by lots of strange folks.
2. Regularly attending language exchange events in London. Maybe the population was too big, but the crowd was literally different every single week.
3. Reading my newspaper in my local cafe every weekday at the same time for the past three months. I think I may be the only work from home weapon in my area who likes single espressos at 11am.
4. Reading my book in my local pub each evening after work for 30 mins over a soda lime. Crowd changes every-time. But, it’s nice to see some familiar faces and I get on with the staff.
5. Attending running clubs when I lived in London. Had lots of great chats. Couple people asked to go for drinks. Similar problem as language exchange events: changing crowds. Still, it was progress.
6. Offering to help carry equipment down from a rave on Arthurs seat. Got invited to afters and added to a group chat. Nice people.
7. Joining my university climbing club in 2023. Most of my new friendships in my life, consolidated over the past 2.5 years, have come from one fateful decision to give climbing a go. University clubs are a great way to make friends with mutual interests and I have held on to a lot of these friendships. In my experience these club based opportunities somewhat die off after university. There exists lots of clubs yes, but in my experience the average age is usually >60. Perhaps there is light in the tunnel however, my housemate added me to a group called ‘Scottish Outdoor Young Team’ which was started by two graduates some years back facing the exact same conundrum of the cliff-like drop off of socialisation of young working adults after uni.

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Back to social media for the conclusion.

Bad news.

My addiction didn’t stop there.

After I had kicked my social media-phone-loneliness-boredom connection. I soon became addicted to emails. And the news. And WhatsApp. And literally anything that could offer me a little drip of dopamine. More on that to come in upcoming epsisodes.

Thanks for reading!

Tools and Tips

1) Notifications – absolutely essential to mute these for everything, except perhaps messages from important people

2) ActionDash – screentime tracker. Also has a blocking function

3) LeechBlock – browser extension for blocking websites, needs some set up

4) Instagram and phone parental controls

5) No algorithms rule – if it has a personalising algorithm or infinite scroll, delete it from your phone