The results demonstrated a statistically significant improvement in an index of happiness, anxiety, and depression among the study cohorts who left online social media in favor of real-world activities.
I’m guessing that these results do not shock you. You know how these apps work, how their algorithms are designed to draw you in with endless bursts of dopamine that fade fast, so you seek more and more. It seems like everyone is living the life but you, including your old friends and former colleagues. The arguments that play out in real time are depressing. Crucially, your scrolling comes at the expense of other things.
I was an early skeptic of Facebook when it came out and stayed away. Somehow, a few years later, I got drawn in and then became a champion, even writing an entire book about all the platforms and how wonderful they were. I’m pleased to say that this book is out of print, and thank goodness, because time caused my view to revert to my initial skepticism.
When I saw how social media was used to manipulate the public’s views during Russiagate and then the COVID-19 pandemic period, I realized that I wanted nothing to do with most of it. I stopped using Facebook and deleted my Instagram account entirely. One worries that doing this is going to cut one off from the action online—will people wonder where I went?—but I immediately felt the opposite. I was suddenly relieved and happy. I’ve never looked back.
Now, when I do see these platforms because someone sends a link or something, I really wonder why people are still there. It oddly makes me think less of them.
Since that time, I have made concerted efforts to detach from my phone as much as possible. Once I realized that it is mostly an engagement promoter that sucks the life out of its users, one realizes one’s profound responsibility in getting a handle on what it is trying to do to you and stop it.
There are big steps I’ve taken aside from just leaving platforms completely.
First, I turned off all nonessential notifications, even those that are tempting. I leave on known callers and direct texts from contacts. Nothing else. No social, no emails, no news, nothing. They don’t go away; the difference is that I’m now in charge of them rather than the reverse.
There is a blessed relief that comes over you when you do this. It’s the first step to getting your life back. Remarkably, you will find that you are not missing much.
That alone took care of 75 percent of the problems. At least this way, you are master of your phone rather than the reverse.
My next step was to turn off my haptics. This is the buzzing sound that my phone was making on my remaining notifications. I got tired of my phone buzzing in my pocket while I was reading or at dinner. I came to realize that it was nothing but an interruption from doing something valuable to diverting my thoughts.
I worried that this would mean that I would miss important calls, but, in fact, this has never happened. If you are in a position to answer your phone, you can simply leave it face up. You will see what you need to see out of your peripheral vision. Otherwise, when you want to fuss with your phone, you can see what you miss and return calls. It’s no big deal.
When I first did this, I wondered if it would last. It has. I love the peace and quiet. No more crazy buzzing at random times, especially in the evenings and at night. It was just one more step toward getting my life back. It is no longer this living and breathing thing I carry around, but rather a quiet tool.
Now I’ve discovered another trick. I was on an airplane, and I saw the guy’s phone in front of me. It was entirely in black and white. It looked very boring, with no flashy colors dancing around. It was just dull or maybe even quietly dramatic like an old movie. In any case, I looked up how to do this.
It turns out that you can go to your preferences. On mine, you look for accessibility, display, and text size. Scroll down and tap color filters. Toggle the switch for color filters to on. Select grayscale. Boom. All fancy colors disappear, and your entire phone looks like a film noir movie from the 1940s, far less dazzling than before and actually human and normal.
Again, I wondered how long I would let it stay this way. It’s now been five days, and I find that I truly love it. It can be a bit more difficult to instantly spot the app for which you are looking, but I don’t mind letting my eyes do some extra work. It makes me feel like I’m a valuable human being again. I don’t even mind that my GPS is slightly harder to see because I need to use my brain more when I drive.
So there we go, just a few steps to turning one’s phone into a human-based technology again. First, leave social media. Second, turn off as many notifications as possible. Third, remove all bleeps and buzzes called haptics. Fourth, remove all colors and make the phone grayscale.
This is how you cut the mindless scrolling and eye-catching distractions. It’s like unplugging from the matrix. I’m greatly relieved, and you might be too.
I worry most about people in their teens and into young adulthood. People are wrecking their lives with these tools advertised as life improvements. We now have empirical evidence that too much use of them promotes sadness and depression, a feeling that life is no good and that everyone else is pretty and having fun. This is no way to live.
I’ve learned this much. If you want your life back, you have to take active measures to make it happen. If you simply accept the defaults, you end up allowing invasive corporations to take away your thought and volition and use your humanity for their own data mining. Hardly anyone allows this to happen on purpose, but these companies are extremely clever about extracting your attention and brain.
It’s time to put a stop to it all, if only to experiment. Give it a try and report back. I’m at the point of wanting to shout: free at last!
