The Social Dilemma: 30 Days Away from Phone Screens

Update: I realized that it's quite hard being off my phone during corona times and since I don't have any close physical connections with any of my friends. So I'm reducing it to a week! I will definitely do this challenge again when circumstances are better and when I am better prepared :)

So I'm taking up a no-social-media challenge for 30 days. Because of Covid-related isolation and social distancing, Instagram, Whatsapp, and FB Messenger have been my main portals for sharing my life with my friends. These tools have helped me keep in touch with my friends who live across borders and seas in the US, the Netherlands, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia...you get the gist of it.

At a certain point, however, I realized that I was using my phone excessively--doom scrolling and staring at the blue, glaring screen for hours. Although I already had trouble sleeping before, I became more restless during bed hours and had days awake looking at the white ceiling, blinking the entire night away. My mind darted back and forth from thought to thought and object to object, but in a way that I could not even sit down to read a page on a book. I haven't even been able to put up a single blog post in a while.

Not to say that I condemn myself for doing this (I'm not going to repeat the mistake of relentlessly beating myself up for this). Using technology has given more activities to engage with friends during quarantine; and not to mention the hundreds, thousands of psychologists, technologists, engineers who put their heads together to figure out how to get users to spend as much time on their social media apps. How can we not fall into this wonderfully curated trap?

Recently, I watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix (Ironically, when watching The Social Dilemma, I constantly checked my phone). I think most people already have plenty of knowledge on the issue of social media. Yes, it's the common narrative we've been taught over and over: "that social media companies monetize your attention," "that social media has become a coping mechanism for loneliness, discomfort, and fear," and "that we get bombarded by millions of messages for the purpose of selling products to us." ,

But I realized that I constantly walked away and ignored this narrative because it's much more comfortable, personally (it differs from person to person, but I find this true for myself), to block out my negative emotions and have something easy to engage in when I'm bored.

So that's why I'm taking up this 30-day challenge, to stop for a moment and step away from the screen and experience more things, enjoy more activities. It's funny because what really took me to take up this challenge is because my phone battery died and that my phone charger broke. I also do have to clarify that this means only for my phone. I will still be using my laptop to access chats because then I won't be able to connect with my friends, but I'm hoping that the laptop being less accessible and harder to carry around will naturally decrease my temptation to open social media apps.

I'm officially starting from tomorrow 21/11/2020 until 20/12/2020; so if anyone wants to join me and have an accountability partner, don't hesitate to email me or message me!

I'll see you in my later updates.