Contents
We’ve all heard about the benefits of doing a digital detox every once in a while. But only a few manage to take breaks in the use of social networks. We publish a personal story of the reader in which he shares a similar experience.
I still remember the days without social media. Times when we weren’t glued to the screens of our smartphones and computers. I will not argue: technology makes life easier, and smartphones are generally the greatest invention of mankind. And yet, you see, there is also a lot of harm from them. They are slowly changing our society. We spend several hours a day in them, and sometimes all day long. And for many, it has become a real addiction.
I was no exception. I once spent six hours on TikTok. Just think: six hours in one place, practically not moving, staring at the screen and doing nothing useful! In general, this sobered me up a little, and I decided to take a break: for a month use a smartphone exclusively for calls — like in the good old days — and see where it leads. Here’s what I learned in those four weeks.
Most didn’t care
Few people even noticed my absence, which is not surprising. We all consume too much content on a daily basis to pay attention to the lack of posts from one of our friends. When I logged into messengers a month later, I found quite a few messages there. And those who wrote to me did not ask where I had gone — they talked as if nothing had happened.
In real life, things are different: we will notice the disappearance of a person quite quickly and, most likely, we will do something to find him. However, there are too many distractions in the virtual space. And it’s not easy to notice that someone “left the radar”.
Alas, we are moving with leaps and bounds towards full digitalization. And, to be honest, I’m afraid that soon empathy and caring will completely disappear from our lives.
It was like quitting drugs
Of course, I can only assume that this is the case. But the bottom line is that It took me a lot of effort not to get into social media apps — or rather, in the end I just had to delete them from the phone. And I really, really wanted to stop my experiment and go back. For the first few days, I was constantly thinking about my phone, turning it over and checking for new messages.
And this, again, is not at all surprising: it has long been proven that scrolling through the social media feed leads to the release of dopamine, which in turn, even if only for a moment, makes us happy. That’s why it’s so hard to give up.
I was lonely but not bored
What did we do before social media? When: chatting with friends, walking, reading books, watching old movies, or just watching the clouds. However, everything has changed, and today there is not just a lot of content — there is too much of it. Netflix alone has more movies than we could watch in a lifetime, and Instagram has more (an extremist organization banned in Russia) images than we can scroll through.
And thanks to all this, while we are online, we feel like we are part of something bigger. And when we fall out of virtual reality for a while, we understand that we are very lonely. I have seen this from my own experience. But I was not bored: I remembered everything that I did once upon a time, even before the advent of social networks. Started walking more, to do exercises in the morning and was close to having a ficus plantation on the windowsill.
I understand why virtual reality has almost replaced the real world
Judge for yourself: in ordinary life, we somehow have to move in order to “churn butter”: we have to work to eat something, and also to solve endless problems. In the virtual world, we can do what we want, when we want, without any consequences. And it’s damn attractive.
Technology makes our lives more convenient — but it also steals our time
I repeat: technology really makes life easier, and it would be foolish to argue with that. When we are online, we can quickly find any information we need, learn something new from YouTube videos. But how much meaningless and useless content do we browse before we stumble upon a real gem!
That is why, it seems to me, it is worth going into the virtual world only for a specific purpose, even if this purpose is to have fun. Otherwise, there is a high risk of wasting hours.
Our society evolves as long as we, its members, remain productive. In my opinion, social networks significantly reduce our productivity. Therefore, it is worth, if not abandoning them completely, then at least limiting the time that we are ready to devote to them.
After all, you don’t let your kids play video games all night long, so why watch cat videos for hours?