Notes from a thousand-day social media detox

I finally left - and it was the best decision of my life

My non-traditional hieroglyphic star chart (182.5 days is 6 months!)

This is sort of linked to my other post about ‘crawling away from the Internet’, which was written last spring, when I still had multiple social media accounts but tried to use them less and less. In short, I was once the most online person to ever live but now I think Web 2.0 is evil and will be our undoing. Here is an update after deleting all my social media and deciding to quit a large number of websites cold turkey for a full thousand days (I add more and more websites as I go along, so I’m writing to you from somewhere between Day 175 and Day -1, or a mean of 81 days quit). This is written mostly as a personal diary and to help me organise my own thoughts, but there might be useful tips here for people who want to do the same kind of thing. I’ll probably write other updates at the halfway and final mark of this project.

Why I did it

• For me, internet use was (partially still is?) a compulsion - ie. once online, I had to check different websites and accounts, it felt wrong not to, etc. I think this is partially a personal issue and partially a result of contemporary UI/UX design - either way, I was actively making life harder for myself by still having social media at all (at the time of the first article I wrote) and viewing the same few regularly-updated websites.

• I also read a ton of writing about the evils of the current internet (Tarnoff’s Internet for the People, Fisher’s The Chaos Machine). I read about the Molly Russell case in the UK and realised I had been exposed to the same sort of suicide-baiting content as a minor, unconscious that it had similar effects on my own psyche and not even realising that algorithms were to blame or that there was any financial benefit to be derived from letting these posts circulate. This made me angry, obviously. I didn’t want to wait around to see what other emotional havoc social networks would wreak on me (Instagram made me feel awful every time I used it, especially after it suppressed my reach and visibility on the art account I made as a teenager and poured my whole soul into).  

• I realised that the ‘anyone can become an influencer’ narrative is a near-total con, and that the tech-affiliated hold up stories of overnight success to tempt the enterprising and creative onto their platforms - and to make it look like Internet fame is available in greater abundance than it really is. This was important to become aware of, because I think other attempts were foiled by that tendency to go ‘what if?’

Why I chose a thousand days (not ‘forever’, for less time, etc.) 

• A thousand days (nearly three years) felt like enough time to build a life where there was absolutely no need for social media - no physical or mental impulse to visit the sites, but also a concrete routine, hobbies, no need for immediate gratification/praise, and enough fulfilling social interaction in real life (or online but through less mentally-damaging means). I think I have made huge steps towards all of these things within the past few months, mainly because I decided to turn the period into a full-scale holistic ‘thousand day challenge’ (more later). The ‘physical or mental impulse’ bit remarkably takes care of itself for me around thirty days (at most) after quitting each site.    

• A thousand days is actually conceivable (‘forever’ isn’t, and was never going to work). Telling myself I will check up on something in a thousand days does do a lot to waylay urges because I can actually picture the amount of time I’m contemplating, rather than forcing myself to give up entirely on something that - in that moment - might mean a lot to me. Of course urges usually go away in like five minutes. I think the actual amount of time might be irrelevant here, as long as a boundary exists.

• The idea of quitting something for a solid thousand days is impressive to me. I think it’s important that you should provide for your own sense of accomplishment and meaning in your own personal narrative when looking for long-term goals.  

Online things I have banned myself from

• All the major social networks - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, etc. I deleted my accounts and am not allowed to open links to these websites, or to view through second-party sites. I never had TikTok itself downloaded for more than about 40 terrifying minutes, but am now specifically banned from watching, eg, YouTube compilations of TikTok videos.

• Gossip forums about web celebrities (I will not lie because I know a million people have had the same problem - I’ve been addicted to these since 2015, and not necessarily out of hatred, envy etc. - more just wanting a good real-life storyline to follow! Have written about this elsewhere. I quit these websites first - originally I was planning to only quit them, then realised my method was so effective that I could use it to kick many other addictions - and I think I’ve already topped my longest attempt to go cold turkey, back in 2016ish).

• Fanfiction sites (also will not lie. This was merely a skeleton of an old addiction I developed eight entire years ago. I revisited about five or six of the same stories regularly for emotional comfort, and felt it was unhealthy. Weirdly, I haven’t felt a need for emotional comfort to that extent since I stopped, maybe because letting go of these stories has allowed me to let go of lots of expectations about real life and to be genuine with others).

• Basically anything designated ‘adult’ that isn’t an art film or Madonna’s 1992 photobook. I hate to say it but sometimes Camille Paglia is wrong! Maybe she would have been right in the nineties when you could buy a VHS tape with an eighty-minute-long porno on it but she’s wrong now!  

• News websites which I found particularly manipulative, unethical, angering, one-note or ‘narrative-y’ (even if I agreed with them, which was tricky). This has been a more recent, ‘as I go along’ kind of process, because identifying these websites requires a kind of mental clarity I definitely did not have a few months ago. So far I have stopped reading/clicking on links from Vice News, Spiked, the Mail Online, Buzzfeed, and two particularly ragebait-y Substacks. I still read the Guardian every day but I am getting better and better at identifying emotional manipulation where the journalists use it, and will soon quit reading the comment section too. 

My methodology/why this attempt is so successful where other attempts have failed

• I have a ‘Day Counter’ app on my phone, and track my ‘days free’ individually for each thing I have quit. I also have a page on Notion that is like a huge star chart, with each website or app given its own row, and each milestone (3 days, 5 days, 100 days etc) its own column. When I reach a milestone, I update the chart with any emoji of my choosing. I’m not sure why this works but it does. Maybe the emoji thing helps with visualisation and symbolism. This is the first thing I look at when I wake up and it always motivates me to keep going.

• I turned the whole quitting period into a holistic ‘challenge’ underpinned by leaving social media - eg, I not only have to leave Twitter for a thousand days, I also have to do a certain number of workouts/read a certain number of books/do ‘creative things’ for some number of hours, etc. This means a) I can build a new routine that does not wholly depend on browsing the internet, b) leaving social media is emblematic of a larger positive future that means a lot to me. Maybe all this quantified data would be terrible for another person, but it really does work in my case.

My slip-ups and why I think they happened 

• I did relapse with Tumblr fairly recently, because I wasn’t careful about setting myself the boundary of not using second party sites to view content. I didn’t feel terrible because I had a graphic visualisation of all my other successful attempts - just restarted the counter and tried again with the new rule. 

Effects so far

• I feel free! I am never in a loop of refreshing my timeline, doomscrolling, being stuck at my desk, etc. 

• I no longer really envy others. This is mainly after getting rid of Instagram. I have actual fulfilling conversations because I can no longer use social media stalking to find things out in advance. I am genuinely curious about other people and feel secure in my friendships - partially because I can’t get paranoid about what my friends post and what it means if I’m not included, partially because of said fulfilling conversations. I genuinely feel like a social person, am making friends without relying on ‘extroverts’ to introduce me, and am realising I was never really an ‘introvert’ at all.

• I no longer desire immediate approval for art or writing. I am not used to Substack posts becoming particularly successful, and that’s fine - I like longform writing because it’s a way to organise my own thoughts. I can plan a project and carry it out over a matter of months, rather than feeling pressured to produce something ready for public consumption straight away - and this is essential to my development as a creative person. 

• At this point there are literally zero drawbacks. I used to be scared that people might be hostile to my offline project and that it might hold me back in some respects, but instead I find that those around me either view it as a harmless eccentricity or actually think more of me once they learn I don’t have Instagram, etc, and say they wish they could do the same. If friends send me Facebook links to events they want to attend I just ask for a map link instead. I’m anticipating it might be hard to build up my social life at UK uni next year - societies at my university all use Instagram to plan/advertise - so I’m going to campaign for information to be circulated over email as well. Most of the narratives that kept me on social media were spread by tech companies in the first place. It’s almost fun to spot them.    

What I’m going to take care of next

• I have learnt that the #1 success factor here is a running sense of honesty. I will be honest with myself about what I still do online and how it affects me. 

• I have also learnt that the chronological format we take for granted in blogs etc. is actually kind of unethical and a great way of making people waste time. I will try and make some kind of non-chronological menu for this Substack as a secondary project.

• I will do more workouts, lol (I was going to go through a yoga video yesterday but it was too cold inside in Taipei! Postponed to tonight! I think restarting my yoga practice has been really beneficial in undoing the ‘rage on command’ effect of Web 2.0. It’s also nice to feel yourself improve at one thing while simultaneously increasing your distance from something harmful).