What I really need is a way to lock myself out of the account, especially Twitter, without suspending it. Like, disable the login for a day, but I am still on the platform. The electric fences I put up myself never work.
This is all anecdotal but I committed social media digicide a short while ago because I didn’t like how it was affecting my life.
Constantly checking for likes, feeling an urge to participate in conversations to feel like “an important voice”. I got to the point where it wasn’t just directly affecting me but also the amount of attention I was giving my kids had dropped enough that I was mad at myself for becoming “that dad”.
I made sure the github stayed live (with some pointers towards currently supported alternatives) so that anyone relying on that (now redundant) work wouldn’t be left high and dry - other than that I just quietly took my online presence down.
I feel like I’ve lost nothing and have been much happier since.
I can see how this could weigh on some people, and everyone's situation is different, but in my case it was just slices of other people's political views and (more often than not) photos of their pets and their lunch.
In my case I just figured if I've lost touch with people over the years there's probably a reason. I don't mean that in any ill or dramatic way, and it's equally true from their side too.
I'm not sure it's that different from an amicable break-up with a partner in that you can naturally drift apart from other people and say "hey you're going that way, I'm going this way, best of luck with everything".
Honestly I thought losing connections with people I actually did have some history with and knew well many years ago was going to be the unfortunate cost of getting off of Facebook. As it turns out, not so much. Clinging too much to the past wastes the present, and life isn't that long to begin with.
That last part really hit me. Since deleting Instagram there’s definitely people I haven’t talked too but I wonder if it would’ve been beneficial to talk to them at all. Am I missing out?
I'd still have an FB social account if I could have disabled Messenger; people insisted on messaging me there even though I'd log in like once per month. I deleted my actual FB just to get people to stop trying to contact me on Messenger, because it was impossible to turn off.
Simple solution : random password that you don’t save anywhere. Now you must rely on account recovery to log back in. If you feel more safe, you can also print it and store it in a drawer :)
Lots of young adult catholics in my area have started including social media in their list of things to practice will over (to improve well being, grow in empathy, etc.).
E.g. It has been a regular practice for the last two millennia to fast on Friday from some subset of enjoyable activity.
It’s interesting to watch ancient cultures start to contemplate social media and suggest healthy behaviors towards it, a technology that is only about a decade old.
I have to keep reminding myself that the world we live in is an infant, and social media will exist in a century, but our relationship to it will be very different than it is now.
That would be awesome! The catholic church certainly has the resources to do that kind of thing, and churches are already like a sort of social network, so they have a very captive audience. They are in a unique position to create a social network that doesn't need to monetize through any kind of ads or data collection, and I imagine their status as a religious organization can even get them tax breaks.
The app stay focused on Android is great for this. It blocks opening apps or websites based on a schedule. Really helped kill my endless scroll habit. I found I do the empty fridge thing with these apps. I'm sure there's others on ios too
I want this for League of Legends. Disable my account for 2 days, one week, one month etc. I don't want to lose the progress I made in the game by deleting the account completely but I also want to focus on my finals for a while.
Surely it's like saying bottles need to be harder to get into because I like drinking alcohol too much...
Or cars need to accelerate slower because I love speeding and can't resist permanently holding down the accelerator pedal, even at risk to my own health and wellbeing
I don’t think this is a fair comparison. Phones are on people essentially 24/7 now, there are few/no times where you are not connected. For alcoholism, a fair comparison would be a flask that buzzes to remind you it’s there and tell you there’s something you should check inside.
Telling people to just ‘develop self control’ is extremely hard when on a societal scale, these services are becoming increasingly interwoven with daily life and participation in wider society. Opting out is an active choice to move against the grain, and you could suffer socially for it. This isn’t something that should weigh on one person alone.
All choices have effects. If you are suffering mentally due to your activities and cutting out causes "social suffering", surely it is an active choice where you decide one is greater than the other?? And even more so in the case of your mental health - what's more important, your mental health or seeing photos of your friend's dog?
What even is "suffering socially"? If I am an alcoholic and decide to quit drinking, is it the local pub's fault if I won't see my friends again? I am surely "suffering socially" as all my friends are at the pub.
An individual's actions weigh on that individual alone. I don't see how you could say otherwise? If I walk out of a room of people, who else should it weigh on? I walked out of the room.
If I leave the local bowling club, is it their fault I won't see them as often? I quit the bowling club, not the other way around.
You are right that some things are interwoven but they are not mandatory. People survived in the 1980s without the Internet, without Facebook and without Instagram. How did they ever manage??
Or are you saying that I need to use Instagram to be able to live a normal life? If so, I don't exist because I don't have an Instagram account. And that was a deliberate decision - it weighed on me alone.
If we replaced the word "Instagram" with "AOL", you can see how faddish such "necessary" tech is and how blown-out-of-proportion the issues with not having an account are. Imagine the horror of not being on AOL in the 90s... yet people survived. Or replace "Instagram" with "Bebo" or "MySpace" - is it still necessary to have such things??
We add deliberate friction to dangerous activities all the time. Speed bumps, for example, for those who lack the “self control” to follow the posted limits.
Ironically, a large portion of people are willing to support legislation like the Brady bill which would make it legal to go after the manufacturer of guns which are used in mass shootings.
Many people in america do blame colt, Winchester, Remington, etc for ever even manufacturing these weapons in the first place. I've heard that the UK is also very strict about knives so maybe some of that can happen there too...
There are all manner of addictions that can be "assisted"/made worse with technology. The solution isn't in the technology though - it surely starts with the person??
Should my toaster warn me if I use it too often in an hour? I might put weight on with all that toast I am eating.
Should my coffee machine warn me if I make too many coffees? I might have too much caffeine and suffer heart problems.
Should my app warn me if I use it too much? I might be a workaholic and spend too much time in Excel.
Who is in control of the toaster? Me or the toaster?
Who is in control of the coffee machine? Me or the coffee machine?
Who is in control of the phone/PC/app? Me or the phone/PC/app?
Ease of access to the thing you're addicted to is a big factor for relapse probability. That's one reason why it's so hard for people with food addiction to lose weight. Developing self control is a lot harder than you make it seem.
But developing self control isn't impossible, else EVERYBODY would be "addicted" to all manner of things - alcohol, smoking, food, sex, shopping, hoarding - all of them.
As these things aren't experienced by everybody, there must be a possibility that self control can be cultivated. It also is supported by laws that punish you for lack of self-control: murder in the case of rage, stealing in the case of greed etc.
In all cases I am sure the addiction-help courses encourage you to not use/take the thing you are addicted to. They are pushing towards self control, else it'd be a pointless thing to undertake.. In this case it's totally possible to just not use the app - uninstall it, or don't launch it, or don't pick up your phone.
Buy a cheap smart wristband and only enable important notifications to cut out the noise?
I wonder if lack of notification lights is anything to do with it? About 20 years ago the Nokias etc. had notification lights and even the early Android phones had them, which meant you knew to look at it as it gently flashed. They seem to have fallen out of popularity and so people now look at their phone all of the time just in case there is something they have missed, and then develop a habit of looking, which only gets worse and worse. You end up training yourself to do the habit, just like biting your nails, or a nervous tick where you scratch your head at certain times.
If the phone was off all of the time until something actually important happened (ie a notification light), or you developed the skill to only look at it at set times throughout the day perhaps that'd help.
If not, then surely ALL apps need a "take a break" feature built in. I mean, I could be spending way too much time inside Notepad... or YouTube... or VLC...
Is Notepad, YouTube and VLC to blame if I spend all the time looking at them??
Or is it my fault?
Perhaps I should take responsibility for constantly using Notepad, YouTube and VLC instead of blaming the app.
