Digital detox

The weight of my first iPod Touch settled into my palm in 2012 and has never budged since.

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That is, until now.

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At the beginning of this semester, I mustered the conviction to delete all my superfluous apps, put my phone down and actually experience life the way it’s meant to be lived.

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I don’t mean to sound like a boomer; there is nothing inherently wrong with social media, the internet or technology. I am grateful for the unrestricted access to the internet I had in the late aughts through the mid-2010s; so much of my personality and interests can be traced to the 2014 Tumblr account I ran with the intransigent fervor only a mentally ill 12-year-old could possess.

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I hope it’s clear that the anti-online sentiments I express here are not coming from a place of moral superiority. The call is very much coming from inside the house. The online world has stitched itself into the fabric of our lives, and while a lot of good has come from that, it has come at a cost — a cost our generation has yet to fully grasp.

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Before I quit social media, my screen time averaged anywhere from nine to 12 hours a day. It wasn’t uncommon for my total for the week to be over 70 hours. While everyone’s internet vice is different, for me YouTube was the biggest contributor.

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I would wake up in the morning and immediately open the app. I’d spend anywhere from five to 20 minutes scrolling through my feed until I found a video sufficient enough to fill the silence in my brain as I got ready for the day.

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I needed it.

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Brushing my teeth, taking a shower, walking to class, eating meals, doing homework, even going to sleep all required something — YouTube, Spotify, a podcast — playing in my ears to distract me from my own thoughts.

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I was terrified of silence.

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Silence meant thinking, and thinking meant spiraling into existential dread. I didn’t want to be reminded of the passage of time. I didn’t want to confront the fact that to achieve my goals I actually had to work on them instead of just daydreaming about accomplishing them.

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It was so much easier to ignore these realities by drowning myself in algorithmically curated content than it was to face my problems head-on. As long as there was enough outside noise ricocheting around my brain, I wouldn’t be able to hear the alarms blaring.

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As much as I may want to sometimes, I can’t ignore reality forever. As it turns out, tricking your conscious into ignorant complacency is much easier than tricking your subconscious into it. The dread always found its way into my bones. It lingered at the base of my skull, waiting to strike the moment I let my defenses down.

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In an attempt to avoid the dread, I sunk further into my phone. My brain was like a sponge, soaking in whatever information the various algorithms spit out for me. Twitter knew which posts would anger me, TikTok knew which news updates would upset me and Instagram knew what pictures would guilt trip me, all in an attempt to get me to engage — to feed the machine with my time, attention and emotional instability.

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These apps thrive off the dissatisfaction of their users. And boy was I dissatisfied. Never once have I logged off one of these apps and felt better about myself or the state of the world around me.

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I knew there was a problem. I didn’t want to be on my phone all day, but I couldn’t gather enough courage to do anything about it. I wasn’t the only one. In high school, my friends and I would joke about being “screenagers” and make self-deprecating comments about how we’d “die without Twitter.”

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These conversations persist even now, usually in the form of casual complaints about getting distracted from homework by TikTok or jokes about our waning attention span. Most of us are in agreement that our screen time is a problem, yet very few of us ever seriously consider changing our online habits.

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Like a raccoon with its fist in a trap, all I had to do was let go to be free, but I couldn’t bear the loss. This treasure I held so tightly was hurting me — killing me — and yet letting go felt like its own death in a way. The line between the real world and the virtual one had become so muddled that giving up the latter felt like losing the former.

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This was due to one simple fact: going completely offline just isn’t possible anymore.

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Even after I finally changed my habits, I wasn’t able to fully disconnect. The internet had already sunk too deep, fusing with my neurons until my whole self was saturated with it — sufficiently programmed.

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Instagram is the only way I can communicate with my Japanese friends, LinkedIn is (apparently) the only way a person can get a job anymore, Snapchat still holds the vast majority of my videos and pictures from high school and I quite literally need my phone to log into my school email and access my assignments.

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I couldn’t just delete these accounts; not unless I wanted to delete the connection I had between myself of the past and myself of the future (as well as my connection to getting good grades).

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That was the most terrifying part of having so much of my identity, personal connections and memories tied up in the iCloud — none of it is real.

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One of the final things I saw on Instagram before pulling the trigger and fully purging my phone was a Reel by the creator Ashing Aisulu (@its_trashling). In the video she says, “We are living in a digital fucking dark age [...] if you’re not burning discs with your songs, movies and TV series on them, guess what? They’re gone. [...] If it’s not physical, it doesn’t exist.”

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This got me thinking about just how much of our current reality is curated by our screens. As a second semester senior, I spend a lot of time thinking about the ephemeral moments I’ll never experience again after I graduate.

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I get this sense of melancholic nostalgia for the present day. Each day only happens once before it’s filed away in history. One day, we as a species will look back at this time period with the same rose-colored glasses we look at past decades. When I flip through the old scrapbooks, pictures and letters my parents saved from college, or listen to them recall old mundane moments with such tender joy, I get that creeping sense of dread congealing in my gut again.

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Where are my memories?

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Our memories?

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Sure, we have plenty of pictures, posts and archives saved on servers all around the world, but what about the little things? The things we don’t realize matter until we don’t experience them anymore. How many beautiful everyday moments have I tuned out in favor of engorging myself on my phone? What do I even do in my free time? I call myself a writer, but how much time have I dedicated to actually writing?

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There are 24 hours in a day and yet I can hardly recall what I do with any of them.

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The realization dawned on me like sitting on an ant hill: first, you see just one ant crawling up your leg, then you look closer and realize there have been thousands swarming around you the whole time. In this case, the ants are the hundreds of days I’ve wasted doom-scrolling.

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I don’t want to look back on my life and remember how I spent my youth suspended in virtual amnesia because I was too comfortable with complacency.

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The moment these thoughts solidified in my mind, I knew I had to suck it up and commit. So I did. I was worried I’d talk myself out of it if I didn’t follow through immediately, so before the doubt could fester I purged the following apps as fast as I could: YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit and Tumblr (I kept Instagram so I could keep in touch with my foreign friends, although I restricted it with a 30 minute timer).

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And just like that, I was finally free.

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The day I deleted everything, I spent the walk to class with my phone in my pocket and my headphones in my backpack.

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It was uncomfortable at first, especially when I realized that I was one of the only people walking without the aid of airpods or a phone. I felt awkward and anxious. I didn’t know what to do with my hands or where to look. My whole body felt out of place as it was forced to cohabitate with my empty thoughts.

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I knew after a lifetime of struggling with my existential dread that it wasn’t going to go away. So, I might as well just accept it. Maybe these thoughts didn’t have to be scary; maybe I could turn them into something worthwhile instead.

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I wanted to observe. I wanted to experience the walk for what it was. To listen to the wind whistle past my ears and feel the winter air chill against my cheeks in the way it always has and never will again.

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I noticed so many things I had never noticed before: the miscellaneous items scattered haphazardly over office window sills, the gray clouds that hung heavy and low between peaks of passing buildings, and the twisting silhouettes of trees flushed deep and dark against them.

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It wasn’t anything special, and yet it was precisely the mundaneness of these observations that made them so beautiful to me. There is so much forgotten beauty in the ordinary, the contemporary.

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Ever since I got off social media, my life has been so much better. I don’t mean to sound dramatic or come across like I’m proselytizing, but I am serious when I say that I’ve felt my brain chemistry change for the better.

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It’s only been about three months and yet, in that time, I’ve stopped reaching for my phone in order to appear busy. I no longer feel the need to take so many study breaks, I get less distracted and I make my bed daily. I no longer struggle to keep my apartment clean, I easily wake up earlier and — perhaps most importantly — feel much more at peace with the existentialism I have struggled with for so long.

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I would list out the negatives of going unplugged, but I genuinely don’t have any. I thought I would miss out on big cultural moments but so far that hasn’t happened. Turns out if something is that funny or that crazy, you’ll hear about it in real-life conversations.

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My screen time has gone down to an average of just four hours a week with my most used apps being Safari, iMessage and NYT Games. Without my phone atrophying me, I have finally found the missing writing time I’d previously lost to the digital ether.

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I’ve started printing out my pictures and am planning on making a scrapbook for each year of high school and college. I’m going to do something similar with all my videos by burning them on CDs. It’s not a perfect solution — pictures fade and CDs degenerate — but at least I’ll have proof to show that I was real.

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When I’m dead, I want to be survived by the fruit of my labor. I don’t want to waste the precious time I have on this earth ignoring it or ignoring myself. Shutting out your physical reality doesn’t slow down the passage of time, and it sure won’t save you from the inevitably of death.

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A small part of my heart breaks every time I stop and take a look around at the people near me,  moving through life with their heads curled into their phones. Together physically, yet isolated in their own hallucination of an online reality.

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I’m not saying I’ve got it all figured out. I’m graduating from Miami this May and still have no idea what I’m doing next. But if there is anything I do know, it’s that I owe it to myself to take this newfound freedom and use it to my advantage.

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In 2024, the weight I had been carrying for so long finally lifted. I won’t waste any more time tethered to an intangible world. Instead, I’ll look around myself to touch the world around me, listen to the voices beside me, and live a life unwasted and without regret.