Digital Addiction

flat screen computer monitor turned on beside black keyboard

Reclaiming my brain from the pull of the Feed.

So I deleted Twitter off my phone yesterday. I really did it. It just took a chapter or two of Digital Minimalism to convince me that I needed a break.

Getting rid of Facebook on my phone about eighteen months ago was one of the healthiest things that I’ve ever done. It was such a time suck and I spent way too much time on the platform arguing with people. One the one hand, it did lead to me writing quite a bit, and probably lead to my political career, but between the toxic people that I had connections with on there, and all of the privacy problems that were going on there, it was just too much. I had to leave. Given the Cambridge Analytica scandal and all the other bad news about Zuckerberg and they way they manage things over there, I’ve had no desire to go back. I’ve logged on a few times to deal with some messages or check on some family members, but I don’t browse the feed at all.

I always considered Twitter a bit different, since I was curating my feed, and it wasn’t just random friend of friend connections. Just because someone wanted to follow me, I didn’t have to follow them. Or vice versa. I still see Twitter as a source of news and information, and being able to remain pseudonymous was part of the main draw as well. Still, I spent way to much time on it, picking up my phone whenever I’m idle. Watching TV shows with the family, sitting out on the deck, or out somewhere waiting in public.

So I removed it Sunday morning and went about my day. The absence was felt immediately. I found my phone in my hand throughout the day, and I found myself wondering why I was holding it. Then I realized that the habit was still there, but I had short-circuited it with the app gone. It happened several times during random moments, like waking from a dream. I took the kids to a nature park to get out for an hour or two, and felt the urge to pull my phone out while the kids were finishing their lunch. No need. I set the slip and slide up for the girls outside and there’s that habit again. Nothing to do. Watching a movie after dinner, sitting on the couch, I’m always checking my feed. Instead, I worked on the Sunday crossword.

Today’s going to be interesting since I don’t have the same kind of blocks setup on my workstations. There are ones out there that will whitelist or blacklist certain sites on a timer. I’ve heard of people using them to make sure they get their work done, but I never went that far with it. There’s lots of downtime during the day, when I’m waiting for a download or some sort of progress bar, when I pull up Twitter and browse the feed. That’s going to be the real test. I wonder if I can redirect that energy to something productive, like doing a lesson on LinkedIn learning, FreeCodeAcademy, or doing one of the competitive coding challenge sites? I have been wanting to take a look at Rust…

I do have a project to finish, that is going to take several weeks of deep work. I’m really going to have to delve into WordPress’s innards and really figure out how the theme system works, then actually develop a design for a site. I had been attempting to figure out how this site’s current theme had been developed, but it’s such a mess, and I don’t know if I have it in me. All of the site’s functionality was just dumped into WordPress’s TwentySixteen theme, without even a child theme setup. And the dev hardcoded all of the scripts for Google Analytics and everything else directly in the template files. I’m got fifty four plugins, and trying to figure out which ones are needed to for the existing site is a mess.

Anyways. There was one moment yesterday when I desperately wished I still had Twitter on my phone. I was driving the kids to the aforementioned nature park, travelling down a two lane divided highway, when there was some sort of traffic slowdown. There was a car pulled off to the right just before an onramp. As I passed it I thought we were clear, but the cars on my left were still slowing up. There, up ahead, was a black man on a horse, just trotting his way down the highway. And there, the perfect tweet formed in my mind: “Is it legal to ride a horse on the parkway? Asking for a friend.”

Well, maybe not. But the next few days will be an interesting experiment to see what happens when I reclaim my brain. Will it unlock my creative superpowers, or have astonishing effects on my mental health and well-being? Probably not anything that that dramatic. Being in the moment certainly won’t hurt, and redirecting that nervous energy somewhere else will most likely be helpful.

Here we go.