time spent offline

“How are things in America?” my mother who lives in Canada asks me just like she does every time we talk over the phone. By things she means COVID numbers. I tell her, like I always do, I don’t know, I don’t watch the news. She laughs and tells me my aunt, who lives in Ethiopia, has been telling her about the millions of COVID cases being reported in America. “The news finds you even from Ethiopia,” she laughs again. I quit the news back in 2016; the news still finds me.

After years of effort to spend less time online, and an intense loathing for the digital world, I still remain entranced by its trappings of entertainment, novelty, and escape. The internet hasn’t been enjoyable since 2016. It is as if somebody programmed it with a set of scripts, on repeat on an endless loop, and forgot the code to make changes. It has been the same ol’ mind-numbingly boring storyline for years now, and yet I can’t look away. I can’t resist the internet. I take the blame, but only partially. Yes, there is so much more to the internet than the same boring bits regurgitated on Reddit.

But there’s a reason we spend three hours a day on social media and not learning a new language on the Duolingo app: One is irresistible, the other, well, it requires effort. When it’s blocked off, put away— out of sight, out of mind— I don’t desire it. I don’t look for it. But once it’s accessible, available, present, all bets are off. I can’t resist a good hour or two spent mindlessly scrolling through information I won’t remember merely a moment later. What was the joke I just read that was funny? Who knows, who cares; there’s more where that came from— scroll, scroll, scroll. What makes something that has lost its appeal half a decade ago and brings less joy than a stick of celery still irresistible?

An experience for one: experiencing something, a moment, a thing, an event, without the need to capture, share, or post about it online. The idea occurred to me while at the cottage enjoying the beautiful view of the lake. I should take a picture, I think; to maybe share on my blog or on instagram, or you know for memory sake. The last part is a lie: I got over 10,700 pictures in my camera roll that I rarely, if ever, look at. I decide against it. This is an experience just for me, I think, and enjoy the view, the moment, the feeling. It’s all good.

When I quit social media, the most wonderful thing happened: I stopped thinking about posting any and every mildly interesting thing that I was doing on social media: a meal, a song, a scenic area. The internal dialogue of how to capture a moment and what to caption it, or how to word a complex thought into a perfect tweet, that occupied much of my thought process went away; and with it, the thought of how it will be received by my followers vanished too. I quit Instagram long before Twitter, so I rarely took pictures anymore, and if I did take photos it was often one or two for memory sake but being on Twitter, I was constantly thinking about sharing my thoughts, and some pictures too. My inner dialogue often went like this: Oooh, girl, this would be a bomb picture to post on Twitter, or lyric speaks exactly to how I really feel, or must share all the oh-so-funny-and-interesting-and-tweet-worthy thoughts I have: And boy, did I have some thoughts to share. Then I deleted my Twitter account and with it social media altogether.