A 30-Day Digital Detox

The challenge of a 25-year old graduate student moving away from the digital world

I’m an old soul, clearly. Friends make fun that I try, quite useless I might add, to escape the virtual realities of our digital world. I haven’t had Facebook in over an year and half which, nowadays, it’s pretty much a decade lost on new features.

My transition to a world without Facebook was very organic. I was getting tired of entering the same ‘old’ discussions with what I perceived to be close-minded people, I didn’t want to see sad photos of disasters exploited for human commiseration and I certainly didn’t want to see another friend or relative joining polemic groups or sharing fake news online. It was getting tiresome.

I had a month-long trip coming ahead of me, so I decided that enough was enough and I wasn’t going to have Facebook on my phone anymore (I still used it on my laptop). I went to the trip, I spent a whole month Facebook-free, discussion-free. When I got back home, not once I felt the need to enter the website again. So after a couple of months not using it anymore, I decided for the ‘unthinkable’ these days: I deleted my account.

I could have opted for keeping my info and just not using it anymore, but in reality I was simply fed up. We don’t need to convince ourselves anymore that Facebook is weird, it mines your personal information, and it can be dangerous for your safety: examples abound. So I wanted out the devil’s agreement. I deleted my account, spent two weeks receiving ‘heart-felt’ emails from Facebook saying how many people (that didn’t care about me) would miss me (when I also didn’t care about them). Two weeks, and they finally did it. Thanks Goddess.

2018 sped through fast. I’m on my Masters, so you get the idea. Life was rushing through experiments, conferences, and presentations. Meanwhile, I discovered a newfound love for wildlife photography, and started posting photos on Instagram of the lovely little birds and mammals I was finding during my field work.

Soon I was going downhill again. I wanted the likes.

You’re been hypocrite if you don’t go into Facebook and Instagram and check if your photo / video / snarky comment has got more attention, more likes, more shares. We’ve all done it! We become accustomed, chained to it. We check and check our empty screens, dying for that little dopamine release. I was comparing myself to others. I was envying all the stationary products my favorite accounts were showing off. I was becoming the version of myself I didn’t want to be anymore, and that’s why I’d left Facebook. So maybe it was time to leave Instagram as well.

But as a creature of [trying to break bad] habits, I decided only leaving Instagram wasn’t cutting it anymore. I need a not-so-quick-fix to my fixation with digital media. And from the bubbling popularity of a particular way of approaching digital life, I learned there was a book promising to teach you to do just that: Digital Minimalism.

The book by Cal Newport has attracted quite attention on its own and I don’t purpose to discuss it here. I read it, I thought about it, and decided to try the Digital Detox.

To spend 30 days without any digital media that you don’t absolutely have to use.

Game On.

Pre-detox: Mindful reflection

I deleted over 20 apps on my phone. It does sound a lot to me, but I understand people live in a much more ‘app’ world, with dozens of different utilities on their phones. Off with YouTube, Gmail, Telegram, games, Ifood, UberEats, Chrome, etc.

I stayed with Gmail and Whatzapp (quite popular in Brazil for texting) because my academic life pretty much revolves around these two. Gmail I was going to check 2 / 3 times a week, and enter Whatzapp for 10 minutes every two days.

I had no idea what was going to happen, and decided to write up my thoughts on it every week. Below I present you an edited version of those notes (I write a lot).

Week One

Indeed, time goes by slower. By the end of the working day I was suddenly aware of all the time I spent previously wasting on digital apps. Now I had long hours ahead of me where I could anything and thus, didn’t know what to do.

I still feel the need to keep checking my phone. In fact, I went to the lengths of checking the weather app on a rate that would be only explainable if I worked on the field.

I was definitively bored. The idea of the detox is to explore fulfilling ways to spend your time. But the graduate life of a scientist is hectic, and I found myself only reading. A lot.

Saturday was a particularly hard day. I just got my period, it was an usual cold night and I suddenly realise I didn’t have that many friends I could just call and talk.

I lighted up an incense and smoked while read. Then, smoothed by both smokes, I realised maybe I didn’t want to leave the house. Maybe the serenity of reading a book Saturday night was exactly what I needed. If I was scrolling Instagram, I would probably feel jealous of friends and acquaintances hanging out in parties and bars. But I was happy with staying home and reading.

Fear of missing out is real, but only if you keep feeding it.

Week Two

FOMO [fear of missing out] kept creeping in my thoughts, but by the end of the second week I wasn’t feeling it that much. Although I reached a rather hard truth, that you are not as important for most people as you would like to believe, boredom was at bay. And I spent more time talking with my good friends, the ones without I would surely miss.

For the first time in the experiment, I went to a meeting to discover in site that it was cancelled. Alas, they had announced a few hours prior by Whatzapp, haven’t I got it? Not even email, they used texting. It set a precedent for me to check for upcoming meetings before hand on the app, but that was it. I lost a couple of hours of my life but the world didn’t end. Everything was kind of fine.

Instagram was something that surprised me. I thought I was going to miss it dearly. But I was missing more the aspect of connecting with long-distance friends than the whole “let-me-post-this-and-see-how-many-likes-will-get” business.

I think I’ll loose some ‘friendships’ by the end. If that happens, we can call it something that never was. Maybe its part of a growing process.

When bored, pet cats.

Week Three

By the middle of the week Instagram had made its big change of removing likes from the app and everyone around me was kind of freaking out, telling me all about it and discussing the pros and cons. I was almost oblivious to it, deciding in my mind whether I would in fact go back to the app or not.

I tried to engage into a conversation with a friend’s friend during lunch at my house; she would respond in only one-word sentences, while munching on pasta with one hand and scrolling with her phone on the other. It wasn’t like I had interrupted her mid-phone moment. We were talking and suddenly she took her phone out of the table and started scrolling. Almost ignoring me completely. Something that would be definitively rude is now a normal behaviour. It still baffles me. When did we started to see this as normal? Maybe a couple of years, if most. Which probably means I’m only been a Scrooge to everyone else.

But I can’t see only the positive sides of this type of all-the-time connection. Friends come to visit you and the first thing they ask is the Wi-Fi password. I tried to pitch a phone-free social gathering at my house with my boyfriend, and he dismissed it saying I couldn’t interfere with people’s free will. But what kind of zombie free will is this?

Week Four

With friends visiting for two weeks, routine was as probable as a flying cow. I caught myself wishing to look into my phone, because for several social moments everyone was doing it. We had a gathering at my house. Beer in one hand, phone in the other. How can I compete with the attention-sucking kind of the digital apps? I kept waging battles over them, and lost.

My Final Thoughts

It’s no coincidence my notes got shorter with the last two weeks. I’m exhausted of having friends at home that don’t engage with me as much as with everyone else in their phones. I wouldn’t mind if that’s what they are doing with their free time, but no. Every. Single. Waking. Moment.

Maybe you think my friends are extreme, or I’m being too unreasonable. But think about it. When was the last time you enjoyed a meal with friends without one, two or all of you scrolling through their phones at some point of the meal? Do this experiment, I can wait.

In the end, I went back to YouTube, but I developed some rules. For starters, I haven’t got YT on my phone; I’m only allowed to watch it on my laptop or on the TV, which removes the temptation of watching videos laying down in my bed. I went back to Instagram but realized I was sick of it and for now I’m away again. Maybe one day I come back and post irregularly some wildlife photos. Maybe I’ll never use Instagram again. And that’s fine.

In a nutshell, having this conscious decision-making process is enlightening. I suggest everyone to give it a try.