

Stuff accumulates in people’s lives because of the worry of “What if I need this one day”. Ryan Nicodemus had a system for identifying and getting rid of the things in his life that he didn’t need. He packed up all his things in boxes and for the next 30 days, if he needed something, he went to the box, got it out and whatever was left in the box at the end of those 30 days, he realized wasn’t adding much value to his life.

Apply this to your social media choices. Take a hiatus from all social media for 30 days. Don’t deactivate and don’t announce (important), just stop using. After 30 days of this ask yourself two questions about each of the services you quit.

Would the last thirty days have been notably better if I had been able to use this service? Did people care that I wasn’t using the service?

If the answer is “no” to each of the questions, drop it. Otherwise, examine your time and decide for yourself.

The key is to free yourself from the convincing marketing at the center of all these platforms which is if you don’t use them you might miss out. Once you go through, you can determine for yourself if you really did miss out.

Lastly, just an interesting note on the interactions on social media. If you have 200 followers on a platform, it can be easy to believe that your activities on these services are important because people volunteered to hear what you have to say. But think of how you get new followers. You follow someone and they in turn follow you. You trade likes to keep engagement up.

“I’ll pay attention to what you say if you pay attention to what I say - regardless of its value”

By dropping off these services, you can test the reality of your status as a content producer.

So by taking a hiatus, this experiment should give a more grounded view of the role social media plays in your daily existence. Maybe you find they’re derailing you from important things, maybe they are at the core of your existence. Either way, you won’t know until you try life without them.

Don’t Use the Internet to Entertain Yourself

Arnold Bennett - an Early twentieth century English writer - wrote about the new class of the “White collar worker”. It was at this time when it became possible to have a job where you spent a set amount of time in an office and received a steady salary in return - the now typical 8 hour work day.

Bennett noted that beyond the 8 hours people were working, they had about 16 hours left in the day. However, he saw that many people didn’t recognize it’s potential. He said in his 1910 self help classic, “How to live on 24 hours a day” that

“The great and profound mistake which my typical man makes in regard to his day is even though he doesn’t enjoy his work and see it as something to get through, he persists in looking upon those hours from ten to six as ‘the day’ to which the ten hours preceding them and the six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue. This is an attitude that is utterly illogical and unhealthy”

He suggests looking at those sixteen hours as a “day within a day” and spend it as an aristocrat would - performing rigorous self-improvement - a task primarily involving reading great literature and poetry.

This is a little antiquated but the idea of doing something structured and productive like reading, or a sport or class, or even spending time with a friend is better and more productive for the mind and soul than spending your leisure time on clicking and surfing through least common denominator digital entertainment. You’d likely fall into despair at the lack of progress in this area of human development.

So try to set some time, no internet, read a book, have an activity, I’d say play a video game - Newport may disagree - but as long as it’s deliberate and with determination, it’s better than giving your attention to social media designed to grab your attention and keep you on. Also, remember to embrace boredom. If you’re in the line at the store or on the bus etc. don’t fall back to social media to give yourself something to do.