Musings and Meanderings

There’s something rotten festering in our society. We can all feel it. Rising depression and anxiety rates, a loss of general empathy and human kindness, a distinct lack of community and connection. We are dying deaths of a thousand cuts via an endless parade of subscription services, overconsumption of unnecessary things, and the whittling away of our free time and energy by apps that seek to monopolize our attention (and our data).

Many label this as “the world we live in now,” while still begrudgingly participating in it. There seems to be a strange new unspoken social contract: that we accept the new technologies (and the alternative realities they create) we are given without much question or pushback. Social media, gross breaches and neglects of privacy via data collection and leakage, artificial intelligence, the encroachment on algorithms from seemingly every corner of our lives, even the “smart”-ification of the most inane objects (do we really need smart ovens?).

Most of us don’t even really seem to like these things, and yet we continue to participate in these new technologies that are thrust upon society. Why? Convenience. Convenience is the sugar that coats the poison pill. Do we really need smart ovens? No. But it sure is convenient to have the oven turn off when its done cooking, and send you a notification. It’s convenient to order food (at a premium price) and have it delivered to our homes instead of making it or going for a drive to go get it. It’s convenient to have unlimited access to a library of tens of thousands of movies and TV shows and music albums in our pockets. All our modern-day conveniences have coagulated themselves into a series of inter-connected devices, ensuring we have a seamless connection between every single activity and task in our day.

This convenience is killing us. It has become a price that is getting to be too high to bear anymore. We’ve been boiled like frogs in a pot over the past ~15 years (my personal turning point for when iPhones started becoming more common), slowly adapted to life with smart devices and apps until we can’t even fathom life without them. But in the grand scheme of things, 15 years is not even that long. That’s not even a generation. We are not in as deep as our digital prisons would like us to believe.

So what can we do? It’s as simple as quitting smoking: we just quit. This is somewhat of a joke, if you’ve ever been a smoker or any other kind of addict. Quitting is easy on paper, but the very nature of addiction makes it extremely difficult, and many people fail repeatedly or never even try in the first place, despite knowing the risks. If it was as easy as setting something down and never picking it back up again, we’d all be doing it yesterday.

Instead, we rationalize and justify. “What if I get anxious and I don’t have Netflix on my phone to calm me down? What if I miss out on a neat local band because I’m not on Instagram anymore? What if I really need to look up something on Reddit?” These are all examples from my own life. I’ve been a smoker and an addict, and I’m also a screen addict. But I’m here to give some hope.

You can, indeed, just walk away. You will feel anxiety, and withdrawals. I’ve even felt the “phantom buzz” of my missing smartwatch. You will notice a distinct loss of convenience. You will feel frustration at the friction of having to do mundane things, to have to wait till you get home to look up who won the Stanley Cup in 2022 (I at least know this by heart), to not immediately catch up on the newest season of a show. The disconnection of not being on social media, peering into everyone else’s lives.

That disconnection is a farce. It is a lie that we have been fed to keep us trapped. It is the apps and the devices themselves that make us disconnected, then drip feed an inferior substitute so that we stay clinging to the nozzle, waiting for the next droplet of a like, a comment, a private message.

So, of course I’ve said that you can just walk away? But this probably feels like an overwhelming concept. There’s too much to let go of, too much planning to put into it, too much terrifying free time and energy. That’s why I’ve decided to write this series of articles. I’m hardly an expert; I am deep in the early stages of my detox and life rebuild myself. I don’t even think of myself as a particularly insightful person. But I’m putting in the legwork, and actively doing the things. I hope that maybe I can help inspire and guide other people to a more grounded and genuine life, and away from this sociological sickness that we’ve been thrust into.

And if you don’t want to leave the walled garden of apps/social media/smart devices yet; you think all this sounds excessive or overblown: that’s fine. To each their own. But I think this movement to unplug is only going to keep gaining steam, especially as everything online rapidly marches towards complete enshittification. You might find yourself feeling a new kind of FOMO as more and more people leave the algorithms and social media apps behind, until the only things left are paid influencers, brands, and AI bots.

I’ve yet to outline a grand overarching plan for this series. They’re more “as the mood strikes” musings and thoughts. The next article will for sure be about the things you can expect when doing a digital detox: emotions, experiences, etc. Then probably more practical information about steps to take, alternatives, and useful tech. We’ll see where it goes, but I’m glad you’re along for the ride.