A Digital Reset: This Time It's Personal
Terrilo Walls via Unsplash
I used to be what some might refer to as terminally online. When I was in this headspace, I’d try and make my life slightly more pleasant by doing small digital resets every once in a while. So, what better time to talk about new year, new me than… mid-March?
Back in 2016, I was going through a full-blown Twitter addiction. Every break I had at work, I would frantically try and catch up on what was going on. It was the third second app on my dock. That summer, we spent 30 days driving across Canada, and being with a smaller network provider meant not having consistent access to reliable data, which forced me into disconnecting for what felt like the first time ever.
Every once in a while, I like to remind myself of that and the fact that I don’t actually need social media in my life. I left Facebook in 2019, Instagram in 2020, Twitter in 2022, and Reddit last year. But when Threads, the shiny new text-first social app came out last summer, I was sucked right back into my old habits. That was until about two weeks ago when I finally bit the FOMO bullet and removed the last vestiges of social media from my phone.
In the past, I’ve talked about how adding a layer of friction between myself and whatever habit I wanted to kick worked for me. Study after study after study has shown that social media has a net negative impact on our mental health. Now, if I want to kill some time by mindless scrolling through my timelines, I have to grab my laptop and log into Mastodon/Threads each time. The result has been interesting. 1) I’ve only been bothered to check both platforms once over the last two weeks 2) I’m more inclined to pick up my Kindle and read something, and 3) my phone’s battery now lasts two full days. Friction, baby!
The flip-side to removing access to social media is that I now spend a lot more time consuming the news. Since Google Reader’s demise in 2013, I’ve been using Feedly (rss gang, rise up) and I noticed that because Feedly defaults to always showing you the number of unread articles (up to 1k, after which they append an entirely meaningless + symbol), I tend to engage in the same style of behaviour I had with Twitter/Threads/Mastodon. That might be changing with the arrival of feeeed, a new RSS reader by Nate Parrot. There’s no account, no cross-device syncing, and most importantly, no unread counter keeping me scrolling. It’s iOS only, but I hope that changes soon.
Speaking of RSS, one small update that I’m going to sneak here: I’ve removed the option to sign up for an email newsletter because I’m no longer going to do one. I felt like with the explosion of Substack (and the controversies since), I had to have one. That feeling of needing to do something as opposed to wanting is more than half the reason I stopped writing for over a year. So, if you want to see my posts in near real-time, plug my URL into any RSS app of your choice.
If you want to take your reset a bit further and consider your privacy online, here are a few extra tidbits:
Conduct a security check-up of your primary email account and remove access to tools, programs, and services you no longer use/recognize
Run your email through a service like haveibeenpwned and see if you need to update your passwords. Use a password manager like 1Password, or my personal recommendation, Bitwarden.
Mask your email online by using a DuckDuckGo email address (Android users, take it up a notch with their App Tracking Protection).
Scramble your ad tracking profile using Track This.
If you can, move your chats to Signal (WhatsApp is good enough).
Lastly, a summer project I’m currently planning is to sort through all my physical documents (which we currently have stuffed haphazardly into a box or three) and digitize them using a document scanner. This might be overkill given that Microsoft’s Office Lens is good enough, but with the WhatsApp example above, I want better than good enough.
Stay tuned for how this project turns out!
