No matter how many times I do a 30 days detox, as in delete all social media apps from my phone, I keep relapsing into doom scrolling. But this time, I did things differently. I also deleted all OTT apps, and did not pay my WIFI bill.
Here are 6 things to fix the social media nightmare.
Remember the purpose of social media
When I first started posting my artworks online, back in 2016, it was just facebook. I wasn't an instagram person or had a youtube channel. I didn't even record any works back then. Some of my friends recommended me to start posting in instagram for better reach. So I installed the app in 2017, initially the response was ok, then after a few months it dropped. My friends who usually liked my posts also started ignoring. And the ever changing algorithm, with insta's ambitious feature updates, I couldn't keep up with adjusting to all of it.
"My Job is to make art, not to be pleasing a social media app's algorithm"
2. The time lost in scrolling
My reality was shaken when i made a simple math to calculate all the time I've spent in scrolling since 2012.
Say I use social media and youtube for at least 3 hours a day, 3x365= 1095 hours in a year.
If i just take the waking hours of a day, say 16 hours, and removing the travel time/food/refreshments, giving it a 2 hours, I get 14 hours a day of actual waking hours.
1095/14 = 78 days or 2.6 months a year of just screentime.
2.6 x 12 years = 31.28 months or 2.6 years of just screentime.
Considering all the time I spent in binge watching web series during lockdown, and even more hours of social media after college got over, I can very well bring it to 3 years.
I could have done a full-time course in that time, or made hundreds of artworks.
"Keep social media less than 30 minutes a day"
3. The lost flow of thoughts
These short content reels were nothing but a nuisance. I never went into the exploe page until before the lockdown, but then when i started scrolling, they kept coming on and on and on. All of those random topics keeps firing different emotions to be surging simultaneously in a short time, and remember all these emotions are caused be release of different hormones in the brain.
This constant extreme secretion of various hormones kinda short-circuit the thoughts, as in, you wander off from what you were thinking before you started scrolling, and you end up in a different line of thoughts after a few minutes. This disruption in thoughts by the distractions you caused, will damage your attention span very badly.
"You need uninterrupted deep line of thoughts to clear your brain fog"
4. Too much power in one app
Imagine if one day someone hacks social media companies and delete all the accounts and data?
Infact, the next world war could very much be hacking internet and gps. All those fancy reels, thousands of followers, everything lost in a second. Even your fulltime art business can be lost. At least i've lived a life before smartphones, so i'm tracing back my ways of life to pre-smartphone era.
They even force us to use trending music for better reach, even when you don't like it. They dump all their new features on the content creators, they decide what content gets viral, they change our jobs from artists to content creators, they make us work for their app's popularity, they make us the pawns of causing screen addiction to millions of people. I mean at least what originality can an Artist have when they decide what form of content gets maximum reach.
"They can't be dictating what our choice of presenting ourselves should be like."
5. The love-hate relationship
In a 30 day detox, when i wanted to just make art, there is this anxiety of not posting completed artwork online. Of course i have a physical art gallery to display, but undoubtedly people can see it first online from anywhere. And that duration of not posting can disrupt possible reach. And with starting the art career in the digital era, I got used to post artworks regularly, that it gives a sense of closure of that particular project only after posting.
But parallelly, my post likes are below 20 per post. Whereas random pages get 100s and 1000s of likes. This lack of response makes it depressing to be making any art further. When i think may be my art needs improvement, which i think i did in the next work, but that too gets the same response, even paid promotions don't bring traffic into my page, i totally get frustrated to keep going in this field.
"Social media is just a tool to showcase art, not a scale to measure how good your art is."
6. The elephant in the room !
This is the outrageous thing of all, when I calculated how much data I've been using per day without OTT or social media, by just using mobile data. It turned out I only used 800mb to 1GB per day!
I've been paying Rs.1079 per month for WIFI for the past 7 years, that is about Rs.90,636 for data that I never needed!
I was never a series person, lockdown ruined me. If i had just the mobile data, then my usage would have been in control, I wouldn't have spent hours doom scrolling, I wouldn't have been mindlessly running my days, i wouldn't be depressed most of the time, I wouldn't have wasted 3 years in scrolling random useless content.
So I've cancelled my WIFI at home/studio, and only have a Rs400 plan at the gallery for using my laptop to update my website and mobile apps. I mean, imagine if i saved all that money!
"You don't need WIFI if you don't have a laptop based work"
Your lifetime is limited, be wise to spend that priceless moments on meaningful activities. Learn that guitar, write that book, keep up that gym routine, get that morning sun light, talk to that old friend, sleep on time and become the Artist you always wanted to be!
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