28 Days of Doomscroll Detox

Photo by Soulful Pizza: https://www.pexels.com/photo/contemporary-smartphone-against-blurred-background-6753220/

Sunday, March 1, was the first day in a month that I checked my social media accounts.

Unfortunately, it was also Day Two of a new Middle East war that was bound to result in an absolute firestorm on the internet—a firestorm I had no desire to see or take part in publicly. I was fine just getting the facts from trusted news sources and having private existential thoughts.

I checked my Instagram DM’s to watch some of the Reels some friends had sent me in February. I scrolled Facebook and Instagram for about five minutes each and caught up on some posts that had a fair amount of importance to me.

Then I closed the apps.

And found myself not wanting to go back on for the rest of the day.

A question—one of many—echoed in my mind: “Is this it? Surely there’s a better way to be social on the internet that doesn’t require being dragged into an endless doomscroll, culture bubble, or echo chamber.”

Unfortunately, the truth is social media has a chokehold on our society.

If you want to update lots of people about a life event all at once, you post about it.

If you want to get a rush of satisfaction from ranting and watching people react, you post about it.

If you want to share creative or professional work, you post about it.

If you want to write a mini-essay about a way to fix the world, you post about it.

If you want to offload possessions without taking them to a thrift store or hosting a yard sale, you post about it.

There’s a reason why so many people still use social media platforms, even though there’s also a small but ever-growing population of people who are rejecting it.

Other options do exist. The folks at Substack are increasingly marketing themselves as a social media alternative that a lot of famous people are already on. YouTube has added social features, and they offer a lot more user control, including the ability to pay for an ad-removing subscription (Meta and Musk could never).

But Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter still own a massive portion of the social internet, and they’re designed to trap people’s eyes and convince them their feeds are the best way to say or perform something to a lot of people all at once. Because of this, when I’m not on social media, I risk not hearing certain things from people in my community because they assume I’ve seen their posts online.

And yet…I guarantee the significant things I missed out on are in the minority of content that I might’ve consumed in February. My social media feed is otherwise full of animal humor, random memes, church content, and various kinds of religious-political posts.

How much of this content do I actually need? And how much time is it going to force me to spend with my neck bent down over my little pocket screen? I think half the problems my chiropractor works on for me are the result of “text neck”. I’m not kind to the upper part of my spine. Or my eyes, which are already looking at a computer screen all day at work.

I’ve decided to take my social media fast further. It’s my chosen Lent “deprivation” this year, and I’ll be breaking my fast on Sundays according to the tradition. Hopefully continuing this detox until Easter will give me more time to wrestle with how I want to proceed—or not—with social media.