Social Media

[nathanielbuildsatesseract]

I'm taking a few days off social media (DreamWidth excepted, of course) because I could feel it affecting my mental health, and I'm struck by how different my Internet experience is. My overall experience, frankly, because right now I don't have a whole lot specifically going on.

It's a bit like the summers during my first couple years of high school. I don't have anywhere to be, I don't have anywhere to go, and I don't have anything in particular to do. Normally—as in, as recently as yesterday morning—I would spend much this time on Tumblr or Twitter. Without that, I'm sort of at loose ends. Back in high school, I spent a lot of time online, reading assorted websites and debating in comments sections. I have no desire to do that anymore, so I'm left wondering what to do.

In practice, the answer is spending more time reading physical books in the last 24 hours than the previous week. I can't complain about this change that much. I'm also toying around with how to approach Summer NaNoWriMo (more on that later) and pondering what I should do for my thesis. But I was doing those last two already.

All told, it's a kind of strange experience. I see why I was much more open to watching TV and rereading the same books ad nauseam, to say nothing of my endless Word documents and packs of notebook paper with abandoned story ideas.

Comments

[mindstalk]

Yeah, if "social media" means "following news and arguments" more than "following things in the lives of friends" then it can easily suck up a lot of time and generate stress ("someone is wrong on the Internet, to arms!")

Did you keep a time log? Can you say how much time a day/week you were spending on social media?

[nathanielbuildsatesseract]

In general, I've found it impossible to separate the two, especially since many of my online friendships started thanks to similar political opinions. (The ones that lasted have generally involved other interests and compatible personalities.) That said, I don't really take a "to arms!" approach—far more lurking than friends and strangers probably suspect.

I don't want to incentivize spending even more time on such things so I've consciously not changed that. However, it leads to a sort of cognitive constipation, if you will, because there's all these ideas running around my head that I'm not responding to. That's one of the main reasons it was affecting me mentally. When I used to interact a lot more, I probably had a lesser negative effect per unit time, but the total time usage was way higher.