Note: I have stopped writing here. If you enjoyed this, you can follow along at Fountain Pen:
Four years ago, I was on a silent meditation retreat where I couldn’t read, write, or use any technology for ten days. No input, no output. The only thing that we’d do was meditate with short breaks in between long sessions.
On the third day, I took a forty-five-minute stroll and focused on a singular problem that had been plaguing me for months. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life: my attention didn’t deviate once from the central subject, and I was able to put the matter to rest after looking at it from all angles. It felt like I had suddenly developed superpowers, but in reality I’d just reset my mind by getting away from the viruses that these technology leaders are inserting into our brains. Like an alcoholic who forgets what healthy sobriety feels like, I had forgotten what real mental clarity feels like.
I was horrified by what these products are doing to us, and since then I’ve taken extreme steps to limit my technology usage: using a flip phone; keeping my phone off until 2 pm each day; and configuring my social media accounts to make them less addictive. The results have been incredible: my days are more meditative; my mind is less anxious; and my conversations are deeper.
But I want to take it a step further. I want to experiment with quitting the internet this September for a few reasons: (1) protest (2) trade-offs (3) competition.
Protest
When you discover something in your feed that you didn't follow before, there should be a high bar — it should just be great. You should be delighted to see it. And I don't think that’s happening enough right now.
— Adam Mosseri (the head of Instagram talking about finding nicer asses and more stimulating five-second videos on your feed)
Ben Thompson beautifully outlines three trends in Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends. All of them scare the living shit out of me.
The first trend is the move towards more immersive content (text to images to video to VR). Being able to create in more mediums is wonderful, but social platforms encourage us to misuse every one: much of Twitter’s high-performing text is lazy and polarizing; many of Instagram’s popular photos are bikini shots and cars; and almost all of TikTok’s viral videos are mind-numbing, ten-second clips. These companies are selling you junk food for the mind, and the results will be more grave than the United States’ current obesity epidemic. We are sleepwalking into a future where millions spend their days watching VR car crashes, pranks, and porn.
The second trend is artificial intelligence moving from recommending content to automatically creating it. OpenAI’s GPT-3 and DALL-E are already scarily good at manufacturing text, images, and videos; and companies like TikTok are so good at determining users’ preferences that they have an entire generation completely addicted to their Chinese war machine. In the near future, companies will combine these technologies so that artificial intelligence will create the most addictive content for you, without any human intervention, on the fly. We are defaulting to computers instead of humans.
The third trend is user experiences moving from user-directed (i.e. you click on the most interesting headline on your feed) towards computer-controlled autoplay (i.e. YouTube chooses what you’ll see next and plays it automatically). This shift gives algorithms more power and takes away our right to choose the content that we want to interact with. Your mind and body’s algorithm is more trustworthy than these companies’ demon spawns—we can’t let their services keep us glued to screens in dark bedrooms while the beauty of the world passes us by.
I’m protesting these platforms by voting with my dollars and my attention. Every minute you spend on Instagram, you’re paying Zuck instead of an up-and-coming writer. Every minute you spend on TikTok, you’re paying the CCP instead of a great painter exhibiting at a museum. Every minute you spend on Twitter, you’re paying 3250 (out of their 7500 employees) to do nothing instead of a great film director.
But far worse than that, you’re actively training your brain out of its ability to enjoy these deeper, slower pleasures until one day it becomes so dependent on dopamine that you can’t lose yourself in a long novel. By quitting them, I’m going to re-allocate my resources towards those who deserve them.
Social Media
We are a consumer company and our success is directly linked to our users trusting us. Therefore we have the same incentive as the user: they want to see relevant advertising so their experience of Google is positive and we want to deliver it.
— Susan Wojcicki (CEO of YouTube talking about Google tracking everything you do)
I’ve gone back-and-forth on social media—frequently deactivating it, only to re-activate it a few months later. Recently, I’ve managed social media well by following two of the strategies that I wrote about in Keep Modernity, Exit the Metaverse:
End your addiction by giving your password to a trusted friend/sibling that you can message every few days when you want to log in.
Make each platform distraction-free by muting everyone that you follow while you can still use the platforms to grow your audience.
By giving my Twitter password to my sister, I massively reduced the amount of time I spent on the platform; however, I didn’t get any meaningful upsides of using it: nothing I posted drove a meaningful amount of attention to my writing, and I connected with very few people. To get more benefits from the platform, you likely need to use it more (and more intelligently), which I’m unwilling to do especially since there are other platforms, such as Hacker News, that can give you massive readership with zero downside.
On Instagram, I muted every person I follow so it became distraction-free. This approach was highly effective as I spent less time on it, but I could still use it to (1) create a bigger travel network (2) broadcast my location so that friends in town could find me (3) share my writing with my followers. But it turned out that (1) I can create a similar travel network by storing numbers in my phone with their locations (2) broadcasting my location made very little difference to my travels (3) I never got more than ~200 reads from Instagram, which is a small percentage of my total readership.
I broke my social media addiction only to realize that its benefits were a mirage. This reality combined with my desire for protest and my frustration with what these platforms encourage—constantly showing off wealth, intelligence, and status—makes me want to experiment with a complete separation.
The Smartphone
If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle things - that's when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It's a discipline; you have to practice it.
— Steve Jobs (the creator of iDistract)
Smartphones are useful for Google Maps, Uber, Spotify, and WhatsApp. Beyond these applications, they mostly make your days more frenetic. That’s why since last December I’ve been doing the following:
For those that need a smartphone for work or other use cases, it might be worth getting two phones: a smartphone without a data plan and a flip phone. You can still call Ubers by connecting to WiFi and you have access to WhatsApp at home, but you aren’t plagued by your phone addiction everywhere you go.
This has worked well, but lately I’ve found myself bringing my phone with me to cafes and desperately craving a WiFi connection when I’m there. I’ve experimented with leaving my phone at home and have found that on those days I experience far greater peace. So, for the next month I’m going to move completely to the flip phone except for listening to music.
The Internet
With BuzzFeed, I always felt like, let’s have as big an impact as we can. Let’s grow this into something giant.
— Jonah Peretti (the founder of BuzzFeed talking about clickbait of epic proportions)
The internet is powerful and beneficial when it’s used as a tool; however, it is hard to do so because it encourages us to trade long, deep experiences for shorter, dopamine-filled ones: We read five poorly written articles on ephemeral subjects instead of timeless Hunter S. Thompson pieces. We trade hour-long immersions into Crime and Punishment for ten six-minute, worthless YouTube videos. We trade reading The Economist on Sunday mornings for countless scatterbrained Twitter breaks.
For September, I’m going to quit the internet’s temptations and exclusively use it as a tool for work, which includes research, communication, and publishing. My hope is that this dramatic change will help me discover a meditative rhythm and a deeper absorption in life—it would be wonderful if my days were full of more deep experiences instead of unfulfilling, fragmented events.
Competition
The question I ask myself like almost every day is, ‘Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?’
— Mark Zuckerberg (the founder who wants us to spend our days doomscrolling)
At twenty-eight years old, the most horrifying thing you can tell your Indian family is that you’re setting out to write a novel, but if I’m going to be a lunatic then I’m going to get my hands on every advantage that the world has to offer.
In modernity, the most differentiated skill is focusing deeply and learning things quickly—the exact opposite of what these technologies aid. In modernity, the most differentiated writers focus on long-lasting principles and ideas rather than The Current Thing. In modernity, the most differentiated creatives allow their minds to rest and dream in boredom instead of handing Twitter a straw and letting it suck the creative juices out of their brains.
Perhaps my experiment will fail and no significant change will come about. But I need to find out. If you want to hear about my experience each week, you can subscribe below:
This is a great post, very inspiring. Also very questioning of our habits/addition.
Your writing is making me think and act in a way that improves my ability to enjoy more of life.
I thank you and encourage you in your process of bringing back the humanity in all of us.
like many others, i find myself in a constant struggle between being connected and disconnected. however, more often than not, i find times of peace and clarity when my phone is no where to be found and i am focused on connecting to everything thats around me.
thanks for sharing and good luck!