2 Day Challenge

Kicking the Social Media Addiction

There’s something about writing that can free you up to better understand the world around you and the demon’s that we all face in life. As an individual I’ve done a lot of work to clean up my act in 2022 and prepare myself to continue to experience positive growth of character and as an individual as we roll into 2023.

The world is ever changing and if I don’t put in the work myself to continue to adapt, evolve and learn from my mistakes then I’m falling behind the curve and leaving meat on the bone in my pursuit of continually improving the person I am in this life.

I’m trying to deprogram my own brain from the addiction of social media and redirect my time and attention into productive efforts that will reverberate positively in my day to day life. Step one was to delete Twitter off of my phone. That was my primary source of information in real time and what I believed to be an important measure of my connectedness with the world. But as I peeled back the romanticism of being in the know, being current, being first in line at the conversation and trying to wrap my head around what any given moment might mean in context of humanity’s journey on this spaceship we call Earth, I realized that Twitter had transformed for me in an unhealthy way.

I’m not speaking about the content on the application. This isn’t some kind of wounded keyboard warrior tribute to Elon Musk and his decision to overtake the app. I deleted Twitter in an attempt to take back some of my time and redirect it to something more meaningful. I started asking myself at the end of a long day, “What tweets can I recall from today that I found especially interesting?”

The answer was sad. I couldn’t remember shit. It was like my brain was in-taking information and then almost immediately dumping it to the wayside never to be utilized again. So was I using Twitter to be informed and connected with the world? Or was it simply a source of dopamine and a digital means to engage my brain’s production of chemicals that would make me feel good in a perhaps, artificial manner? After finally taking the much needed step of removing the app from my phone, I realized it was almost definitively the latter.

For the first couple of days, my brain was constantly pinging me to check Twitter. It was like a person was inside my skull and every few minutes would knock on the door of my head, hoping I’d re-engage with that application. It felt as though my brain was starved for the utilization of Twitter. I was addicted and didn’t realize it until I eliminated the source of my addiction. But as those pings kept ringing inside of myself, I recognized that this was a form of social media withdrawal that I was experiencing.

It was a tough realization as my plan had been to remove the app from my phone for a period of time as a sort of reset, but with the ultimate intention of re-installing and returning to becoming a user. But once removed, the realization of my brain’s demand for the usage of the app sparked in me more questions on how exactly my brain was being programmed by this little blue bird.

How are these applications training us to think? What were they doing to our ability to keep an attention span on any given topic or subject? Is it possible that using these type of apps is actually eroding away at our functional memory both short and long term?

I want to try and find answers to some of these questions that are not built simply on my own anecdote but are more rooted in analysis of a broader spectrum of users. My first step and hope is to get some engagement from my readers on this topic. Have you deleted Facebook/Twitter/Snapchat/Tik-Tok or some other social media that you felt you were too consumed by? What was your experience in the immediate aftermath of deletion?

I spoke with some of my co-workers about my decision and began to formulate the idea of a 2 day challenge.

It isn’t some complicated formula to positive self-change or instant growth but it is a simple exercise that I believe will at least serve to reveal our addiction to these type of applications. In talking to my colleagues at my job, I suggested that they write down their username and password of Facebook or whatever their primary social media tool of choice was, and then delete it off their phone. For those of us who actively use the passwords feature on the iPhone or any smart phone that auto stores and encrypts your password information, it was even more simple. You could delete the app and that login info would be stored on your phone still, maintaining a bridge of connection in the case that you found yourself wanting to re-download the app.

But my theory is that if you spent 2 full days without the application on your phone, it would become self-evident just how intense our desire is to utilize the now-missing social media app. We are now 2 decades into the journey of the social media. For many of us old-school kids, we may have first been introduced to social media via Zynga or Myspace. But for most of the users of social media today, Facebook was their first introduction to the digital community of online engagement. I believe I first created my Facebook profile back in 2008. (14 years ago, YIKES). So we’ve spent countless hundreds of hours if not thousands scrolling through these types of applications over the last 10-15 years and through the course of time, we’ve become intensely dependent on these apps for self-validation and good feels.

But in that pursuit of connectedness and global reach as an individual, we’ve become hopelessly reliant on a tool that is hindering our ability to have functional relationships with each other and ourselves. Social media is a highlight reel where we project what we expect others to believe is our best selves and using a variety of filters, emoticons, and signaling, we continue to lie to the world.

You don’t see many people being their most honest self on social media accounts and if they seem to be doing just that, it is typically a ploy for engagement. Even honesty and truth are contrived as levers to leverage potential engagement and increase your follower account. Ironically, it triggers my memory of Kendrick Lamar’s lyric, “I don’t do it for the Gram, I do it for Compton”.

If only! Imagine if most of our efforts were directed at trying to better the real life world around us, the cities we come from, the people who need to be picked up. Sure it might feel good to change your profile picture to signal to the rest of the world that you are unified behind a particular cause that is trending but what are you actually doing in the realm of the real?

2 Day Challenge:

Anyways, I’m getting off topic. Let’s get back to the simple idea of a 2 day Challenge. Pick whatever your social media bae is whether it is Facebook, Snapchat, Tik-Tok, Twitter, Rumble, Instagram, Truth-Social (HA!) or any other ones that I’m probably unaware of in my old age of 31. Write down your username/password information.

Now delete that bitch off your phone.

Easy right? Now I want you to take an honest catalogue over the next 48 hours. Every single time you think about getting on the application that you’ve now deleted, I want you to write down on a piece of paper. For my paperless homies, keep close track on your note’s or keep app with a single mark. It can be a 1 or a line but you need to use that to keep an active count of how often you feel your brain demanding you to open the app. I truly believe that most people will be horrified at how many fucking times they are being prompted by some little thought in their brain, to check the app.

After 2 days, assuming you endure that long, you will have a hard choice to make. Is this the life I want to live moving forward? Having my brain pinging me to consume content on an application that is not serving me and seeks to gamify my attention, monetizing it to serve billion dollar corporations that care not about my mental health? Or is there something better that I could be doing with my time and attention. My hope in people trying out this simple exercise is that they will be forced to look in the mirror and recognize the unhealthy tendencies of the behaviors in which these apps have programed us over the last 10-15 years.

My biggest fear is that many who venture to try this challenge won’t survive the 48 hours before they’ve re-engaged in their social media app of choice and plugged themselves back in to the toxic Matrix that we’ve grown so reliant upon.

It’s an intense addiction and I now agree with many who’ve said that our generation’s cigarettes, is social media.

Face the Music!

I’m still on this journey and trying to figure out what I do moving forward to better protect my time and energy. The biggest gain I’ve experienced thus far in turning off Twitter has been a reinvigoration of the person in me who loves to write. I’m not wasting my time trying to come up with a clever 140 or 280 character tweet to shoot out into the nether. My ~340 Twitter followers most likely do not miss the fact that I’m no longer present on the app and rightfully so. The application isn’t built to connect us. It is created to enslave our attention and sap out our productivity. It tells us to “CONSUME, CONSUME, CONSUME!”

And for the most part we do, not just in our digital life surfing the waves of social media and interaction, but in our very real lives where no expenses have been spared to ensure that we can consume to our hearts content at the push of a button.

In deleting Twitter off my phone I’ve taken back some ownership of my mental state and I’m hoping that as the time between when I deleted the app and the present increases in distance, that my attention span and functionally of my brain continually improve. I don’t want 1000 internal pings from my subconscious begging me to consume junk content on social media. I want to come up with long form ideas and pursuits that take time, thought, energy and consistence in pursuit. Without my personal stumbling block that Twitter had become, I feel a rediscovered sense of freedom.

And full disclosure to the people who try the 2 day challenge and fail. You aren’t alone! After 2 weeks off from Twitter, I found myself secretly downloading it to see what I had been missing.

I spent about 4 minutes on the app, checking missed messages and notifications and quickly realized how sad it was that I’ve wasted so much of my life trying to prove out an existence to the world around me that is too busy trying to do the same to really care. The mask had been pulled off and I couldn’t un-see what I had seen. I deleted the app again and now I find myself 1 day away from my 3 week mark without Twitter (excluding of course my 4 minute relapse).

Please subscribe, share, and engage with this piece! I want to hear back from other people on their experience with the 2 day challenge. How many times did your brain ping you to check that app in the 48 hour window? I have to imagine that the numbers might get quite absurd for people who are keeping an honest count. I wish you well and hope that as Christmas creeps closer to us as well as the variety of Holidays that other religions and culture celebrate over the next 30 days, you find this approach helpful in taking back ownership of your time and attention span. Cheers!

(One more funny/ironic realization that just hit me. My Substack is connected to my Twitter profile as a funnel of publication. In the spirit of this post, I won’t be using Substack’s automated service to send this out via Twitter as it feels wrong to try and leverage social media in order to spread the post. My hope is that my reader’s will instead share it in a direct way with the people in their life that they believe could be positively impacted by this 2 day Challenge).