5 Simple Ways to Clean up Your Digital Life by Vanessa Torre

 

How to bring more contentment and less contention to every day.

Times are strange. Having been sequestered away for months, we’ve been more connected to technology than ever. We also seem to have hit a limit. We’re burned out, disenfranchised, and disillusioned.

I’m seeing people taking drastic action to disconnect from technology. I totally get it. I deactivated my Facebook a couple of weeks ago and it felt glorious. It still does.

Others may not be ready to pull the plug or may not even care to. My best friend swears she has a perfectly healthy relationship with social media. She told me this at happy hour last week and I just looked at her saying, “Mmmmm hmmm,” while sipping my beer.

Doing a digital clean up doesn’t have to be hard, broad sweeping, or overly dramatic. But, it allows you to quiet down the noise around you so you’re not in sensory overload every 34 seconds.

These actions take very little time, have a lasting effect, and will help you in ways you may not even realize.

Cull your heard

After realizing a few weeks in a row that I was in a generally pissy mood most of the time, I started to look around me. I had over a thousand “friends” on Facebook. Seriously. No one has that many friends.

What we actually have are a lot of minor acquaintances, friends of friends, people we met six years ago after a concert, and other random people we’ve collected over the years that we couldn’t pick out of a lineup.

The issue with all of these superficial relationships is that they’re often not bringing value to our everyday life. How do we connect with over a thousand people in a meaningful way? We can’t.

What I found is that many of the people who were getting under my skin regularly were not the people I was close to in real life. Oddly, the people I was closest to hardly ever post on social media. This was a huge sign to me that changes were needed.

I went through and deleted a quarter of my social media relationships. If I hadn’t had a meaningful interaction with them in the last three years, we didn’t need to be connected.

What doing this does for you:

• Decreases the amount of influence you allow in your life
• Allows you to focus on fostering and building the relationships that do matter
• Controls the amount of info you see, which decreases scrolling time.

If you’re hesitant about cutting ties, trust me when I tell you that someone you’ve not interacted with for three years will not miss you.

Turn off your notifications

Since I started writing this article, my phone, which is on vibrate and across the room, has buzzed exactly once. Last month, it would have happened ten times as much. No, I didn’t become wildly unpopular since last month.

What I did was go through my settings and turned off nearly all of my notifications. It was too much. The average person gets 46 push notifications a day. Many times, it’s connected to a little bit of dopamine we’ve become addicted to. It’s low key psychological manipulation.

The difficulty of the app notification is that rarely do we just pick up the phone and check that one notification. And, it’s designed to draw you back into the app. Why? Because the more you pick up the phone from the app notification, the more ads the app can send you which is their income source.

What doing this does for you:

• Allows you to control when you receive information
• Reduces the outside influence of apps to determine when you use your phone
• Allows you to stay focused on what you are doing without interruption

The world will not burn down if you do this. I mean, a huge missile could come from North Korea but may you’re better off not knowing that, anyway.

Clean up your inbox

If you're anything like me, you have willfully given your email address to anyone who has offered you a coupon or discount. You need an oil change? I have a coupon.

Wading into my email was overwhelming and time-consuming for me. By the time I cleared out all the nonsense, I either forgot why I was in my email to begin with, had been distracted by something on sale, or just got too tired to complete the task I started. What the hell?

If you spend the first ten minutes you have your email open deleting unopened email, you have a problem on your hands. The unsubscribe button is your friend. Handle this like disconnecting from people. If you haven’t visited a website or made a purchase from a company in the last year or two, you don’t need the email subscription.

What this does for you:

• Decreases the likelihood of impulse spending and fear of missing out
• Shortens the amount of time you inherently spend in email
• Allows you to keep your inbox organized

Even if you’ve made a purchase from a company that shows up regularly in your inbox, give some thought as to whether that purchase was intentional or because you saw the email. Unsubscribe accordingly.

Establish non-digital routes for connection

Get addresses. Get phone numbers. Create space for connection before you start plugging plugs. It’s critical to your success in disconnecting.

Be honest with the amount of time you have. You have more than you think. You can’t tell me you don’t have time to text people, send a note, or meet someone for coffee.

Coffee takes an hour out of your day. The average person spends two and a half hours a day on social media alone. And, coffee is delicious. Wine, even more so.

We’ve become reliant on technology to connect us because it’s easy. Most times, it’s passive. We can alert people to what’s happening in our lives by posting a picture, tweet, or diatribe in relation to a life event.

What doing this does for you:

• Allows you to focus on the quality of relationships, not the quantity
• Increases our ability to express ourselves genuinely
• Decreases our dependency on digital communication for connection

Face to face communication is much better for us than digital. It improves our overall ability to communicate, understand, and feel heard. As a result of this, our relationships improve.

Set metric goals for usage

Depending on your device, you can track your habits and create goals for yourself based on what you want to work on most — overall screen time, app usage, etc.

One of the metrics I am focusing on is the number of “pickups” I have during the day. I was shocked how often I pick up the phone, especially immediately after notification. Shameful.

I factor out text message pickups as those conversations trickle in but I know that, because I’m tracking my usage, I try not to meaningless just grab my phone. I have a goal of less than three dozen pickups a day. That’s still every 30 minutes for 18 hours but 20 pickups less than the average user.

What it does for you:

• Challenges you to stick to the digital decisions for usage you’ve made and set goals that can pare down usage over time
• Allows you to monitor how effective your efforts are
• Lets you monitor whether you replace one screen time outlet for another

Accountability is huge to me. I need it. Knowing that I’m checking against my goals for the week keeps me from grabbing the damn phone for no reason.

We all need to monitor and adjust our lives from time to time by examining our routines and behaviors. We need to make decisions in our own best interest, including those that encourage human connection and the improvement of our mental health.

Just like our homes and our cars, we need to do an occasional deep cleaning. How much work we have to do is determined by how much of a mess we’ve made. Taking time to tidy up our digital lives shouldn’t be avoided or time-consuming.

You digital clean up should be done like anything else in your life. Keep it simple and keep it sustainable.

https://medium.com/curious/5-simple-ways-to-clean-up-your-digital-life-cd0f26e2530f

Deleting Social Media Should Be the New “Breaking Your TV” by Vanessa Torre

 

Reclaiming mental health is more important now than ever.

After college, I took a writing class with a local author who lived off the grid. I thought it was unusual behavior in 1998, even for an artist. I was working full time as a teacher, taking grad school classes in the summer, and struggling to figure out how my writing would get the time and attention that it needed with all this going on. I asked her advice on how to do it.

“Listen to me very closely,” she said, leaning in. “When you get home today, grab a brick and throw it into your television.” She was dead serious.

She firmly believed that we had a much greater supply of creativity, positivity, and time by destroying the main distraction that pulled us away from our creative pursuits and our happiness.

I didn’t break my TV when I got home. It took me 20 years after that conversation to launch a writing career. Now, the brick needs to hit something else.

There is a reason I hate reality television. Only one of two things happens when we watch it. Either we feel horrible about our own lives or we watch other people’s lives to come to the realization that the train wreck we think we’re living is just merely a train delay.

Whichever one happens, neither feels good. This is the exact same experience I have on social media. I would say that the vast majority of us feel this.

Last night, I watched The Social Dilemma, a Netflix documentary with countless interviews from people who have become conscientious defectors from the apps they spent much of their career building. It’s terrifying but for an hour and a half, the world made sense to me.

Right now, the world is falling apart at every seam and everyone seems to have a thought about it. They’re not necessarily interesting or intelligent thoughts but people shamelessly sign their name to them regardless.

Do I sound judgmental and angry? It’s because I’m judgmental and angry. I’m coming to realize that’s not necessarily my fault. and I’m not alone in it. I’m judgmental and angry and it’s by design. And now I’ve moved from angry to livid.

The premise of The Social Dilemma is to show us how we are being manipulated by social media as a result of its intrinsic design. People who have designed major functions of the app explain how they work and psychologists explain what happens to our brains as a result.

Our mental health has been monetized in a destructive manner in order to fill the pockets of advertisers and it’s dismantling humanity. And we signed up for it willingly.

It sounds dramatic. I know. But, it’s neverending and the longer we stay involved in it, the worse it gets. The decrease in the quality of my life over the last ten years, as a result of social media, is staggering.

Before social media, I generally had no idea what my friends’ political beliefs were. Now, I find myself resenting people I used to adore because they’re not on the same page I am. I am part of the divisiveness.

Bail et al. at Duke University found that our exposure to an onslaught of political statements and images, whether we agree with them or not, actually increases our foothold on our beliefs. We don’t become open-minded. We become more polarized.

I am more inclined to spend money on things I don't need because I am routinely bombarded with ads for stuff I glanced at for 5.3 seconds online. I am less able to separate a want from a need.

A few years ago, Cooper Smith at Business Insider explained why this happens. Facebook and Amazon interact with each other to allow cookies from one site to promote goods on another, all using metadata, to show me the same rug 2,483 times.

And it works. I can’t stop thinking about that damn rug and practically have to freeze my credit card in a large ice cube to not buy it. Of course, Google stores my card information, making it really easy to get the rug frozen card or not. This technology is wearing me down.

People who display perfectly curated lives online when I know their marriage/jobs/children are falling apart, in reality, give me trust issues and have made me a bitter skeptic. I believe nothing I see.

At the same time, I believe everything I see. I have been fed a distorted reality of what happens in the world based on the millions of pieces of data apps have collected on me over the last decade.

This is intentional and we’ve lost the ability to separate truth from fiction. A study by MIT found that a fake news story will spread six times faster than one with actual truth. How do we filter out misinformation?

Beyond FOMO, I have recognized anger and depression over actually missing out when I see pictures of outings I was not invited on. It has made me question the strength and value of relationships.

Nothing good comes from this. Sure, I have learned about far off places through pictures I normally wouldn’t see. I have been inspired by the work of others and been able to share my work with a larger audience. Because of the existence of Facebook, an article I wrote this summer reached 75k readers.

Still, we stand to be better people without the endless parade of stimuli that clutters our minds. It’s time to reclaim our own thoughts. The digital age has run its course and it’s run itself right off the track.

Immediately after the credits rolled on the documentary, I deactivated my Facebook account. Today was the first day I didn’t wake up and check it before I’d even had coffee. I turned every single notification off on my phone. There is no reason to look at my phone before bed or first thing when I wake up. Anything there can wait until I’m ready for it.

This is the first stage in a digital clean-up. Basically, reprogramming my brain has to happen. I need less contention and more contentment. I need less artificial intelligence and more actual intelligence.

I need more joy. I like the idea of choosing joy over anything else. I feel that deep in my being. I need a period or mental repair. I want my time back.

https://medium.com/invisible-illness/deleting-social-media-should-be-the-new-breaking-your-tv-235185c132e7

How My Life Immediately Changed Without Facebook by Vanessa Torre

 

My thoughts and emotional behavior look different.

About a month ago, after having the crap scared out of me watching The Social Dilemma, I deactivate my Facebook account. I didn’t delete it because I’m too lazy to download all of my pictures right now. That sounds exhausting.

I thought I would make it about three days before Facebook called me back and dragged me back in. Perhaps it’s the tail end of an election year or, you know, having better things to do, but there has been no desire to reactivate. At all.

There was no withdrawal. Just much more opportunity for positivity. Peace and quiet. It didn’t take me long to see changes in my attitude and behavior. The changes in my life were quick and unexpected.

My screen time has changed in strange ways.

My screen time has decreased by only 34%. I hover at about two and a half hours a day on my phone. I was at about four hours, which is pretty average.

The difference is the composition of the time I’m spending. The amount of time I spend texting has increased as I now connect with people actively instead of passively.

What hasn’t changed is my obsessive need to Google weird things like the name of the actor from Greatest American Hero. Now, though, I don’t get ads for box sets of retro TV shows being thrown at me from all sides.

I am a far nicer person.

Especially now, with people at each other’s throats all the damn time, I had a low-level anger that just hung about me like a fog. And it was thick.

I’m a sensitive thing. I get triggered easily. I feel like I am just the type of person that Facebook’s algorithms can manipulate.

Following this week’s debate, I was thrilled that I had no external influence adding to how I felt about the disaster. I dealt with my own thoughts and no one else’s. Their commentary was unheard by me.

I’m more patient with other people.

I was starting to harbor some contempt for people I love. My friend Paul likes to stir shit on social media for the sake of it. When he says something horribly off-color in real life, it’s hilarious. When I see it on my feed, it bothers me.

I realized that part of deleting Facebook was that I love my friend Paul and that if I want to keep loving Paul, I can’t see him on Facebook. I can now look forward to seeing my friends without being in a state of annoyance about their drama, constant meme posting, cries for validation, or political posts I don’t agree with. These things just don’t come out in face to face experiences.

I do not fear I am missing out, at all.

To the contrary, I hear of drama playing out publicly in people’s lives and have no idea what is going on. Their business is no longer my business and my business is not longer their business. It’s glorious.

If there is anything happening without me, I have no idea and I like it that way. I am sure that there may be invitations I have missed out on because contact is easy on Facebook, but I don’t feel like there is a hole in my life.

I am slightly out of touch with minor (any maybe major) news stories.

But, I really don’t care. Look, at this point in my life, I know how I feel about important issues. I know which lawmakers support my stance on those issues. I know how to vote and when my ballot is due. The rest is inconsequential.

I find out about huge events like the passing of a Supreme Court justice or the president getting COVID-19 by word of mouth. If I want to know more, that is my decision, not an algorithm.

I am no longer dependent on Facebook, but slightly inconvenienced.

I couldn’t log in to my Spotify account. I had to connect it to an email. All of my playlists now show they are created by 12856329573.

The number of websites and apps that encourage our dependency on Facebook as an easy means of logging in without having to create an account is staggering. Keep in mind, this interface is one more way for Facebook to collect data on you.

All in all, it’s been a remarkably positive experience. For the longest time, I told myself I just wasn’t ready to pull the plug. I was. I hear this from a lot of people. You are ready.

This is not one of those events in your life where a strange voice comes on while you’re deactivating your account that warns you of a bunch of possible negative side effects. Those don’t exist. Reclaim your time.

https://vanessatorre.medium.com/how-my-life-immediately-changed-without-facebook-9a7081ba1004