Reflecting on social media, my time and my happiness
Lately I had the most wonderful vacation on Tokyo (my favorite place on Earth) were I had many many boxes checked for all the things I wanted to do last time but couldn't due to being sick for most of that trip. This time I got to enjoy all of them and more which made me feel extremely satisfied and happy that things turned out differently this time around.
What was interesting was that this trip happened at the same time that I was experimenting with something new: the "digital well being" app timer on my phone, which allows you to put selected apps on a shared timer and once it runs out you can't use (or get notifications from) them until the next day. I have it set up to 30mins per day on all my apps that are either social media or that have a scrollable feed, which meant that during this trip my brain had 23.5hs (minus sleep time I guess) to find ways to be entertained. This on an exciting country like Japan meant extra processing of cultural differences, more time for my itinerary, more japanese practice, etc. I think it helped me absorb, process and ultimately enjoy my trip more but also made me start to wonder, ideate and question more things (specially on the train, I really love JP's train system and not having to drive everywhere). I reflected a lot about my life and what made me truly happy, I remembered vague ephemeral thoughts I once had about new creative projects and other fun things...but maybe most importantly I felt so much less noise on my mind, less time wasted on whatever people complain nowadays on socials, no vague randomposting from people that were more bored than me...nothing, just me and my brain looking for something fulfilling to think about.
I'm not going to lie here, there is definitely an adaptation period. It feels to me like what withdrawal must be for a recovering addict because that's essentially how our brains become after getting rotted by mindless scrolling, so much so that I'm deliberately using the word "feels" here instead of "felt" because I don't feel truly done fighting against it yet. However, on the flip side once you're into it the combination of alienating social media from your life plus your new extra time to question & internally debate everything, the whole concept of social media as its practiced nowadays starts to become...weird? Things that felt obviously wrong start to look nice, things that were obviously better start to look stupid. For example, I remembered xitter turned into this awful corrupted place where everywhere you looked you only saw alt-right bait accounts, AI slop and haters/trolls everywhere...yet after a few "I don't like this post" interactions I realized the "For You" feed started showing me the most wonderful artists that didn't make the jump to bsky! Not only their awesome awesome art but like their actually interesting interactions and recommendations too: Tools, tips and events were now coming from places & people I didn't know before and wouldn't have otherwise seen if it wasn't for this updated algorithm. Heck I even got a highlight of my JP trip by visiting this cool indie event in Shibuya which I only saw because of a reco on xitter (I might write about it next, it was soooo good)...so, was xitter really that bad for me? I thought it could be a fluke so I checked bsky aaaand well the opposite happened actually: Bsky devs embracing the very thing they promised not to do and why everyone migrated out of xitter in the first place, artists I followed because of their creativity and talent posting about local political events which I had absolutely no context or understanding of, random people complaining about what [enter generic AAA CEO here] said about the need for the industry to use more AI, etc...and while I do agree that some of these topics are important to discuss and promote their visibility on, that's a much different reason for why I followed some of those users in the first place. If I wanted to be subscribed to those topics I would via hashtags or something (antennas on fedi are pretty useful for this). While bsky does have a "For You" tab it works well for illustrations but not really for anything other than that, especially if you consider the considerably smaller userbase it has compared to xitter.
So just when I was here doubting if maybe while I was away from the social media meta things changed and now it was time to move back to xitter, I realized that the more time from my daily budget I spent on xitter the less effective it was on my happiness and the more it looked like every other social media space. bsky instead remained overall the same (negative) and fedi felt exactly the same as always (also negative). So I think my main takeaways could be:
- Social media is all fake advertising, literally and figuratively. If you follow someone today because of X you're actually not going to see much of X from them and instead you're literally going to use valuable time of your life seeing whatever they decide to be vocal about next: drama, negative news, random inside jokes, more negative news, etc. There are some golden exceptions to this, but still pretty limited. The underline being that negative content tracks louder/wider reactions, its very rare to see positive content overruling negative one even on non-algorithmic feeds.
- Complete isolation is also not the answer, limited and controlled exposure to social media is actually beneficial and inspiring! A few mins per day is all I need to know Ado released a new song, there's a cool app cooking I might want to try, there's positive feedback on the latest WuWa arc I was looking to play and someone posted a really cool desk setup that gives me a few ideas to try. Oh don't forget that freaking cool Miku illustration that did huge numbers with no hashtags from a hugely popular pixiv artist I didn't know about...until now :3
At the end, correlating frustration, exhaustion and just bad mood with my interactions with social media helped me find that sweet spot and finally get that extra time I've been craving for years. It's crazy what good conscious boredom can do for you.