Adjusting to Real Life After Social Media

The challenges of a break from Twitter and Instagram

Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash

Maybe it was all the ads on Twitter. Maybe I was tired of seeing every complex issue reduced to a heated binary conflict. In any event, a few weeks ago, I set a screen time limit on my phone for Twitter and Instagram, and it all just stopped. Now I’m only on a few minutes day, at most. It wasn’t quite as easy as I thought.

• My eyes are no longer accustomed to the stillness of life. Sitting at my desk, in my NYC bedroom, I’m looking out at the building next door. Its rectangular windows are shaped like my cell phone screen, and during the first few days of my social media break, I almost expected them to scroll or fill with images. But they are fixed in brick. It’s an adjunct building for a hospital — I think it contains some labs and offices — so there’s barely ever any movement or change. Seeking movement and distraction, my eyes flit around my desk and room, resisting focus.
• My eyes are tired. Or — I’m finally feeling how tired they’ve been. The constant absorption of visual information, the gazing and switching — it had become a habit. Now that I don’t just hitch my eyes to the moving visual parade of social media, numbing everything, I’m feeling the pull and burn of eye strain.
• I have a lot of questions. Do you have to be on Twitter to be…