I am back, for myself!

The past year has been a time I strictly spent with myself. I say this in a digital sense, not in the analog. I quit all social media around my birthday last year. It was long coming. I was trying to kick the habit for a while. I first realized that my social media usage was becoming unhealthy during the pandemic. The first step was to keep checking my screen time for all apps. It usually stayed in the neighborhood of eight hours. That was stupefying at the time, but I rationalized it by telling myself that since we were all sitting at home, there was no real life as such. Then gradually things opened up and I started going to work. In my line of work, which doesn't involve any work from home, I started going out earlier than others with proper permissions. I thought this would take my screen time down automatically because I was going out and doing actual work. But the drop was only so much. I was still hovering around six hours a day. 

I think I must have been desperately sincere in thought about kicking the habit but hopelessly lax in action. Still, one day I bought a new handset. I bought a new sim card and I set up what I called The Social Media Phone. This project was going to succeed because I was going to keep my social media phone at home when I went to work. I was really proud of coming up with this clever idea. Since then, anyone I met through social media always got that number and I met a lot of people. Almost too many. My Serious Office Phone, on the other hand, was used only for work (which fortunately it still is). So there I was! I was holding two ends of the Earth that were never going to meet!  Something that Kipling said a long time ago: 

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet! 

But I forgot that the Earth is round. And after a few months of getting better (like all addicts do) I relapsed. Social media apps started showing up on my work phone again and I also started carrying my social media phone to work. So effectively, I was in touch with my work contacts AND my social media contacts at all times. This is how a very smartly designed system backfires. When you don't understand the ability of your own mind to argue with you until you reach the absolute nadir. Yet, it kept telling me that it wasn't as bad as I thought it was. Well, it was worse than what I thought. 

It took a few external jolts  (meeting the wrong people, going through friendship break-ups) for me to realize that meeting people off social media perhaps wasn't my thing anymore. It started out as meeting people isn't my thing anymore, but my ever oscillating anxiety fueled mind has now accepted a cleaner version - that I am a better person (to myself first) when I am off social media. 

So after messing up my two-phone system, I decided to start a journal! I would journal every single day. I didn't know exactly what I was trying to achieve by doing this back then, but in retrospect, perhaps my unconscious had taken over to lead me to something that might work. I journaled almost every single day from 2023 until this morning. And every month, I used to review what I said on the same day last year in my journal. Gradually I realized that whining about my social media use and failing at different strategies to control it was basically my entire journal. I used focus modes, I decided not to look at Facebook for 4 hours and gave myself a star, I intermittently kept my social media phone at home. I did a lot of things which led me to believe that deleting my accounts like a waxing strip, all of a sudden, was the only way out. And one day I did it. And didn't look back. It has been more than a year and the world has gotten worse. There is AI writing everywhere. Except for books, you don't get to read very many things on the internet that aren't written using AI. This becomes all the more evident on LinkedIn, which my PhD supervisor named tar-baby long time ago, much before it became a tar-virus. 

So I decided to write again, because I believe that writing shouldn't be outsourced to a robot. It is something that comes from the very core of being human - language, writing, painting, reading. These things are all best done by real humans because they are essential for our sanity. I never wrote for applause. There was a long time when I wrote on Facebook but even then, I never felt compelled to write for applause. My writing was applauded and I enjoyed it, but now that I am off Facebook, I don't miss the applause. I miss writing. So I decided to choose the most discreet place to write on in these times - A Blog! (Seriously! Who even writes a blog anymore?). But I am going to keep writing because it is essential for my sanity.