We couldn’t have timed our No Social Media November experiment better, what with everything that was going down at Twitter then.

Background

By this point there’s no need to spend so many words explaning why one might want to run this experiment: skewed information diet, depressing content, lack of actionables, a wanting substitute for real sense of community and connectedness, etc etc.

Something else that came up in discussion was that the longer you doomscroll social media, the rarer wondrousness seems to become. The novel, joyous encounters become more elusive as you experience more repetitive content, but the annoying and frustrating things don’t become more tolerable. Things just get very weary after a while, like growing up in an accelerated, sad sort of way.

It’s possible to curate your feed to some degree, but overall it still seemed to feed cynicism more than anything, which isn’t really something we need more of right now. Hence the No Social Media November experiment.

How It Went

Not much to say about the methodology (personally just moved the apps to another page of the smartphone, and avoided the platforms on the browser), so let’s jump straight into how the process was like.

First off, we decided to supplant doomscrolling with bookreading instead, so I made a real dent in my reading backlog. Both mornings in bed and workout sessions (where I read while recovering between sets) became more quiet and peaceful. There’s a nice meditative quality to it, and also had the upside of feeling more productive.

Because a lot of newsworthy things were happening during this month, we did get into situations where we got the sense that something big and happening was going on around a particular topic, but weren’t able to get the full context (read: check out the spicy primary sources) ourselves. We asked other people for their take instead, and pieced things together ourselves more than we used to.

In that sense, cutting out social media really did seem to make us more social, heh.

Conclusion

At the risk of sounding like a wilting Heian noble, avoiding these platforms has truly been nice for keeping oneself from being bogged down by worldly affairs, especially those ones that you (feel you) can’t do much about.

It’s not so much that we didn’t know this was a thing, as that we didn’t know to what degree we would personally experience it.

Overall, the effect on daily mood is actually surprisingly noticeable, and so we’re going to continue indefinitely with limiting our regular consumption of the stuff.

Definitely a good experiment worth conducting, maybe the most fruitful of the year in fact. Recommended!