I tried

I didn't exactly decide on keeping a whole day off from social media, but I did end up challenging myself to minimize it down as much as possible. Funnily enough, I messed up immediately after waking up. Without thinking, I opened up Instagram while still lying in bed. The same thing happened throughout the day. Waking up an hour before the programming course for the day started, I all of a sudden found myself a bit bored, quite not knowing what to do with myself at first, since I couldn't really start doing anything else with the lesson start looming ahead. I did send some messages through Whatsapp and Messenger, but even those I chose to keep to bare minimum, whatever that is... 

As you can see, I still managed to cut down my screen time with quite a chunk. Biggest time consumer is unarguably Whatsapp, although I don't consider it a social media in a same sense as Instagram and Facebook. 

Late at night I decided that well, it would also be quite a fitting day to watch The Social Dilemma. It actually got me thinking, that what if I'm actually not quite as introverted as I initially thought? While  taking even some time off from social media, the only thing I really missed was talking to my friends. Especially during a pandemic, when the real life social contacts are quite near to a zero, it feels a bit overwhelming. A lot of the things the movie points out, I've already been consciously fighting against for some time. For example with the notifications that are supposed to make you interact, and bringing engaging content into your feed. With most apps, I allow only a bare minimum of notifications or none at all. At one point earlier this year, I noticed some Facebook groups I had joined, kept me scrolling for quite a while. Only because I found watching people argue over the stupidest and smallest things, only to realise that I need to stop this. So, I ended up disabling notifications from the groups, and set it up so they wouldn't ever again pop up in my feed. Of course I could've just left the groups, but I still kind of wanted to leave myself a back door open in case I wanted to go see what was going on there. But to tell you the truth, I haven't opened those groups even one time since, so at this point I'm just questioning why am I even still there. 

As a whole, I was quite satisfied with the day as whole. Albeit I didn't go completely without social media, even this felt like a small win in a way. And I did end up making a phone call I otherwise probably wouldn't have.