30 Day Mental Reset
30 days isn’t that long, right?
In case you missed it, Elon Musk was asked what he thought was doing the most harm to humanity and one of his answers was “short form content.” He called it the worst invention of all time.
There’s a lot of damage being done but an obvious one is that our attention spans have shrunk from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds today.
And I can feel it. I can’t remember things or pay attention as long as I used to. I’m going to do a little challenge and experiment with putting down the phone and picking up my life.
Starting July 6th I’m getting off social media for a month. Confession: While writing this I asked Siri how many days July 6-August 2 is, but caught myself and counted the days on the open calendar right next to me. This is where we are!
Can I even do it? Can I remove social media from my phone and spend a month reading and writing, painting and gardening, harvesting honey and tending bees? Honestly my brain feels itchy just thinking about it. Y’all know I love a good Instagram reel with inspiring music and quotes.
But let’s be honest. That’s not all that is in my feed. I have lived my life swimming in news, current events, and politics, and prided myself on being the one who had the details on a breaking story. I just want to know all the things. Shout out to Eve, I can’t judge you, girl! But knowing what’s going on (being informed) also means knowing what’s going on (here’s a terrible tragic story that doesn’t affect your life at all) and my algorithm doesn’t seem to know the difference between a war lord slaughtering people in a third world country, a recipe for peach cobbler and an ad for a cute summer dress.
The algorithm cannot in fact read the room. Or can it?
In the dystopian part of my brain it actually can and dispersing not only my attention but also my empathy and compassion is part of the plan. Shades of the Screwtape Letters.
Meanwhile on social media our minds are being bombarded, addicted, and abused in this attention economy. Because when we are doom scrolling someone, not us, is getting paid. In case no one told you our attention and TIME are being harvested for cash.
For all the dangers about short form content and our attention spans I believe this slipping news and disaster into our feeds may be doing the most damage to our minds and emotions. I scroll and glide right past the most ghastly human behavior to see a motivational video, a room makeover, a natural disaster, a video of beautiful architecture, a friends’ travel post, and a violent crime captured on someone’s phone who filmed it instead of helping.
Y’all. Our brains were not made for this. Scientists call this neurosystem overdrive and neural fatigue. We were made to chat with God in a garden (read my post, Chasing Eden, about that) so what are we even doing?
It’s a dilemma for people who want to be informed and a problem our parents didn’t deal with. The newspaper was on the driveway and my dad would have read it over morning coffee. In the evening at 5:30 the news came on for 30 minutes.
As a child we would have maybe talked about Nixon’s trip to China over dinner but that was it. Real life, daily life was..well, real life. Work and cutting the grass, making dinner and doing the dishes, cooking out, chatting with friends, cleaning the house.
And let’s face it, even though the news was bad a network could only cram so much of it into 30 minutes. Then in the 80s Ted Turner started CNN and I was hooked. I could turn on the news any time and catch up. But in case you don’t remember, in those early days it was still basically a 30 minute newscast repeated and maybe updated throughout the day if there was breaking news. After a while you would gather that you’d seen all the news that was available or that you’d caught up and switched it off to move on with your life.
I know you came here for hope and honey but I’m going somewhere with this.
What if…I turned it off.
I have an advantage over younger generations and it’s that I remember a time before. If you are over a certain age you do too. I can get up in the morning and think “what did I do before all these devices?” Here’s what a day in the 90s looked like:
Get up, make coffee, get the paper and read it.
Read something else or work the crossword puzzle.
Put things away and tidy up the house, start some laundry.
Get dressed for errands, do the shopping, etc. Maybe I’d read something in the paper that sparked my interest. I’d go to the library to find a book about it. The LIBRARY, y’all.
Work on projects.
Lunch and catch up on news if it was a big news day.
Read.
More housework, gardening, cooking, or more projects.
Make dinner.
Eat, more news, television until bedtime.
Read in bed until falling asleep.
There was this mildly unpleasant feeling called boredom when you would literally have nothing to do. An overwhelming irritating kind of boredom that was enough incentive to look around for a way to be creative or productive. Maybe just phone a friend to see what they were doing. Not the kind of boredom you experience when you don’t like a movie. I don’t know how to explain it other than it was kind of heavy and very much a mood that would drive people to action to make it go away.
Can you remember the last time you felt that? I can’t. I haven’t been properly bored since 2009 when a friend convinced me to get on FB. A few years later I got my first smart phone and now boredom is banished because any moment no matter how small can be filled up. Standing in line at Kroger? Phone comes out. And that’s if it ever got put away because it’s likely the list is on my phone or my husband has texted me with something else we need. Waiting at a doctor’s office? Phone. Random commercial in the middle of the movie? Phone.
So what would happen if I just stopped? It sounds easy but there are some issues:
Running my blog. Most people arrive from social media.
Selling honey and updates about the process and when it’s available.
Posting about new chapters of my novel dropping every week.
Sharing about the experience of going social media free.
Actually those are the only ones I can think of. Because guess what. None of that is what I’m spending the majority of my time doing. I am spending most of the time mindlessly scrolling ruining my attention span in the process and quite literally wasting my days and I’m a little far down the road to be wasting any time.
I’ve enlisted the help of some Gen Z friends for advice on how best to go about it and here are their suggestions.
Do at least a month because a week is too easy.
Remove all the social media apps from my home screen.
Use my camera (phone allowed for this) and journal to document
Share what I’ve learned and what I got done at the end of the challenge.
Preschedule as much as possible for the novel chapter drops, blog posts, etc.
Goals:
To get some deep reading, thinking, and writing done.
To be present in my own life
To stay off all social media.
To change how I engage with social media after this challenge is over.
A lot of this is going to include just not picking up the phone to look at it for anything if I can help it. Do we still have a physical city map? Do I just look out the window for the weather? Should I physically write instead of using my laptop? Give me all your suggestions and ideas in the comments.
Help me make the rules.
But hurry! I can only read them until Sunday night!