It's been about a week since I deleted my Twitter account and signed out of Facebook, and honestly, I'm feeling pretty good about it. I don't miss Twitter at all. Over the last year, it had turned into such a festering sinkhole. Still, totally, finally nuking the account was a big decision. Facebook is a bit harder to drop; a few friends and family scattered around the world still rely on it to stay in touch, so I'm sort of stuck with it. But I’d been wasting way too many hours a week mindlessly scrolling, and I decided to just sign out. Now, I can’t just open the homepage without thinking about it—I have to make the deliberate choice to log in and waste my time. So far, I haven’t done that.
I went for this digital detox because the U.S. election coverage was doing my head in. I tend to have a fairly dim, Hobbesian view of humanity, and I wasn’t seeing anything good coming out of it. Turns out, I'm not alone. Psychologists have been talking about a huge rise in anxiety tied directly to the political process in the U.S., and that anxiety is spreading on both sides of the aisle, inside and outside the States. The world feels like it’s coming apart. I realized that it might be better to take a breath, step back, stop devouring five hours of polling data and analysis each day, and maybe do something more productive with my time.
So, I started reading books. I plucked a few volumes off my shelves and scattered them around the house. Not my usual novels or histories, but shorter, more bite-sized reads. I grabbed a couple of titles that are collections of epigrams—or, I don’t know, is "epigrammatic" even a word? Little pithy paragraphs, anyway. One of them is a book I’ve been meaning to read for nearly 20 years: *Unleashed: Poems by Writers' Dogs*. It’s a quirky collection of poems written from the perspective of the poets' dogs, and it’s pretty cute.
Now, I’ve got these books scattered around the house—in the kitchen, bathroom, out on the deck—basically everywhere I might otherwise take out my phone and start scrolling like a zombie. The first few days, the urge to mindlessly scroll was intense; it almost felt like caffeine withdrawal, this real edge at the end of my nerves. But that’s starting to fade now, and I’m finding myself thinking, “Hey, where’s that book? Or that magazine?” And I’ll pick one up and flick through a few pages instead.
It's been a surprisingly nice change—far more restful than what I've been doing for the past 20 years.