The 5 Things I Felt During My 20 Minute Break From Social Media
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The 5 Things I Felt During My 20 Minute Break From Social Media

Sometimes you need some reflective time. I finally took some and felt like it was worth sharing my experience.

Dylan Sawyer
May 23, 2019
Villanova University
29
The 5 Things I Felt During My 20 Minute Break From Social Media
Dylan Sawyer

This past week, I realized I spend way too much time on social media. When I'm with friends, I will be scrolling through Instagram or tapping through Snapchat stories and that just started to feel ridiculous. So I brainstormed for a while and I decided there was only one thing I could do... take a 20 minute break from social media. It was a hard decision to make, and I knew it would be tough, but I did it. With dedication and perseverance, I spent 20 minutes off of social media and the emotional roller-coaster really caught me off guard.

1. Scared

At first I was simply scared of the world around me. I looked up from my phone and after the first minute, I realized that the world around me is very scary. I was forced to look at things in the material world like blenders and knives and grills. I also looked at things other than social media on my phone, news, charging port, settings. Those things can hurt me, but slowly, I began to get comfortable at about minute 5.

2. Worried

That is until I began to think about social media again. All I kept thinking was that somebody was trying to reach out to me about something really important, like what Tati/James Charles said this time. I was in a panic about missing out on something that was urgent, and poor me wouldn't be able to answer for 20 MINUTES. It was tragic.

3. Curious

Once I got over my fomo, about minute 10, I realized I should explore the world around me, and try to find out more about my phone outside of social media. I found myself in wonderful world of questions like how does the grass grow?, and why does the sun move?, and how do the volume buttons do that? These questions really forced me to escape the digital world of social media, and boy did it make a difference.

4. Awe-inspired

In an attempt to answer these questions, I turned to Google. During this search, I learned that the internet is kinda huge, There are just so many places to go to learn things. Here I was thinking the internet was just a collection of social media sites and CoolMath4Kids. I was so wrong. There's places like Pintrest and YouTube that we can gather really cool ideas from. It's wild. There is so much to the internet outside of Instagram and Twitter and Snapchat, I'm glad I was able to take advantage of it for about 7 minutes.

5. Fulfilled

By minute 20, I felt like a whole new man. I knew so much more about the world of my phone, and to an extent the world around me. It was fantastic, it was life changing, and most of all, it was going to make a great Instagram post.

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