During the week of Thanksgiving, I decided to give myself a challenge. I vowed to stay away from social media from Sunday, Nov. 22 to Sunday, Nov. 27. I needed a break from all of the negative and unproductive things that I see on daily basis. Other than Facebook, I did not feel as though I spent a lot of time scrolling through my various timelines, but I knew that all it took was a TrumpForPresident hashtag to send me over the edge.
This was not a test to prove that social media is bad for people, I just wanted to know what my brain would come up with to occupy my time. I wanted to put myself back in the mindset of my elementary school self. I had access to the internet at home, but it was the AOL Dial-Up internet that took a billion years to load, and you could not be on the phone while you were using it.
When I was a child up until around middle school, most of my time was spent reading whatever I could get my hands on, writing really bad poetry, or playing with my friends outside. As I’ve gone through high school and college, I realized that I rarely go outside just to be outside, and I never have time to read for pleasure. I thought that maybe I would get some reading done over the break, if I did not have access to my social media accounts. I defined “social media” as anything that would cause me to aimlessly scroll or do nothing for hours at a time, so that meant Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Tumblr, Vine, Yik Yak, Tinder, Vine, and even YouTube. What I did not account for was Netflix.
The first two days of my hiatus went without a hitch. I did not even realize that I wasn’t on social media because I had so much work to do in my classes. By day three, I had to completely disable the notifications on my phone, and I had to put all of the apps in their own folder and on the next screen so that I wouldn’t go to click on them out of habit (which happened more than a few times). The next few days, I spent more than 10 hours watching Netflix. (Don’t judge me. Everyone has done it).
The problem was, I ended up not reading for pleasure, not one page. I was so glad to have some time to watch Netflix that it was all that I did. I did not consider that Netflix should be included in my list of time-consuming things, because I never had time to find out.
While being off of social media did give me more time to think about life and ready myself for my upcoming finals, it did not have the effect that I thought it would. This doesn’t mean that social media is 100 percent great and there’s no reason not to take a break every now and then, but we all have our vices, and sometimes, we have to alter them in order to get the results that we want. I know that I have to cut off everything, Netflix included, to fully hit the reset button when I need it. I need to grab a book, make some tea, and sit outside. Some people might meditate, do yoga, work out, or write music.
It doesn’t matter what you do with your added time, as long as you do something other than scrolling your life away.
