Digital Declutter

 I really hate the feature on iphones where, when you take a photo to send to someone in an imessage, it saves it to your phone. I don't necessarily need to save the photo of the crusty, dirty mop at my dad's office that I asked if he was sure he wanted me to use (he wasn't. I did not mop). Yes, I can delete them, but my computer has just been backing up all my icloud photos forever. There are photos in there I don't have on my phone because they aren't important and I deleted them, as well as photos I deleted because they are painful to look at. But I digress. 

You know what there was a lot of on my phone? Videos. Of me. Talking to myself. Sometimes they're more benign (in my opinion), just me voicing thoughts aloud and wanting them recorded for some particular reason I can't pin down. I almost never watch these again. Other times it's me ranting about something. There were so many of these in the last two or three weeks before I deleted them. All of them were about something I saw online that clearly got me going.

I have to admit I am proud of my self-restraint in that these videos were not posted online. I've really reined myself in about ranting even just on my instagram story- nobody wants to see it, I never feel good about it later (only embarrassed), and nobody cares, including me later when the moment has passed. But I haven't had much of an urge to make them anymore, and I have a hunch as to why. I'm sure anyone can guess where this is going, but we're going anyway.

First of all, I'm no longer watching content from random strangers talking about something, usually something the algorithm knows I'll interact with. AKA something that I either really support or that really irks me. I started getting a lot of alternative medicine quackery on tiktok right before I deleted it, and it was really irritating me. I'm finding it hard to avoid going into specifics here, but I don't want that to be the point of this post. The point was that I was on these apps watching people film themselves talking absolutely nonsense garbage, and there were so many little buttons on the screen that encouraged me to respond in the same way. Post a response video. Make your own. The button is right there at the bottom of the screen all the time... and other apps had the same features. Lots of buttons to press to record yourself and upload some content to keep others online too. Snapchat's default is to open to selfie mode I think (I can't actually check). It feels like it requires a truly herculean effort to avoid falling into these many traps. AKA not something I, as an individual with a lot of stuff going on in my life just like everyone else, have the energy or attention to devote to avoiding. 

And those two things together- the video content from people and the myriad of little buttons encouraging me to respond and/or make my own- meant I was thinking about filming myself all the time. I speculated on that at the start of this experiment, and now here I am writing a blog post every day. I haven't filmed myself once. It feels silly and stupid to do that in response to, I don't know, a line in a book I read that I particularly disagreed with. I'm more likely to rant about it to someone I know and start an actual honest to god conversation, or at least just speak the thought aloud and bounce it off some other living person out in the world. Sometimes that's all you need. 

The thing is though... people often don't respond or care when I do that. That's not always a bad thing, nor is it a malicious thing. The people in my life are busy and don't often care as deeply as I do about the same things. In fact, it acts like the opposite of those algorithms, in a way. I'm not getting pulled in and sucked deeper into outrage or frustration. Sometimes I'm being actively prevented from doing that. Best case scenario, I find common ground with someone, or someone challenges me in a productive way that makes me think. Algorithms never did that for me. 

I'm also noticing more space inside my head for my own opinions and thoughts, now that I'm not constantly subjecting myself to everyone else's. I truly don't think humans were ever really meant to comprehend that. We're built to maintain local social circles, and yes, sometimes those might expose us to differing opinions. Including ones that result in excommunication and physical violence- it's not like humanity never did that before social media. It's not like it was impossible to be physically isolated in a community that doesn't share your values before you could log on to tiktok and see what feels like the values and opinions and stories of everybody in the entire world and experience just how many of those don't line up with yours. But I think that's the problem, at least before you might think if you left that physical community, you could find something different. Where can you go that's outside the internet? What community is there outside of the vast majority of internet-connected, content-producing humans?

Anyway. I don't know if there's anything to that. But I feel more like I am living my own life, by myself, doing my best, instead of living my life alongside everyone on planet earth, if that makes sense (I suspect it only does if you immerse yourself in social media and then remove yourself as i did). Everything is quieter and I have more control over how much noise gets into my head. I also haven't really thought about those friendly acquaintances in a while. I hope they're doing well, but it no longer makes sense for me to know as much about their lives as I did. Then again, what a gift that was. It always felt special to know, even if it didn't totally make sense. 

Also- I said at the start of this that I'd still find ways to waste time, and I stand by that. But wasting time feels like when I do things like, I don't know, pull every single strand of hair out of my hairbrush, or eat the popcorn outsides to save the middles for the end as a fun snack, or like when one of my elderly neighbours spends all day outside in the fall blowing every single individual leaf off the rocks beside his lawn. Wasting time is me in high school doodling tiny flowers in the margin of my social studies notes, or me in undergrad trying on all the dresses in my closet, or putting on makeup just to take it all off again. It's things that don't really serve any purpose other than making time go by. And what does it really say that I put social media in that category?

I mean, really, what I spend a lot of time doing when I work from home- watching youtube videos and simultaneously playing games on my phone- is indicative perhaps of my short attention span, but it doesn't really feel like wasting time. I'm usually watching something I enjoy and learning about something new, and I'm playing a game, which is a thing I like to do as well. Or I'm reading, more often than not. Or I'm here, typing. Or- and this is some new health thing I'm focusing on at the moment- I'm making myself actual meals. Or I'm going on walks with my mom. Or I'm petting one of the dogs, or doing a load of laundry, or or or. All productive little tasks. Even me going to play a video game downstairs for an hour feels more productive and useful than scrolling. 

Nothing is ever as satisfying as scrolling is, for sure. But in general, if I move away from thinking of productivity as just my work output- in this case, work towards my PhD- and move towards thinking of it as time well spent, well, then I'm spending my time well. And it's things like that that make me want to keep going.