Healthy Media Habits

For a period in high school my cellular data stopped working for some inexplicable reason. This meant that my phone only had an internet connection when I was at home or had access to some other Wi-Fi network. At first this was of course incredibly frustrating, but since I had no time to fix it I simply had to come up with ad hoc solutions. This forced me to be a lot more intentional when it came to my media consumption.

If you want to consume something when you are out of the house (say on your commute) this meant that you have to have downloaded it in advance. PDFs, HTML documents, music to listen to — it all has to be pre-planned. Most troublesome however was the inability to use GPS. Instead one had to memorize or write down addresses and routes, download maps of different areas, and ask strangers for directions. This last practice has practically dissipated from everyday use, but it was of course quite common before. This was perhaps one of the most strongly positive aspects of not being able to find your way around — it gives you a stronger anchor to your surroundings rather than merely gliding past a world of extras. Being consciously aware of what media you are consuming, and for what purpose, also allows you to more critically evaluate that media, rather than just letting it flow through you.

I think doing something of this sort is a good idea for most people. It does not involve any major sacrifices in that you still have access to your tiktok slop feed, but only at home. You don't sacrifice the security of being able to call for help (you still have your phone) but you also can't respond to slack messages immediately as they come in. Instead you have these specific moments of prescence whenever you are out partying, walking the dog, or just commuting. The knowledge that you are capable of this stays with you even if you choose to enable mobile data (or in my case your connection suddenly starts working one day).

The biggest downside of not using social media is not getting regular updates in things that are going on. The largest issue I had with this is that I would spend enormous amounts of time trying to read everything there was to know about everything going on at any given moment. Not only was this incredibly draining to do, I also realized that it didn't give me enough time or energy to think about big-picture trends. The solution for me was twofold:

1. Stop using news apps and read an actual newspaper.

Reading a newspaper — ideally a physical paper one — creates a hard cut-off for consuming news. You can't read any more about a topic than what is in your hand! It also gives you a nice feeling of being "caught up" on everything that has been happening. Getting your flow of information from an actual reputable source is also better than merely having it filtered through some unknown twitter user. In my case I read The Economist, a general news paper with some extra focus on business and politics². I particularly enjoy the number of graphs and data-driven journalism since I love statistics. Since it is released weekly I also get to read it at a leisurely pace.

1. Get updates through RSS feeds

Reading on an analog paper is lovely, but there are of course some things that can't be delivered to physically or that come out on an irregular basis. These sort of things are best served through an RSS feed in my experience. RSS is supported in more places than you might think, and if not there are often ways to integrate it with an RSS reader³. Having a fixed, reverse-chronological list of things to read (or otherwise go through, RSS can be used for formats other than text) also gives you this feeling of being "done" that a newspaper gives you. There is no infinite feed that can get you stuck scrolling for 6 hours. You can still use get some digital media delivered to your phone, but won't be glued to it and it will return to "just" a communications device after a short while.

"But what about discovery?" I head you say. For this I recommend Andreas Gohr's indieblog.page (where you can also find this website). He has RSS feeds to a number of random daily indieblog entries⁴. Not every random blog post will be interesting, but sometimes you'll find someone doing interesting things — at which point you can subscribe to their RSS feed. You can read feeds in lots of different ways — I use feeder on my smartphone and elfeed on my laptops and desktop.

1. Actually talk to people

Scrolling through your friends' social media posts may seem like a good way to keep in touch with them, but in actuality you are not creating or maintaining a genuine connection with them — you are merely interacting with a simulacrum of them. Our brains are not made for distinguishing the differences between the two⁵ but we nevertheless suffer the consequences. The solution to this? Just reach out to people that you might otherwise not have. Either message them directly, email them, or give them a quick call.

There doesn't have to be any stress about it — and in fact there should not be. Genuine human interaction is by definition messy, and that is okay. Social media often tries to show the existence some of perfect social being, the "pickup artist" that always has the perfect lines that always work, the influencer with the perfect jokes that everyone laughs at (while being at a carefully orchestrated photo-shoot) et cetera. The techniques they are employing is of course just simple cherry picking, but it is easy to fall for it in the moment. Embracing the messiness of human conversation — and the cost and benefits that come with it — is much more rewarding in the long run.

Social media is in practice not a social endeavour. Instead it is a form of entertainment, a means to observe things going on. This does not have to be inherently bad in any way, but it is clear to anyone in the modern day that social media platforms are not your friend, but instead want to keep you addicted while they show you more advertisements. It would be a mistake however to abandon all forms of media.

It has become clearer to me over the period after the COVID-19 pandemic that contentedness — although not happiness — can only be attained through active engagement. Victor Breder puts it as "I love having read". Happiness can be found easily in the individual moment through listening to someone else's jokes, social media, sex, or drugs but long-term contentedness requires effort to be put in. It requires the mind to be fully occupied with whatever one is doing. It is straining, and it has to be because it should challenge you.

The difference then is not as simple as "stop doing X". Watching instagram reels is not inherently negative, it is possible to be intellectually stimulated through them, but it is much harder to misuse a physical book or magazine. I also have no problem with movies in this regard because if I am sitting down to watch a film I am entirely focused on the subject matter at hand. A problem would theoretically emerge if I am merely watching it to "pass time" or get some cheap dopamine. The problem merely emerges with one's interaction with media, not the media itself.

But this still does not mean that we should blame ourselves for failing to restrain ourselves when it comes to these new addictive technologies. They are genuinely problematic, and you need to identify where the line is for you and what media you can regularly interact with without misuse. For me I will confess that this line is quite low — I found most pure social media platforms too addictive — but it might be different for you (although I think that it is really quite low for most people).

The methods outlined here work for me, but they are by no means guaranteed to work for you. Experimenting with different forms of media consumption is not only one of the most impactful changes you can make to your life, but it is also quite fun! Optimising this is also one way to easily challenge yourself — is what you are doing right now really what will satisfy you? If yes; great! Maybe try and do more of it? If not; try and identify what caused you to get into that situation and create frameworks in your life that will effortlessly guide you away from those activities. ❦