Technology

May 21, 2024

Adventures minus social media: Week three - life interruptions

Auto-generated description: Two smartphones are placed side by side, one displaying a clock and text, and the other showing an intricate fish illustration.

A little late writing up this week’s update. Life itself has been a little distracting recently, both for good and bad reasons. As such, my focus on not using social media this month has taken a back seat.

Thankfully, I haven’t really given up and been worse than last week. If anything, I think I’m being a bit more careful with things this week. My Reddit usage has actually gone down. While I’m still sharing photos to Instagram, I’m not getting too caught up in scrolling the algorithmic feed and being caught in a time warp.

I’ve actually been reading more. I picked up a Moaan InkPalm 5 phone sized eink reader, which has given me something else to keep in my pocket and read instead of scrolling through my phone.

I’ll do a proper write up on it later when I have the energy.

Anyway, it’s probably bed time. Work is keeping me busy and we have some exciting things for the family in the next few days; so I have plenty of things outside of social media to keep my attention focused.

May 13, 2024

Adventures minus social media: Week two - utter failure

I re-enabled Instagram.

It’s a very annoying thing to do or even admit, but the whole sharing photos thing got the better of me. Even though I have a seperate website for my photos (and even got a couple of comments this week), I still want to share my stuff more widely. I don’t know why really, it’s not like I have many followers or likes/comments on my posts so far.

If anything, it’s probably nice to share this stuff with the few people on my Instagram; who are generally family but don’t see that stuff on Facebook, where it’s really just pictures of my kids.

I also have been finding I’m having an issue with Reddit. While I haven’t logged into my account, I find myself wasting time just browsing the site anyway. Not so much on the phone, but on my laptop when I’m “bored”.

I’ve blocked it on my phone, I should probably work out a method on my laptop too.

Outside of the failures, things have been ok. I finished reading The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman, who goes through the problems with the ‘power of positive thinking’ cult, how that actually leads to unhappiness and some alternative ideas such as truly embracing failure can actually lead to more happiness.

I should really start noting down summaries and ideas from these books down. I do feel like I forget a bit of it until I skim through and read parts of it again.

So in short, I’ve so far simply replaced one version of time wasting on social media with others and a little bit of extra reading.

Don’t think I’m doing a great job at this so far, but I keep pushing through.