My Social Dilemma

I fell off the digital grid and it felt amazing.

Clarity is power.

That’s the recurring theme of Yuval Harari’s book ‘21 Lessons for the 21st Century’. I can’t say I remember much from that book if I’m being honest, it’s been about four years since I read it. But, I recently heard Harrari speak on a podcast and that phrase once again jumped out at me. It reminded me of a time when I spent three months off the digital grid and how it affected my athletic performance and my ability to simply be present in my entire life. 

Sometime during the summer of 2020, I remember sitting at a computer trying to do this new thing called working from home, the world was in chaos, people were dying left and right, and others were losing their minds in the streets or glued to their phones fighting a civil war on a digital battlefield. My smartphone was blowing up—text messages, Twitter notifications, Instagram likes, grandma’s Facebook post about how to stop COVID by sucking on a hairdryer (this is a real example)—the bombardment was constant. I know I am not alone when I say I hit a mental low point in 2020. I had to do something about it.

The world outside me was in utter chaos. I couldn’t solve that—at least not right away, I thought. So, I shifted my focus inside—inside myself that is. That mental shift by no means fixed anything right away, but it did set me on a path of self-study that has completely changed my life for the better. I started paying attention to everything in my life and how it affected my emotions. Over nearly two years of rigorous self-examination, I started taking note of habits that either lead me toward the person I want to become or didn't. I started cutting the things that didn’t out of my life. One of those things was social media.

We live in an age where we have all collectively normalized some extremely bad habits—i.e. doom scrolling social media and using smartphones anytime we are even remotely bored. I’m not here to judge or criticize anyone—I’m just as guilty as the next guy. Nonetheless, I think I should point out the importance of focus and controlling one’s attention. Yes, attention is our most scarce and most valuable resource. That’s why companies (like Facebook and its subsidiaries, YouTube, and Twitter, etc.) have spent millions finding nefarious ways to capture it, and they’ve succeeded. I don’t need to go into detail to explain all the ways that social media apps are getting us addicted to them. For that, you can watch ‘The Social Dilemma’ on Netflix, read ‘Attention Merchants’ by Tim Wu, or ‘Surveillance Capitalism’ by Shoshana Zuboff, to name a few. Long story short, social media apps are dividing our attention, making it shorter and shorter, and simultaneously frying our dopamine receptors, making us less and less happy. And that’s just on a personal level. On a societal level, the effects are far more terrifying.

Anyway, when I started paying attention to my habits, I reframed my relationship with my phone and to the apps on it. I started thinking about each moment differently and about where my attention was going. I would put my phone in a kitchen drawer and go for long walks. Suddenly, the world would become quieter. Even though the world was still a shitshow outside, things didn’t seem so bad to me. When I focused my attention on the present all of a sudden everything was alright. And some things that I would barely even have noticed had I been walking with my phone or listening to music, became tiny miracles. Flowers were colorful again, trees became amazing feats of nature, and sunsets were vibrant and spiritual. I could feel the wind blowing on my skin, the warmth of sunlight. This didn’t happen immediately, of course, but over time I started to feel my brain resetting. When I removed the phone from the equation, I became human again. 

My phone and the constant bombardment of content meant to keep me staring at the screen had raised my standard of mental stimulus to astronomical levels. It was like a drug… no it wasn’t like a drug, it was a drug. And it completely altered my perception… and my perception was my reality. Do I want to live in a chaotic world or a simple world? If I want to live in a simple world, then I must simplify what I pay attention to.

The next step for me was to shut down all my social media accounts. I didn’t want to deal with the rigor of having to budget out my time to use my phone, or to try to control how often I picked up my phone so I just removed the temptation altogether. And then, after a few months of no social media, I took it a step further. I got what I call a dumb phone, i.e not a smartphone. Yes, I carried around a dumb phone. All it did was send text messages, call, and it had maps if I got lost (It’s called the Light Phone if you want to check it out, highly recommend). It changed my world. I became present in my own life again—never pulled away from the moment by a notification.  

All of this is not to say I went on some violent crusade against technology. There are in fact so many beneficial tools and aspects of our devices that bring us together and make the world a better place. However, there is also something deeply malevolent about the current way we consume these tools… or rather the way they are designed to consume us.

Deep focus while climbing in a cave in Austin, TX. Fell off shortly after, but still working on this boulder.

After a few weeks of living life phone-free, I started to notice another more exciting change in my climbing performance. Whether I was climbing alone or with friends, my climbing sessions became a lot more meditative. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t being distracted in my climbing sessions. I also felt like the many hours of phonelessness and mental clarity were making it easier for me to focus deeply on what I was doing. I remember a few days after I had worked on a difficult boulder at the gym, I was laying in bed, rehearsing each move in my head. I actually took out a notebook and surprised myself by drawing the boulder by hand, down to the very foot placement on each move. On the next session, I finished the boulder–my highest grade up to that point (for all the climbers out there it was a V12, just kidding it was a lot lower). Of course, this is anecdotal evidence, but it’s no secret that better focus equals better performance. 

My time without a smartphone opened my eyes to just how destructive and distracting some of our digital habits can be. Removing myself from the digital grid for a few months was a personal revelation. I’ve since returned to social media and the digital world (in fact, full disclosure I work as a digital producer for a news organization, trust me I understand the irony and cognitive dissonance). But coming back from a social media detox was like being on a healthy diet and then suddenly going on a nonstop Doritos and Pepsi binge–it feels kind of disgusting. Still, when so much of our lives are lived online, it’s pretty hard to function offline. 

In recent months, I’ve limited my use of social media and paid close attention to the way unfettered digital dopamine affects my mood. Social media and other digital apps are just getting better and better at sucking us in. If we don’t have self-discipline in the way we use them we are at risk of losing ourselves. 

I want to live in the physical, natural world and use the digital world as a tool when I need something like connection, or a space to share thoughts. I don’t want to live in the digital world and only use the physical world as a tool to gather material for my digital life. 

While I have technically returned to social media, mostly because of my job, I try to use it a lot less. I don’t have a Facebook account to worry about. I only use Twitter if I need it for work. And I download and check Instagram, once a week on Saturdays. Other than that it stays off my phone. Additionally, while I have used Tiktok for work, I have a hard rule against having the app on my phone or even having a personal account. There’s something about that app that terrifies me. Let me rephrase: everything about that app terrifies me. 

Also, I recently discovered the Opal app on the iPhone. It’s basically a souped-up version of the Iphone’s built-in screen time monitor but it’s a lot harder to circumvent. On weekdays, I use Opal to block access to all social apps, including iMessage. The app is very customizable and allows you to block any distracting app you’d like. Of course, I also tried to purge my iPhone of any unnecessary features. 

People who are in tune with their emotions, who can think clearly, and who have control of their attention are going extinct. We will not be able to perform at our absolute best unless we learn to turn off all the other noise—tone down the bullshit if you will. The best athletes and performers are the ones that can achieve the deepest levels of focus and mental clarity. Let’s face it, our devices and social media apps are the world’s best distractors, keeping us from living and performing in flow.  

Ask yourself this: do you want the lifelong tool of clarity or the immediate gratification of digital stimuli? If your answer is the former, then it requires some work. I am by no means fully removed from the digital world and its strong grip but I am trying to maximize the moments of complete clarity, because as Harari says: clarity is power.