The surprisingly undisciplined trick to escaping social media |
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The surprisingly undisciplined trick to escaping social media
Routines aren’t the key to healthy habits. Indulgence is.
If you’re looking to wean yourself off social media and replace it with a more productive habit — and who among us isn’t — a lot of the common advice can sound like it’s coming from a drill instructor: Go outside and touch grass. Routine is key. Get your butt in the chair and don’t get up until you’ve done the work. They might as well be telling you to do a hundred pushups while they’re at it.
Curiosity is one of the most powerful human motivators. That’s why social media preys on it.
To reclaim your time, find a question that interests you.
Try to answer that question.
Let the process spark another question for you.
As valuable as that advice may be when you need a kick in the pants, these imperatives create an uneasy tension between leisure and labor. It’s all well and good to try to turn away from the siren song of your phone, but how likely are you to stick with the alternatives — reading books, drawing, meditating — if they feel like homework?
It’s a lot more fun, and a lot less arduous, to try to beat social media at its own game instead, and harness your curiosity.
Social media apps work in part by playing off our natural curiosity. Every time we refresh the endless scroll, they promise to give us new information, capturing the parts of our brains that always wonder what’s about to happen next. But they rarely actually satisfy that curiosity. They just repeat it endlessly: What’s going to happen when I scroll this far? Or this far? Or this far? The answer is almost always: the same thing as last time.
Away from social media, however, the world works differently. If you get curious about a question off the algorithm, it can lead you somewhere new and interesting.
Why you (probably) won’t finish reading this story
Even when we begin with a utilitarian goal, curiosity can take us in surprising directions. A few years ago, I got interested in running. At first I would just lace up my shoes, do a few perfunctory stretches, and jog straight out of my front door. But I gradually became curious about the mechanics of what I was trying to do. I began investigating running form, which led me to theories about how you should be doing different kinds of running every week. From........