When I went home to New Jersey for the last time to say goodbye to the house and rescue any of my cherished possessions before they got Kondo-ed to the curb by my mother's frenetic packing, I discovered my old iPod Touch tucked away in a drawer full of useless crap (read: love letters). It was long dead, but I had a charger back home (Boston home, the only one now).
The evening before I left, on my way back inside from taking the trash out, I sat on the front steps and wallowed for a while in my memories. Since my parents had (cruelly) uprooted the great Japanese maple (our climbing tree, pirate ship, spy fort, insurance liability, property value detractor) from the front yard, I had a clear view down the hill to the Duck Pond. I thought of all the times I had circled it for Fourth of July parades, bike rides, middle school gym classes, track practices, and dog walks. Beyond the pond, I could see a train pulling into the station. I'd miss that too: all those trips to the city, visiting dad after work, going with friends unsupervised for the first time in high school, going to concerts, tennis tournaments, that one bull riding competition...
At some point, the sun set and I went back inside to warm up.
Anyway, I was still feeling melancholy a couple days later, so I decided to lean into it. After work, I docked my iPod into my iHome (the best and only radio I have ever owned), waited for it to charge up, and then, ditching my phone, took a nice long walk through the Emerald Necklace, bopping along to some ancient tunes on my wired earbuds. I'm no luddite (okay, fine, maybe I am), but it was really nice to not be able to check twitter for an hour or so.
When I got home (to the Boston one - I don't need to disambiguate anymore!) and back to my phone, I deleted the Instagram, Twitter and Facebook apps. I also resolved to not tell anyone. There's nothing worse than some enlightened asshole telling you how much better he is than you because he can think in sentences longer than 140 characters because he hasn't seen a meme in two months. Whoops.
Anyway, here are some of the things I've thunked have been temporarily freed from the shackles of social media's unshakable allure, distilled into short bullet points that you can hopefully pay attention to long enough before your next notification:
I might have missed your birthday. Sorry.
I followed a bunch of cartoonists on Instagram and I miss it. Haven't gotten around to getting the New Yorker app or some other alternative, but I probably will soon.
I'm still always on that damn phone. I've mostly been reading articles from HackerNews or NYT or WSJ. These articles are arguably better for me than memes, but comment sections are equally stimulating and toxic everywhere.
I feel a real physical pang of longing when I catch sight of someone scrolling through Instagram. This sort of scares me, but not in a very scary way.
I thought getting off Twitter would help me be more creative. I'm not sure if it has, but it's certainly nice to not spend time thinking of tweetable thoughts.
I still don't understand or want to understand TikTok trends.
When my friends ask me if I've seen one meme or another, it's easy to say no. The hard part is trying to hide the fact that I haven't seen it because I'm on a social media cleanse because I have such a huge brain and am getting such a unique insight on life in the modern era and please let me tell you about all the deep revelations I've had, or better yet, go read my blog post about it. Shit. There I go again.
I haven't re- downloaded any of those apps, nor have I taken any more melancholy iPod walks. We'll see what crazy thing I decide to do on the next one. Maybe I'll stop using the toaster. Yeah, that's a good idea. I'll start microwaving my eggos. It'll build character.