I quiet quit the internet and here's what I've learnt
On learning how to inhabit this world (part 4)
The last time I wrote in my ‘How to Inhabit’ series, I was leaving phonewater behind and finding new pillars to use as building blocks to build my life on.
I would say, since around that time, my relationship with the internet (I primarily here mean algorithmic social-media internet) can be best described as ‘quiet quitting’.
Quiet quitting, in terms of a job, "refers to doing the minimum requirements of one's job and putting in no more time, effort, or enthusiasm than absolutely necessary... the worker who does this doesn't actually leave their position and continues to collect a salary” (Investopedia).
Quiet quitting the internet for me has been remaining on the internet, but being able to reap the beneficial parts of it without being consumed by its whims, at least for the most part. Hey, even a quiet-quitter might have to work hard for 1-2 days when their job has a very tight deadline. I view how I use the internet now as similar to that- I may have a couple of days where I fall into the doom-scroll void, but this isn’t something I judge myself for- and I feel confident in my ability to return from phonewater.
It can feel tempting to run away from the world and live like a hermit, but Jenny Odell reminds us there is no real way to ‘escape the system’ permanently. She instead advocates for staying in place, staying where you are and only changing where your attention flows. We are pretty obsessed with ‘challenge’ and ‘core’-ification of everything- so it can be very tempting to delete all social media overnight, do a ‘dopamine fast challenge’ and all that- but I’ve been there, and don’t think any of this is sustainable. Currently, I still have all my social media accounts. I’ve just quiet-quit them.
What does quiet-quitting the internet look like?
I have not run away from the internet: I check my Instagram, almost daily. I watch my favourite YouTubers when they post, and I do spend what could be considered a significant amount of time (2-4 hours) in my week doing this.
What changes have I made? I don’t have Instagram on my phone anymore- only on my laptop. I log into and log out of it whenever I feel like it (which might be once a day or so). I have YouTube but have disabled watch history on my primary YouTube account, so I don’t have shorts or a recommended page of videos- I can only watch the YouTubers I’m subscribed to. I have another account with the recommendations turned on that I visit once in 4-5 days or so, to just see if the recommended page has any suggestions for me that seem interesting. This way, I can feel reassured I am not ‘missing out’ on the next big creator/drama, etc. I still have WhatsApp on my phone and Reddit, Pinterest on my laptop. When I meet my friends, they will ask me if I’ve watched ‘x’ or ‘y’, and I won’t lie, increasingly, I respond with clueless looks- but I don’t mind. If it’s very important, someone will tell me and I can then go and look it up.
What has quiet quitting the internet been like?
Now that it’s been a solid 5-6 months of living like this- I think its a good time to reflect on what’s it been like, and what my learnings have been.
No one is bored, everything is boring:
Mark Fisher spoke about how ever since industrialisation, the idea of ‘using time well’- maximising productivity of time came about and has intensified. Capitalist business (what he calls ‘busy-ness’) commands you to the ‘now’ - clocking in shifts, making appointments, meeting deadlines. With the development of our phones, he says, we now carry in our pockets a device that at all times is commanding our attention towards these urgencies of capitalism- work notifications to be responded to immediately, text messages to be responded to immediately, videos to be consumed right now. When in the midst of a doomscroll, it seems absolutely urgent to move to the next video/post- to ensure we capture as much ‘value’ out of the next second as possible. Chloe Salmon calls this ‘the cult of the now’.
Everyone is freed from the terror of boredom, but we’ve lost the freedom to be bored, to be freed up from the pressures of capitalism on our time - since every second of our attention is being mined to make more money for large corporations. Fisher traces that we’ve traded in boredom for anxiety, as we are constantly pulled towards fulfilling the urgencies of capitalism in all directions. Everything feels like it has to be done now. We of course inevitably ignore some of these calls, but the psychological effects of missing out/not being there for something or someone/abandoning projects remains, keeping us in a state of hyper-alertness amidst a “cesspool of fragmented, incoherent information which we lack the time and resource to fully make sense of”.
I realised I’m so habitually used to using my phone that when I decided to quiet-quit, I had the urge to fill my random 5-10 minutes of free time with YouTube/Instagram- but when I let myself do that- most things were quite boring and I didn’t really want to be watching it, but I honestly didn’t know what to do with myself. I literally bought slime and started setting 5 minute timers to just play with it. I also just started walking around the house. I just stared at the wall for some time. And naps- I’ve been taking a LOT of naps. I also started listening to songs and staring out the window like I’m in a movie- something I don’t think I’ve done since I was maybe 16. It’s still quite fun, I must tell you.
Dreaming up the future again:
Dr. Aditi Nerurkar in Emma Chamberlain’s podcast spoke about being stressed as being in a state where you are hyper-focused on surviving the present moment (symapthetic nervous system). Your body is in flight or fight trying to get you to survive the day, and this is incompatible with long-term goal-oriented action. Our hyper-alert generation are hyper-stressed, and this is hindering our ability to conceive of a future, really. Fisher calls this phenomenon the ‘slow cancellation of the future’. Combined with growing wealth inequality, climate crisis and rising global conflict, it makes complete sense that we are a generation that is just unable to really meaningfully conceive of a tangible future, whether for ourselves or the world.
Having a break from constant stimulation definitely helped me think about and take some actions towards my future self. I think the most critical thing is being able to process an emotion better. I realised that I opened social media as soon as I’m confronted with something slightly challenging or uncomfortable- an email that is tricky to write, or uncomfortable feelings about anything- which defers the feeling to a later time. If you’ve ever experienced that you are fine during the day and are consumed by anxious thoughts at night, chances are that it is the only unstimulated time you are giving your brain, and it is trying to process that emotion. I think my brain has a bit more space to think about and problem solve now in an unstressed state. Some things I’ve thought about for years and never been able to do, I’ve gotten some of those things done over the past 3-4 months- and I’d like to think its maybe because I’ve given my brain the space to think about, come up with and act on the solutions.
Self-optimisation phase:
However, this entire journey hasn’t been an unproblematic one. A core reason people try to use their phone less is so that they can get more of what they want done. I assumed mindless scrolling was taking away from living life intentionally, and I could do so much more of what I wanted once I stopped scrolling. I could finish work quickly. I could then spend time studying, working out, cooking healthy meals, etc. I could be this ideal version of myself! (Older, Not Wiser also wrote on ‘optimising life’ a while back as well)
I realised my brain, so used to dopamine, was looking for something adjacent: and so I was listening to a substantial amount of podcasts and audiobooks at this time. I was in a ‘fix my life’ era- trying to sleep 8 hours a day, meal prep, work out, meet all my work deadlines, read the books I wanted to, work on community projects, have time to paint, get my daily steps in, have a good social life etc etc- all while consuming a steady diet of content, which although maybe well intentioned, was pushing me to try new ways of ‘being healthy’ or ‘being productive’ or ‘being a good person’ - constantly needing to do ‘more’.
Looking back, it was no wonder I burnt out, twice, probably. I was trying to sub out all my self-soothing, bed-rotting entertainment time with self-optimised hard work. The second time, while sleeping away my stress-induced migraines, I remember reading about Anna, the EY employee who had unfortunately passed away due to overwork, and it really made me reflect about what a chokehold hustle-culture has gotten all of us in, even if we claim to be anti-capitalist or whatever. Since then, I’ve really been thinking about what I want to prioritise- and realising somethings I just can’t prioritise. I realised I’m someone who would like to do all the things, but like, I’ve had to tell myself that maybe I can do all the things, but definitely not all at the same time. I also realise that some things I thought were unnecessary to do, or maybe even like *cringe* like breath work, gratitude, stretching, mindfulness, etc - were actually quite helpful and necessary for me- which is probably a very stupid realisation, because obviously these things were created and shared around precisely because they help.
Maybe the last paragraph got a bit heavier than expected, but all this to say that I might have lived in the delusion that ‘it’s the goddamn phones’ holding us back from self-actualisation when in reality not using your phone is not a panacea for everything. I used my phone as a time to break from both work and ‘working on myself’, and I had to find adequate replacement time and activities that were just fun, restful or ‘mindless’.
Self-kindness and acceptance:
This then brings me towards my current ‘phase’. I’ve been building a kinder and more accepting relationship to myself and my limits. I’ve been stronger with my work boundaries- where I am just letting deadlines slip me- and focusing on only on the key things, and I’ve actually felt increased work satisfaction since doing this (maybe more on this another time). As I was killing this ‘fantasy self’ of self-optimisation, it also became evident to me how much of it was just a hangover from my social media usage. Much of what I thought I ‘should’ be doing, were actually not my desires at all, but borrowed from all the content I’d been consuming for years.
Influencers are only called that because they hold power to *wait for it* influence our choices. I know we are all well aware of this by now, and yes, this can be harmless at times, but I think no matter how aware we are- it still does infiltrate our wants and desires. Now that I use social media far less, I’m also able to recognise the sources of my influence better. The other day, I was craving roast chicken and potatoes- something I’ve never really had in my life- and I realised it was because Florence Pugh talked about it in her ‘What I eat in a Day’ video.
I feel a bit sad now remembering how my friends and I spoke about ‘not being able to stick to journalling’ or ‘working out’, or budgeting, or anything, with such self-loathing. I do think doomscrolling can prevent you from taking meaningful action on your goals but also I think we really need to examine how many of our goals and desires are just products of the doomscroll itself. I remember a friend with 0 skin issues shaking their head and going ‘uff, I should really get my skin care routine in shape’. This is likely because it has become very normalised to have this elaborate skincare routine in social media these days.
Now, it is only when I encounter a specific problem in real life that I go to the internet looking for a solution. For example, I moved houses and I’m trying to think of a good solution to store my clothes. I’ve been looking up and consuming some videos on the same. I’ve become more accepting of myself- it’s okay if this takes me 2 days, 2 months or even 2 years- there’s no rush to prove anything to anybody. I also am not taking my failure to get clothes in order as a personal failing, but rather also seeing it as maybe that wasn’t the right system for me and my life. These things are supposed to make your life easier, and are not standards to which you should hold yourself to. The evaluator in my head has died down.
Chloe Salmon also spoke about the ‘inner police’ that social media makes us have to our own thoughts. “People are self-reporting their thought crimes to themselves.” We are always performing, even to ourselves, which has closed the space to have our own private inner life of complex thoughts. The less I use social media, the less I have this voice in my head and the more I can begin to develop something that looks like my own value system and intuition. No thoughts or feelings that I have are bad in itself, and it’s up to me how I choose to act on them.
Ritual of return:
I currently don’t feel like I am depriving myself of social media. I am fully allowing myself to use the internet whenever I feel like it and I’ve just not been feeling like using it too much. When I do get preoccupied by the ‘urgencies of capitalism’ whether through working too much or bed-rot doom-scrolling, I actually realise now that I miss my own company, and try to carve out time for me to get back to myself, through what Ayana from Seeda School calls rituals of return. I think I’ve reached a point where my mind is quite a nice friend* and I miss her when I don’t visit often. And so, I don’t mind even if I get lost in phonewaters again, I trust in my rituals to bring me back, grounded in pillars outlined in part 2 and part 3 of this series. These are slowly helping me build a self that I don’t need to escape from. And while it hasn’t been a smooth journey, it’s been quite lovely.
* I feel like I should clarify that I have neurotypical and other sources of privilege that make this easier for me.