My Time Offline

the great datacation: notes, love letters, and observations

Since dropping off every other social media, I've had a lot of questions from friends and family about my experience.

How's my anxiety? Am I still financially stable? Am I lonely? (yes.) What's my next career move? ( you’re reading it, baby.) Am I ever going back after the datacation? What have I been up to? (I’ll tell you all about it.) How have I kept up with the news? (Ever heard of conversation? It’s a really cool concept...)

I want to write this for them, my curious friends, my nosey family, and for you, my beloved readers.

I am writing as a beacon of hope for people who are scared of going offline. Beyond general curious minds, wishing to read my thoughts on going social media free, I want to write this for other creators who've made their money on these evil platforms and who are afraid of leaving them behind. I want to write this for teenagers who can sense that something is wrong but can't ever quite put their fingers on it. I want to write this for the twenty-somethings who feel so lost and hopeless that they are fighting suicidal ideation and leaning on social media and anti-depressants like their lives depend on it, because in many ways, they do. I am writing this for the older generations, who pity mine yet have succumbed to the same demons they tried to warn us against.

I am writing this on my futon, pressed up against my big window. Rain cascades in clear rivers through the Los Angeles streets barely visible beyond the pink-flowered privacy hedge that guards my apartment. The water was muddy at first, but it's been raining for the better part of a week straight. All this, after eleven months with less than a centimeter.

As with just about everything these days, I have a clutch of metaphors for the rain. It came, in merciful rivers, pummeling the parched earth no less than a week after the worst wildfires in the history of California.

The devastation remains incalculable. It has been estimated in the hundred billions, but the truth is that we can never tally up what all was lost. Family heirlooms dating back seven generations. Entire discographies of unreleased music—masterpieces of art in every genre for that matter. Living, breathing things, too; Pets. Horse stables. Entire gardens. Unfinished memoirs, to be published post mortem. All of it, burned into nothing. It makes you realize how useless numbers are rendered by sentimental or spiritual value.

How I prayed for this rain. We all did. I watch it now with a strange hollowness.

Grateful, but reserved. My jubilation unexpectedly subdued. Like a parent that comes back home after you were molested by a stand-in boyfriend. Yes, they're here now. Yes, there's relief. But the scars of their absence are too great to move past. So you watch and you wait. And you hope. But you also know things you shouldn’t about human nature and the apathy of the universe.

My studio apartment is filled with warmth from the oven and the scent of fresh bread. I'm baking a loaf of sourdough. This one is finally perfect. I did everything right. There are three minutes on the timer before I pull it out and let it rest. A full stick of grass-fed butter is warming in a silver dish on the counter, ready to be spread with fig jam over the first, steaming slice. I've been orchestrating that moment for no less than 27 hours at this point. My mouth waters just thinking about it.

my perfect bread

There's a book nearly wedged under my left foot. A pen, marking my place in the spine; pages filled with underlinings and margins stuffed scrappy, cursive. Women Who Run With Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD. I found it in a bookstore my first week of the datacation and bought it to feel clever. I have never been so humbled by nor so attached to a piece of literature. I got so emotional talking about it at the rock climbing gym on Monday that a stranger named Alex pulled out his phone.

"What's it called?"

"Women Who Run with Wolves."

"I'll-"

"Look, you can read it, but you won't get it."

"I won't get it?"

"No, I mean, you can- in fact you should read it, but you won't understand what it means to me. No offense, Alex, but you're simply not woman enough."

He laughed and nodded, typing it down anyway.

So, back to my being offline.

The long and short of it is that it’s allowed me to catch up on at least a decade of sleep debt. It hasn't been easy, I was almost brought low by the unsuspected evil of YouTube Shorts. I developed what I'm now calling anti-social anxiety, different than fomo, but in the same vein. I'll discuss this with you at greater length in a separate post, so forgive the brevity of that section.

Finally, I want to reflect on my plots and schemes, the passage of time and how it changes based on how I choose to live. Into the thick of it:

I AM FINALLY (SLEEP) DEBT FREE

From January 19th to the 27th or so, I dealt with the most extreme social media withdrawals I have ever experienced in my life. This, of course, was the result of averaging eight to nine hours screen times each week for about three months straight.

While the payouts I received from my humble TikTok success were not insignificant, they were in no way, shape, or form worth the cost I was paying for them. In those first eight days without it, I experienced a constant nagging sensation to pick up my phone. I found myself scrolling stupidly through my apps, looking for my favorite dopamine buttons. They were all gone, of course. Obliterated from my dirty glass box with the righteous indignation of Gandalf banishing Saruman.

Having given myself nothing but Substack to play with, it quickly became my new addiction. I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled, endlessly looking for the same hits of dopamine I had regularly abused on TikTok and Instagram. I found some truly incredible writers and made substantial growth on my own platform. It was still obviously a cope, but it did feel different. Not yet better, if we're all being honest.

The only way I found to effectively deal with these withdrawals was to sleep them off.

In that first week, I was regularly sleeping three or four hours more each day. Not necessarily each night, as I would often lay down at 3pm and nap until the urge to scroll didn't feel quite as intense and demanding.

We all know this, but it bears repeating:

Sleep deprivation is a serious hidden cost of all of social media addictions. It is rarely talked about, but constantly felt. Chronic fatigue, accelerated aging, increased rates of cancer, cognitive decline, and many other health issues related to sleep deprivation are the price we collectively pay to scroll our lives away on social media.

It doesn’t help that American society is uniquely anti-sleep. Other countries, specifically Spain, known for its midday siesta, prioritize sleep over "productivity."

It's fascinating because you might think that America would have realized a long time ago that the most effective way to get more productive workers is to let them sleep. And perhaps it would have, if the goal was actually production and not both physical and spiritual oppression of the masses. Whatever.

Sleep deprevation is just one way we are not merely exploited, but abused for our labor.

Alas, our entire society is structured around not only sleeping less, but feeling shame, guilt, and a seeming moral failing for taking the time to rest as much as we need, which, as any doctor will tell you, is seven to nine hours a night for grown adults. Sleep deprivation is a form of torture that has broken criminals and terrorists. We subject teenagers and children to it in the name of advancing society.

From my anecdotal evidence, I can tell you sleeping more has been more beneficial for my immediate health (and presumably my long term) health than any other obsessive health nut behavior I regularly exhibit. I became a sleep dealer. Bringing friends and lovers over simply to lay about and nap. This was around the time I got really insane about nonverbal bonding time. Read my recent piece, Going Nonverbal, for more insights on that.

WHAT IF I LIKE KISSING THE HAND THAT BEATS ME?

Addictions exist in a severity typically reflective of:

a. their cultural pervasiveness or

b. covert accessibility.

Alcohol is tricky because it's goddamn everywhere. Same with caffeine. This cultural pervasiveness. Porn is nefarious because all you need to access it is the internet. Other elicit drugs are made similarly accessible once you overcome the moral quandaries with hunting them down. These are examples of covertly accessible addictions.

Social media is an incredibly dangerous combination of both. It is literally inescapable unless you choose to be on the outside of an in-crowd literally millions strong.

During the early days of my dedication, many, many, many of my friends asked me what I planned to do when it was over.

Was I going to go back to TikTok? Was I going to pursue something totally different? Did I miss it? How did I feel? No, like how did I actually feel? (as if "Much better" was an unsatisfactory answer and they needed, for their own peace of mind, to know that it fucking sucked a lot and that they shouldn't even bother poking the dragon I was halfway through slaying).

God, I yearned for social media. A part of me still does. I was looking for a ballet class on my TV last week, and ended up lost in YouTube shorts. It activated my dopamine and pleasure centers in a way that hadn’t been sparked in about 21 days at that point.

It was like having crack injected directly into my veins.

I felt my palm growing sweaty on the remote, my eyes glazing over, my brain itching to skip to the next video.

What will it tell me?

What will it show me?

What will I learn?

What will I see?

These questions demanded more of me than I was capable of giving.

I dropped the remote like a venomous snake and went straight to the plug, yanking it out of the wall. My heart was hammering. My good bitch, I thought, that was unbelievably close.

I took a few minutes and turned the TV back on, only to be immeasurably humbled by some waif of a 16 year old ballerina who smiled blithely through the most agonizing stretching routine ever created while I flailed and swore on the other side of the screen.

The nefarious aspect of social media is not the community it inevitably welcomes or the art it fosters, but rather how it feeds upon our natural social desire for novelty, new information, arousal, and yes, even flame wars. Consider how long your mind has been wired for these. My addiction is a solid eight years old at this point. It's gonna need a life insurance policy soon.

We know it's not good for us, but it is designed specifically to hijack our biological wiring. It is quite nearly impossible to resist. Fortunately, I am an incredibly stubborn woman as anyone who knows me can attest. Once my mind is made up, it is made up.

I have been able to ignore the people who tell me to get back on TikTok, if only to promote my substack and other channels before it is outlawed again.

I am entirely too proud to go crawling back to any of the platforms I so vocally abandoned before my planned return. But the principle of the matter became of growing importance the longer I was off of the platforms.

Something else started happening to me…

MAKING FATHER TIME MY SUB

About two weeks in, I began to regather my wits about me. I started taking time, not just to sleep properly, but to plan how I wanted to exist in the real world. What quickly became apparent was how slowly time was passing.

For the last year, I've heard and shared the same sentiment over and over again with my peers:

The months are just evaporating. Time is vanishing more quickly than ever. I blink and it’s next week. Where the hell did Christmas come from?

Most of us chalked it up to aging. Time moves faster every year until you die. Surely that’s how and why our grandparents weathered 30 plus years in shitty jobs without a second thought, right? Before it was echoed to me from friends far and wide, I assumed it had something to do with moving to Southern California. Aging! Damnit, I should’ve known.

What my friends and I failed to consider is that our aging occurred in almost perfect tandem to the development of social media. We process time as going faster when our dopamine levels are heightened. Social media raises dopamine. Pharmaceutical concentrations, recreationally abused. In the last two years, it has gotten exponentially smarter (and more evil). In sympathy, our brains have literally sped up time.

Being abruptly starved of dopamine, my brain processed 22 days as being about three months long. As someone who is terrified of dying, this is an incredible secret to have unlocked. I will live three times longer just by living differently.

That realization lends itself to an immediate gripping anxiety that I am not living well enough or experiencing enough.

Enter: Anti-social Anxiety

Making plans for the sake of experience rather than the curation of how it will look on your story later is a bizarre and unexpected liberation. Suddenly, I felt fearless.

Let me go to that bar alone. Fuck it, I’ll longboard there in docs. Let me take that dance class. I'm going to spin into a wall, leaving red-faced and hideous, who cares? Let me bake these ugly English Muffins and toss half in the trash because I trusted my stove too much. Let me write effusive poetry and tell no one. Let me draw again for drawings sake and not because I want to show some dude I met at a party last weekend that I’m lowkey artsty via the subtle communication of my IG story. Let me go on dates without ever thinking about a godforsaken hard launch. Let me just enjoy a person, presently. Waiting in line for my coffee, I take in my surroundings instead of forcing the world into the background while I listen to Emma Chamberlain laugh compilations or some other chronically online, absentmindedly insane content.

Sure, I'll go to a singing bowl meditation. Yes, I'd love to foster that dog. Oh, uhm, sorry, what's a cocoa ceremony? I would be curious to try that sometime, but I've got book club this Tuesday. (book clubs in LA are, in my experience, absolutely fucked up.) Will you teach me how to DJ? I want to throw a party—well, more like a European Enlightenment salon actually. I wrote love letters to all my girls for Valentine's Day and put them in the mail (late, I'm still criminally tardy, even via handwritten correspondence).

I'm currently planning trips to Honduras, Chicago, Rome, and NYC. In that order, all within the next six months. I'm writing a novel and three scripts. I think all of them are stupid and brilliant in their own ways. More importantly by far, I'm making connections with people who can teach me how to bring them into reality. I'm building this platform into something cohesive and working on longer form video content. I've taken on more responsibilities in my freelance work. I call my mom more. I call everyone more, actually. As a minor side quest, I became a V6 climber and filled an entire journal in under three months, twice.

TLDR:

I'm changing. For the better. And yes, it has everything to do with not being on social media. No, it was not easy. Yes, I still feel like I'm missing out sometimes. No, I don't think all hope is lost. Yes, I have a folder of carefully selected and meticulously edited photos ready and waiting to be posted in a photodump to rival all photodumps upon my return. No, it will never be the same.

Yes, I think I am better than everyone who is still chronically online.

But only in the way I consider myself better than smokers. It's more a feeling of pity and sadness than pure superiority. All things being possible, I would pluck their addictions out like a thorn from their head and help heal the infected wound for as long as it needs to bleed.

But I can't do everything by myself. I need your help.

Please share this. Please use it as fodder for your own desires and dreams and brand of determinism. Please use it to encourage (or bully) friends and family into getting offline. Please write about your experience with the datacation if you took one. Please call me crazy. Say I'm an annoying white woman who doesn't know what she's talking about. Do ANYTHING. Just please don't let this fall into a hole in your head that you say you'll do something about later and then promptly forget. I don't wanna share leg room with you grandma's peanut butter cookie recipe or that protest you should've gone to but chickened out on last minute.

Thank you for reading. Go now, be brave. And, as always, stick it to the man and say fuck you very much to everyone who profits off your data.

current reading list:

Go Tell It On The Mountain, James Baldwin

Women Who Run With Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.

Come Together Emily, Nagoski, Ph.D.

The Sabbath, Abraham Joshua Henschel