The day I said stop to wasting time on the Internet

March 20, 2025

I’m always impressed when I read people had a complete disconnection. In this day and age, how do you simply stop? Is it a work in progress? Or do you just stop and never look back?

Honestly, I thought I would talk about an addiction to social media, and maybe it is. But I’ve deleted my Facebook account in November 2023, I barely use Instagram for checking on my friends’ stories, I’m on LinkedIn but not really, I’m using a special plugin to make sure I don’t spend much time on YouTube, and Mastodon isn’t designed for doomscrolling. So… where’s the true addiction?

The fact that I’m always connected, always a second away from answering people’s messages. I’m there, but not there there. I’m millions of kilometres away, thinking about millions things and doing millions of things at the same time.

I want to stop that.

Break the cycle.

Yesterday, I went pony-riding with my almost 3-year-old. For two hours, it was just us there, physically and mentally. But after those two hours, the first thing I did was to check on my emails. Seriously…

I’m not proud: on a day off, I shouldn’t check on my emails or scroll social media. I would love to simply enjoy spending time with my little one and be truly there. But once again I do and think about a million things, a million kilometres away.

So I decided that for a month — let’s try a month first — I would switch my internet off when I’m not at work, and be allowed to check social media for maximum ten minutes per day. Will it hold? No idea until I try.

Update: May 6, 2025

Spoiler alert: it didn't hold.

Today, I deleted my Instagram account. I had to google how to delete it because, of course, the option is buried in Meta's parameters. But I did it. I'm proud of it.

I've also deleted all the apps from my phone. It's weird though, because I open my phone and I'm going on apps that aren't there anymore. So I'm puzzled each time, to remember it's not on there. The only way for me to go on social media is to turn on my computer, which is a bit harder that just take my phone.

My only struggle left is YouTube. So many distractions! Even with the plugin that removes all the shorts, it's still too attractive. I'm gonna work on that in the next months.

Ah! And I succeeded in moving my family to Signal instead of Whatsapp. Unfortunately, I'm still keeping Whatsapp for now because of various reasons. But at least checking it once a week instead of every day is a win (yeah, I removed the notifications from Whatsapp).