Switching off by the sea

👋 Here in the UK, we’ve just had the final bank holiday weekend of the year. So, my partner and I took the opportunity to head down to the south coast and spend a few days by the sea.

I really wanted to use this weekend to totally switch off. I’ve mentioned in previous Substacks how I’ve been trying to claw myself out of a rut. I’ve had the most amazingly busy, HOT, sticky summer. The kind of summer I’ll look back on in 30 years time and think “God, what a summer that was.”

But it’s also been a very full calendar, and I was more than ready to cut down my phone time, delete social media, and swim in the sea every single day.

Mission complete.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my use (frankly, reliance) on social media lately. A few weeks ago, I read this absolutely sensational article by my wonderfully talented friend Katie Morley, and it made me stop in my tracks and ask myself: what the fuck was I doing?

As a content manager, I’d convinced myself that being on top of social media was just part of the job. Except… Katie was literally my manager. A CONTENT DIRECTOR. Living proof that you can do this work without being chronically online.

(Plus, I work in the utter glam of B2B tech writing long-form articles. So I don’t exactly need to keep track of the latest trending sounds.)

Since 2012, I have always been ‘online’. I was a Tumblr addict in my late teens, then onto Vine, then later my own blog, Instagram, and TikTok. And to be honest, I took pride in being the person who knew every meme, every trend, every niche bit of online drama. It felt like being a part of a community—despite it impacting my ability to be present in my actual, real-life community.

But, it’s not like I didn’t know social media was rotting my brain. In 2018, just before I moved to Australia, I did a huge purge of my Facebook friends. In FACT, my dad sat down with me and made me explain every single friend on Facebook (there were over 1300 at the time—a clear signal of being a Tumblr teen who added/accepted anyone and everyone).

The rule was, if I couldn’t explain how I knew them or I hadn’t met them in real life, they had to go. Three hours later, and my friend list was cut by 800 people.

At the end of this purge, I felt liberated. But now, I truly cannot believe I had so many ‘connections’ that meant literally nothing to me.

A few years later, I recognised that Instagram wasn’t making me feel fab either. So I decided to simply unfollow anyone I wouldn’t say hi to in the street, plus any influencer who made me feel like shit.

And again, my immediate reaction after going on the unfollow spree was embarrassment! Because how did it take me this long to stop giving a shit about people I sat next to in Year 7 maths?

But, the biggest embarrassment has crept up over the past 6 months or so, as I’ve realised just how much the apps were shaping how I felt about the world around me.

When I’m out for dinner with friends and they can’t put their phone down to listen to a conversation, I hate it. When I’m on the tube and every single person around me is on their phone, my mind is taken up with how disconnected we all are from each other. When my screen time is 5 hours on my phone—NOT including the laptop I am on for 8 hours a day—I feel like my brain is rotting from the inside out.

And when I finally deleted Instagram and TikTok from my phone a couple of weeks ago, the few times I redownloaded them (to post about a new article, obvs 💅), I found myself absolutely dreading it.

And who dreads opening an app? That is not “fun” anymore. That’s called dependency, sis.

Thankfully, I’m trying to channel that feeling into something useful.

So! What did I do with all of this free time on my holiday?

I read two books, I swam, I did a big walk over the cliffs of the Jurassic Coast, I caught up with writing my diary, I drank wine and played board games on the beach, and I barely picked up my phone. I felt so immersed in the holiday and so at peace, that on the final night in our little caravan, I felt like crying at the thought of it being over so soon.

And that feeling was glorious. How bloody lucky am I to have enjoyed this staycation by the sea so much that I didn’t want to leave?

It may have taken 15 years, and you might be sitting here reading this thinking “HOW is this only just clicking for you???” but it isn’t that it only just clicked. I was just ignoring the problem.

I’m not saying I’ll never be on Instagram again (the likelihood is, you’ve found this post from me promoting it on Instagram👋). I’m simply saying that after fifteen years, it turns out I don’t miss the endless scroll at all. Keep your feeds. I’ll take the sea, a book, and a bottle of wine.