What happens after you quit drinking and social media (mostly)

It started with stopping drinking alcohol. There wasn’t one clarifying moment, a horrific hangover or next-day embarrassment (my teens were for that.) It was a gentle realisation that even one drink made me feel flat. Anxious. Dulled my senses. And it was about a 2-3 day turnaround to shake off the flatness and get my mood back to baseline again.

I’m not alone: studies everywhere are showing millennials are drinking way less than they used to.

Then it was social media. I’ve said it once and I’ve said it again. Using an app-blocker changed my life. Physically locking myself for the majority of the day out of an app that used to live in lockstep with my life and soul. Letting the voices of ten thousand others quietly die down. I still have to use it for work. I understand its value. But having that physical separation between me and it for most of the day showed me how loud it is in there.

And then, allowing my circle to become smaller. Not culling, just… letting some things lie. Letting people have whatever perception they want. Not chasing up connections that felt mismatched or draining. I don’t believe everyone in our circle should be our echo chambers or pump up our ego. Actually, I think that’s exactly what we don’t need. I think we grow through difference and different perspectives. We need to be forced sometimes to look at our own horseshit. But I don’t think we should stay in connections where we feel chronically and intentionally misunderstood, either.

People talk about peace. They romanticise the quiet cottage in the woods, the memes about leaving civilisation behind and never talking to another soul. Here’s the thing, when you’re not on random loops like the alcohol rollercoaster, or the constant low-level voice in your ear of social media, the quiet can be intimidating. When you intentionally turn down the drama in your own habits, you can find yourself feeling suspended, strange. And like; ‘am I missing something here?’

That’s not to say everything is easy peasy. I have a five year old. I have impossibly tight deadlines sometimes. Here, things tend to break down all at once and need to be fixed immediately. I have a customer service businesses that means a barrage of abusive messages are not uncommon and they still spike my adrenaline no matter how many times I receive them. I thought this year would be the first in three years I would fly home to Australia for Christmas. With the war and prices on everything, that looks like that’s not going to happen, and I’m disappointed about it.

I have friction and challenge (and as I say sometimes, I love my problems and wouldn’t want to trade them for any others, I am very well aware these are luxury problems.) But that’s more external friction. That stuff that comes at us and we can’t do anything about it.

The internal friction I’m talking about is kind of the self-created loops we keep ourselves in. Because it drowns out the noise of a deeper part of us, and because it keeps this forward-motion feeling. And in this world, forward-motion is comfortable.

I don’t exactly know what it is that I’m trying to achieve. It’s not to promote sobriety, nor less social media use for others: I literally couldn’t care what anyone else does around me. It’s more; I’m curious to see who I find when I’m not being influenced by these things. Maybe I’m more boring, I’m definitely more clearheaded. Clearheadedness can be challenging though, when your thoughts keep going and nothing to stop them. Luckily I have a five year old on hand with a “Mama! Mama! Look at me. Look at meeeeee!” before my thoughts go too far. Maybe the silence in my head sometimes feels a little lonely, but it also means when fresh ideas come through I am more sure they are my own. That they come from my own voice and essence.

I still crave difference, and challenge, and adrenaline spikes, and the risky fun feeling of doing stupid shit. And maybe thats why I’m focusing so much on mountain biking right now. I completed a six-foot drop I have been dreaming about for six months (where you yeet yourself off of a ramp into thin air). I got such a spike of adrenaline I felt hungover for the next two days. But it feels controlled, like I have the sole say in how hard I want to go, when to pull back. Not that it controls me like alcohol did, like social media also did in a more low-level way.

I feel like life is so short, and I want to know who I really was in this life. What was at the core, and more than that I want my kid to feel like he knew me. I want my friends to feel like I met as myself. I want to be in love with one guy for as long as I can, ideally for the rest of my life. It just seems reasonable that trying to eliminate stuff that makes me unnecessarily sad and anxious would assist that goal.

By many accounts, I’m boring. But unlike last year where I was trying to make all these concurrent pieces fit together, the mother, the partner, the biker, the business owner, the expat. I’m not questioning it so much anymore. We are all made up of freaky little parts that shouldn’t fit together, but they do.

Is this what getting old and boring looks like? Right now, I don’t mind it at all. I like having a clearer relationship with my mind and people around me.