I’m not sure if you have noticed (thanks to those that reached out BTW) but over the last few weeks I have been significantly quieter over on Mastodon and also this blog.

I’ve needed a bit of a reset, time away from social media, RSS, podcasts and YouTube to figure out what I want to do and give myself a bit of headspace to think.

Now I have done this I thoroughly recommend it – if even for a week.

I get caught up in the new, in the imposter syndrome, in the trap of thinking I haven’t achieved anything when others seem to be doing it so easily, in the negativity and I had enough – I don’t switch off that easily and find it hard to relax, which makes it even worse to manage.

I needed time away from a lot of things; to be bored and to help me relax a bit. This isn’t any sort of vision quest I just needed some time away after being on social media since the first days of Facebook. I wanted to see what it was like to be in a little bubble for a bit and let me just digest my own thoughts on things.

The first thing I noticed is what I have just mentioned – boredom. I don’t feel I am addicted to checking my phone, this wasn’t the point of the break but when I removed all of the apps I used to fill in boredom I suddenly had some silence and time to just be in the moment. I didn’t really look to spend this time thinking about what I wanted to do but after a few days it just came to me. It was starting to become clearer what I enjoyed about being social on the internet and blogging; and after the three weeks I did miss the smaller communities in Discord that I have come to enjoy.

This is what I noticed I missed the most to start with; not being able to converse with others with the same interests. I work at home and don’t have those around me that share these interests so the good of social media is these interactions I figured out.

It also helped me realise that I don’t think I can handle social media in it’s current form. I don’t have any Facebook accounts and I deleted my Twitter account – Mastodon and Glass are the only real social apps I have. I find that I enjoy sharing photography on Glass and I missed this (I’m posting again on there) but the text based Mastodon got to me, just like Twitter did at the end. I don’t feel that at the moment I can engage in this sort of social media – I prefer being part of a smaller community, like on Discord.

My current plan is stay off Mastodon and just enjoy writing here and the smaller Discord servers that I check in on.

Secondly and maybe one of the most important is that disconnecting from the tech news cycle helped slow me down a bit. Tech moves so quickly and I was (and still am) tired of topics like AI and Crypto so not having a clue what was happening in that space was great. I still don’t check an RSS app (my iPhone looks quite different now) or subscribe to many tech podcasts.

Next, I only relied on my iPhone for messaging. Funnily enough this change also coincided with me switching to a point and shoot rather than use my iPhone so I didn’t have the need to use it that much. I took it with me for Apple Pay and messaging but nothing else. This has made me realise how unimportant the type of phone I use is now and was tempted to switch to an older Nokia phone and dump the iPhone for a bit. I’m still figuring this bit out…

Next, I went to the news rather than it coming to me. By stopping using an RSS app I just bookmarked the sites I wanted to visit and when I feel like checking in I just fire up Safari and read the site – old school I know!

Lastly (for this blog post at least) I noticed that I missed writing here, sharing my thoughts, I had also noticed that I had become a lot more negative on the blog. Taking this break I feel has helped me come up with new ideas and posts like this one, rather than “why isn’t Apple updating Reminders on macOS” type posts that I had fallen into. I’ll still write about tech that interests me but I feel that articles like this one add more of a variety and I also do these little experiments anyway but not really shared much about them before.

Thanks if you made it this far, it’s a long post for me and I wanted to get it off my chest and onto text.

(BTW I’m actually now writing up my thoughts in Google Keep rather than random posts from the WordPress app…).