The day I said stop // Disconnection #1

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. 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 internet. Internet is the 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.