As the global pandemic comes to a pause, people start walking around without masks and shops reopen for business, it is time to reflect on the past three months.
I remember spring 2009 as a wonderful time in my life. I was writing my BA dissertation on Husserl, leaving the house only to give my tutor another chapter. Living the monk life.
A similar monk life descended upon us during this crisis, yet I felt I wasn’t as happy as I was back then. Certainly I wasn’t a student anymore, I had to work, zoom meetings, bugs to fix.
Yet it wasn’t like something was missing, I was feeling like something was in excess. Among others, I feel the main difference between 2009 and 2020 is that I now have a smartphone.
Without needing to commute, where was my time going? what was I learning? I was drawing as much as before, not much reading was done, energy and mood were down to critical levels.
Where was my time going? On Instagram.

If you recall, I removed my FB account in late 2018, Twitter, Reddit, and Mastodon in 2019. Instagram was lingering.

In February I decided to open a second IG account to post my drawings and that was not a great idea. More input, more likes, more Pavlovian indoctrination. My early mornings were spent scrolling through the feed like a zombie, liking and scrolling, scrolling and liking. After two months of this I approached the idea of calling it quits.
I made a list of people I only had on IG and gave it a week to ponder. I thought I could just use the browser version and check it once every few days. Except you cannot upload pictures on there. Why? because it’s harder to control you from the browser. The primitive interactions you have through your bare hands are easier to manipulate. You touch your hearts.

That realization really pissed me off. I reviewed that list of people, out of maybe 20 there were 5 I really wanted to keep in touch. I sent them a message to exchange alternative means of communication and deleted all my accounts. I became socialmedialess.

Did anything change? A ton. Instead of scrolling through pictures of food and dogs I’m carving through a long reading list I had saved in a RSS client.
What I did next was perhaps even more interesting.

Some people don’t suspect this but I’m a big youtube user. I used to watch a ton of videos, my Saturday and Sunday mornings were basically spent in the youtube backlog.
I soon realized that most videos I didn’t really want to watch. Inspired by a post I had read, I decided to hide the thumbnail pictures and add a 7s delay to every click on youtube.
My time spent there was reduced, but not so much, and the 7s delay was truly frustrating. Interestingly that 7s helped me make more conscious decisions about my watching, but not that much over months.
Then one day I realized that I was going back to the YT homepage just to see if anything new was there. This is the same behavior I noticed on FB, Twitter, Reddit, IG. Any social media.
I knew it was high time for something a bit more drastic. I downloaded a Firefox extension called “Remove YouTube Recommended Videos, Comments”. This weekend I’ve watched 1 short painting video and a few Baduk lectures. No videos during the week and zero random watching.
My setup is so that I have a blank homepage, no subscriptions bar on the left (only playlists are showing), no comments, no recommendation of any kind. I wish there was a way to hide thumbnails too but that’s OK for now.
Sometimes I still find myself clicking for the homepage, except I should know it’s blank now. This is the scary level of conditioning we’re under. Otherwise, I feel like I was able to defuse youtube.

Could this be the end? Of course not.

All of this made me wonder: why is social media so toxic to my well being?
I would like to enjoy IG to see artists pictures and learn from them, but why do I have to endure the stupidity, the breakfasts, and the onlyfans ladies?
They call this tailored content, but tailored towards what? Obviously not me. It’s as if everything was designed to keep me in this box, except the box was empty.
If discipline is required to use IG for what I really want instead of looking for the next dopamine fix, maybe IG is not really helping me, I am helping it.

I realized that I want to live with as little tech as possible. I need mental space to breath, focus, think, and create.

This thought snippet drove me to think more critically of any tech giant, inside or outside of social media. Google search “tailors” your results. In fact I can type anything in it and it would return me a page of programming documentation.
This is not necessarily malignant, it’s great for the work I do, but what about anything else? news? opinions? Have you ever shared an opinion in a new group of people only to realize to your amazement that they don’t share it? It happened to me a few times. It’s crazy to realize the bubbles and walls we build around ourselves. Social media is gone. Now it’s Google’s turn.

De-googlifying oneself is becoming hip now. Here’s a summary of how I intend to act in the short term:
- Ads: adBlocker ultimate + uBlock origin extensions. Pretty standard stuff
- Search: DuckduckGo is a great replacement. Give it a few days, really!
- Email: I thought this would be the greatest pain point but it’s turning out nicely. I opened a free Protonmail account and seriously considering upgrading to the paid version. I have two gmail accounts, one nickname and one realname. I’m forwarding the nickname to the nickname-proton and changing associated emails little by little. I’ll probably won’t be able to completely delete the realname one since it’s linked to real-world stuff like doctors and taxes, but it’s a start
- Drive: Opened a free Mega account. I’m actually writing from it, hello!
- Browser: I’ve been using Firefox since 2003, easy
- Photos: still no idea
- Android: still no idea
- Maps: still no idea. I tried drawing my own maps on a piece of paper, it’s not working out
- DNS: using my ISP DNS so far, not sure about this. I had used OpenDNS in the past but it was way too slow, maybe I’ll give it another try

I regret the time wasted during what could be considered a mini-sabbatical the pandemic gave us commuters, but I’m happy I found the will to remove Instagram and start de-googlifying.
If anything, this is what I found at the end of the tunnel.
If you like what you read, I urge you to try it. If you think I’m crazy, even more so, try!

Namaste folks.