I have been online since before most people knew what the internet was. IRC before 1995. ICQ. Forums. Facebook. Twitter. Each new platform arrived and I adopted it eagerly, the way introverts often do — here was a way to connect with people on your own terms, at your own pace, from the safety of your own room.

For a long time it genuinely worked that way. I remember Twitter around 2009. No algorithm, no outrage engine, just people sharing thoughts in real time. It felt like the best parts of IRC with a wider audience. That was then.

By 2024 something had quietly shifted. I was checking my phone over 150 times a day. Not because anything important was happening — but because the habit had become involuntary, like blinking. Mastodon, Telegram, WhatsApp, Instagram, Bluesky, Matrix, Discord. Each one demanding a small slice of attention, each one conditioning me to expect that the next refresh might bring something worth seeing. Usually it didn’t. I kept refreshing anyway.

This is what I have started calling the refresh addiction. It sits below drugs on the social acceptability scale, somewhere around cigarettes — normalized, invisible, and quietly corrosive. Nobody stages an intervention. Nobody even notices, including yourself, until you stop.

The experiment

I deleted or deactivated nearly everything. WhatsApp, Instagram, Bluesky, Telegram, Facebook Messenger — gone, accounts and all. Twitter paused. For thirty days I would be reachable only by email, SMS, or a phone call. Handwritten letters also accepted.

The thirty days is deliberate. Long enough to actually rewire something — the research suggests around twenty-one days to meaningfully shift a habit — and short enough to feel survivable. Having a finish line matters. It is a lot easier to tell yourself only two more weeks than to commit to some vague, open-ended digital detox with no endpoint in sight.

I kept IRC. The #LinuxRenaissance channel on libera.chat in the evenings, for anyone who wanted to find me. This turned out to be an interesting choice for reasons I did not predict: IRC is simply not engineered for addiction. You ask a question, someone answers, and then it is quiet. There is no feed to scroll. There is no algorithm deciding what you should feel next. After a few days it started feeling almost boring — and I mean that as a compliment. Boring is underrated.

What the first week actually feels like

The first five to seven days were uncomfortable in a way that is hard to describe without sounding dramatic. A low-level restlessness. Reaching for a phone that had nothing new to show. The brain looking for its next hit and finding nothing.

By day ten something had shifted. I had more time — genuinely free time, not time I was nominally present for while half my attention was somewhere else. I started working through a C programming book I had been meaning to read for months. In the evenings I actually read it, typed the exercises, thought about them. It was the first time in a long while that my attention had belonged entirely to one thing.

I also started treating email the way email was designed to be treated — like a letter, not a chat. You do not check your mailbox every twenty minutes. You go once, deal with what is there, and close it. I answer in the evenings, on a computer, at my own pace. The urgency I had built into it was invented. None of it was actually urgent.

The question worth sitting with

We have been handed a set of tools and told they are essential — for staying connected, for keeping relationships alive, for being a functioning participant in modern life. Some of that is true. Most of it is marketing, dressed up as social obligation.

The honest question is not whether you use these platforms. Most of us will, in some form. The question is whether you are using them or they are using you. Whether you open the app because you decided to, or because a notification tugged at your sleeve and you followed without thinking.

One hundred and fifty times a day. Think about that number. Think about what else you could have done with those moments.

The follow-up report is coming.