Digital Fast: Reflections

The School of the Unconformed Challenged Its Readers to Do a Screens Fast

In this post, participants of this fast were prompted to share their experience by answering certain questions, that is what I’ll be doing in this post.

After taking eight weeks of strictly limited screen time, I not only found myself feeling less stressed but also more alive. I never truly realized how much time I, and others, spend their lives in a world that isn’t real. The biggest takeaway from my journey to digital freedom was how special our world is. In the digital landscape, Earth is painted as some hellscape, a planet facing impending doom. That may be a strategy to keep people online. Yes, the world is evil, but being able to see it without the hindrance of news, media, and online bias I found it to be beautiful. Seeing its beauty makes me want to take care of it, and take care of me. Digital fasting has prompted me to eat healthier, think healthier, and live healthier.

What was your experience?

As a teenage girl, taking any technology break is difficult, not just because I would struggle. Most of my friends, and the people around me, use technology as a form of connection and socializing. Being off-screen more certainly doesn’t help my already floundering social life. I’ve never been on social media, so that makes it less difficult, but I do enjoy sites like YouTube and Pinterest. I also can quickly get stuck in information rabbit holes, as I’m quite a nerd in that way. My experience ended up being much better than I would have expected, I don’t pretend I followed the rules I set for myself flawlessly every day, but now that I’m on the other side I find that lots of the habits I established I am planning to keep. I enjoyed being free from technology, and it's almost easier to stay off it now because I don’t have to, I’m simply choosing to.

I also really enjoyed getting to read so much, I read a lot of ‘bucket list’ books, and for that, I’ll be publishing a separate post with a list and short review of each book I read. Overall my experience was positive, I’ve worked out more, gotten more school done, connected better with my family, played piano more, read more, and cleaned up more.

What practices worked for you? Did you find any new strategies?

Using email once a day, instead of texting was an easy strategy for me, and it prompted me to have a more meaningful connection with my friends who live many states away. The biggest thing for me was not letting myself get bored, because not to be dramatic trying to stay offline can feel like trying not to take drugs, or drink too much. Keeping myself busy, whether that be going to the library multiple times a week, drawing, or cleaning, was my biggest strategy. And, that doesn’t mean I lived in constant distraction, I took time to relax and reflect, but letting myself sit around was the most ‘dangerous.’ Something I discovered one week when I slipped a couple of times. But, I also found that beating myself up and acting like it’s too late is a bad strategy, if I slip up, that’s okay. I recognized that, was able to forgive myself, and noticed just how ick being online made me feel again. I was motivated to stay away, even though it’s been an uphill battle.

I let myself go online once a week, for not school-related activity, to look up questions I may have had during the week and it honestly started to feel like a chore. I’ve also found myself less and less entertained by television and YouTube, I think stepping back and looking at it from afar makes it apparent just how empty it all is. As I’ve discussed in a previous post I’ve always had a tremendous fear of death. The thought of wasting half my life online is terrifying, so in a way, I leaned into my fear and would remind myself that watching YouTube was not how I wanted to spend what could be my last day on earth.

I picked up some tech-free activities, too. I used my record player more often, and I repaired an old pocket film camera. One thing I found myself never doing was taking photos with my phone, which is good, but also sad. I hope that using a film camera I’ll be more intentional with photos and not have to take out my phone while travelling.

What was your biggest struggle?

The main struggle was that I sometimes felt like I was inconveniencing people. Someone might ask me to send a message or look something up and I’d say, “Oh, I don’t have my phone.” This may be a good thing, but the societal pressure to be online was difficult. I hope that more and more people try these fasts, because I’m the only one I know who did it, so it was challenging in that way.

As I mentioned above, I also struggled a lot with being bored and feeling tempted to, or a few times succumbing to, use my screens.

What did not work?

Honestly, all of it worked pretty well. There are a few small things I tweaked but nothing drastic.

Going forward, are you planning to continue any of your digital fasting practices?

I can’t let myself fall back into how I was before. Though sometimes one feels like the people sent to the islands in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, it is wholly worth it for me. I plan to keep my phone screen time down, avoid using YouTube as entertainment, only text once a day, and read more. I try to keep my phone screen time around 10-30 minutes a day, the number varying on how much I’m out. If I’m out all day, I’m on it more, because I have to text my parents to let them know I’m safe. I plan to read more, the next books on my list are Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol.

I viewed this fast as the first step on my journey of technological liberation, so I certainly intend to keep going.

-Helen Browne