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     23 What happens when the thing that structured so much of our lives loses its
     24 utility?
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     26 [10]Anne Helen Petersen
     27 Jan 19, 2025
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     48 
     49 If you missed it from earlier this week: [15]I’ve put together a bunch of ways
     50 you can help those in LA *right now.*
     51 
     52 We’re also doing another round of “Ask A Divorced Person” — where people with
     53 questions for divorced people submit their questions, and a group of divorced
     54 people (who’ve gone through different types of divorces) answer them. You can
     55 get the general idea [16]here.
     56 
     57 If you have a question for a divorced person, you can submit it [17]here. If
     58 you’d like to answer questions as a divorced person, you can volunteer [18]here
     59 . (Link is now fixed, it takes you to the right form!)
     60 
     61 And if you open this newsletter all the time, if you forward to your friends
     62 and co-workers, if it challenges you to think in new and different ways — [19]
     63 consider subscribing.
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     69 You get access to the weekly Things I Read and Loved at the end of the Sunday
     70 newsletter, the massive links/recs posts, the ability to comment, and the
     71 knowledge that you’re paying for the stuff that adds value to your life. Plus,
     72 there’s the addictive & useful threads: like Friday’s on [21]The Most Beautiful
     73 Swim You’ve Ever Taken, and this month’s “[22]What Are You Reading” (1100+
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     76 [23]
     77 [https]
     78 Abandoned Concrete Barges from World War II in the River Thames (Aerial Essex /
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     80 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
     81 
     82 The day before Christmas Eve, I deleted Instagram and my email from my phone.
     83 Facebook hasn’t been there for years, and Twitter has been gone for nearly two.
     84 For reasons that mystify me — maybe because I hid it on the third page — I only
     85 feel like getting on TikTok once or twice a month, and then I watch it like
     86 it’s a long movie and then leave it be. My phone was reduced to a texting
     87 device with a smattering of essential apps: the camera, of course, but also the
     88 weather, maps, browsing. I didn’t make it totally un-useful. I just
     89 significantly reduced its potential to fill my time.
     90 
     91 It was easy to ignore during the bustle of the holidays. It was usually just in
     92 the mornings, when I first woke up, that I realized just how much time I’d
     93 devoted to scrolling. There I was, looking at the weather or the snow report
     94 for the third time, checking our local NextDoor and feeling dismayed that no
     95 one had published a new sunset photo. At night, I’d look at my phone, realize
     96 it had nothing to offer me, and throw it onto the bedside table like a cranky
     97 toddler bored with a toy. I read and slept in abundance.
     98 
     99 It’s not that I didn’t read email, or utterly ignored Instagram — I could still
    100 take a look on my computer browser. It’s that I looked at them far fewer times.
    101 It felt like 2006 in the very best of ways: I could still communicate with
    102 others and periodically see pictures from their lives. It’s just that that
    103 communication didn’t serve as the score and meter of my life.
    104 
    105 I told myself I’d put both Instagram and email back on my phone at the end of
    106 the in-between weeks. Days kept passing, and I kept not doing it. One day I had
    107 to make a return in town that required a QR code; I forwarded the email to my
    108 mom and had her show her phone. (I also could’ve just….printed it out).
    109 
    110 I read the news of the Los Angeles fires on news sites and in newsletters
    111 instead of being barraged by it on Instagram. I open my email on my computer
    112 and sort through the accumulation in a massive chunk — like my PO Box, when I
    113 haven’t gone for a few days — instead of bit by distracting bit. I find myself
    114 diverting my scroll energy to Facebook, where I still have an account to access
    115 dahlia groups, but it feels even more gross than before: a wasteland of AI
    116 accounts promising blue dahlias and weight loss reels and suggestions to
    117 friends of friends who haven’t updated their Facebook accounts in nearly a
    118 decade. It’s like a frat house basement at 10 am. Why the fuck am I here.
    119 
    120 [24]
    121 [https]
    122 HOW, FOR EXAMPLE, DID THIS GET IN MY FEED
    123 
    124 I’ve spent more time than ever before on Substack Notes, but not posting, or
    125 even responding to other people’s notes. The algorithm seems to have learned
    126 that I like to read newsletters, not posts, and is serving me those links, not
    127 others’ endless discussion of what they don’t like about Notes (namely: it’s
    128 like everywhere else that they also don’t like).
    129 
    130 I’m not quitting Instagram. I may or may not add email to my phone; maybe I’ll
    131 just do it when I’m traveling, and it becomes my de facto computer. I’m not
    132 trying to convince you to do what I’ve done, and I’m not suggesting I’m a
    133 superior or more disciplined person for doing any of this. All I’m saying is: I
    134 think I’ve turned the corner. And I think a lot of you have — or are about to
    135 — too.
    136 
    137 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
    138 
    139 You know how, when people get sober, or fall in love with running, or have a
    140 breakthrough in therapy — they can’t stop proselytizing about it? “Proselytize”
    141 feels like the right word here, because they really are preaching the good news
    142 of a new religion: a way of understanding and occupying the world. To them, it
    143 feels so right — and so unbelievable, that it took them this long to find it
    144 — that they want others to figure it out now, in less time than they did.
    145 
    146 But proselytizing doesn’t work, at least not how people think it does, and
    147 rarely in lasting ways. People make major decisions in their lives only when
    148 they’re ready, and they rarely reach a point of “ready” by people preaching at
    149 them. Instead, they slowly absorb examples, arguments, and desires for their
    150 own lives, and arrive at a place where they’re malleable to change.
    151 
    152 After years of people yelling at me in books, think pieces, and tweets (lol) to
    153 “break up with my phone,” “delete your social media accounts,” and “fuck Mark
    154 Zuckerberg,” turns out the thing that I needed was a whole conglomeration of
    155 quiet arguments and technological shifts that made my phone and the social
    156 media accounts on it feel less precious. Put differently, I haven’t come to
    157 value it less; instead, it’s become less valuable.
    158 
    159 This sounds spectacularly self-centered: that you can only quit a thing, or
    160 modify your usage of it, when it fails to serve you. But if we think of our
    161 phones and social media as addictive products, which they certainly are, then
    162 the classic addiction model makes sense: you only consider quitting when the
    163 negative impacts (the dead feeling of the soft-brain scroll, the loss of
    164 attention span, the weight of comparison, the exposure to trolls, the lack of
    165 control over the algorithm) outweigh the positive benefits (the distraction,
    166 the serotonin hit, the semblance of connection, the loose ties, the business
    167 benefits).
    168 
    169 My sense is that a lot of you are at a similar point. The amount of space these
    170 technologies take up in our lives — and their ever-diminishing utility — has
    171 brought us to a sort of cultural tipping point. I’ve sensed it over the last
    172 year, when my social feeds seemed to finish their years-long transformation
    173 from a neighborhood populated with friends to a glossy condo development of
    174 brands. I could feel it in the responses to my piece, last month, to [25]
    175 Posting Less, but also in a slew of pieces from other writers, all tracing
    176 different pathways to the same conclusion: this isn’t working anymore. What if
    177 we stopped trying to make it?
    178 
    179 At this point, we’ve had social media around for long enough — and people have
    180 been experimenting with decreasing or eliminating it for various lengths of
    181 time — that there’s a pretty rich collection of writing on the topic. I thought
    182 it might be useful to show you a few recent examples that have set up residency
    183 in my brain:
    184 
    185 1.) “[26]You Might Just Have To Be Bored.”
    186 
    187 Kate Lindsay [28]points out a foundational problem with decreasing phone/app
    188 use: we’ve forgotten how to be bored. This has felt true to me for some time,
    189 but I appreciated the point that trying to re-acquaint yourself with boredom
    190 cold turkey can be a disaster that leads to even greater dependence.
    191 
    192 Lindsay has gradually decreased how she uses her phone and social apps, and in
    193 so doing, the feeling of necessity also decreased. For me, all of this felt
    194 impossible until Twitter lost its utility for me — slowly at first, and then I
    195 realized I just didn’t want to hang out there. At first, I felt its absence,
    196 but then I began leveraging other modes of communication to keep in touch — or
    197 just kept in touch less (and spent more time doing things that were nourishing
    198 in ways that had nothing to do with being online).
    199 
    200 And then there’s the fact that boredom is far more than, I dunno, staring out
    201 the window on a long car ride when you were eight years old. “Boredom,” Lindsay
    202 argues, “is when life happens”:
    203 
    204     Boredom is when you do the dishes, run the errand you’ve been putting off,
    205     respond to the text you’ve left on read. Boredom is when you bring a book
    206     to read on the subway or make small talk with the person in front of you in
    207     line about how slow the pharmacy is. Boredom is when you do the things that
    208     make you feel like you have life under control. Not being bored is why you
    209     always feel busy, why you keep “not having time” to take a package to the
    210     post office or work on your novel. You do have time—you just spend it on
    211     your phone. By refusing to ever let your brain rest, you are choosing to
    212     watch other people’s lives through a screen at the expense of your own.
    213 
    214 She fucking nails it, doesn’t she. How obvious, how painful, how hilarious,
    215 that two things that most of us feel most stifled by — our lack of time, and
    216 our phones — are deeply fucking related.
    217 
    218 2.) “[29]Not having a smartphone is entirely practical. You [30]do not need it
    219 [31]. This machine barely [32]does[33] anything at all.”
    220 
    221 [35]This argument, from Sam Kriss, is not for people who use their phones as
    222 their sole computing device. It’s for people who use phones as one of many
    223 devices to communicate and navigate the internet. Kriss concedes that the GPS/
    224 mapping function of the phone is quite useful — but apart from that, our phones
    225 really aren’t doing much that our computers don’t do, they’re just portable and
    226 thus available to disrupt any potential boredom.
    227 
    228 This point comes about halfway through Kriss’s piece, which is about giving up
    229 his phone for 40 days, and I appreciate how he resists the narrative that
    230 giving up your phone will change your life — you still have the internet, after
    231 all, you just have slightly less access to it, and that slight change in access
    232 can be meaningful, or at least clarifying.
    233 
    234 I’m not interested in getting rid of my phone, I’m just interested in being
    235 less bound to it. My experience without email on my phone for the last three
    236 weeks has also underlined just how stupid my previous arguments were about its
    237 necessity. Nearly everything can wait until I can access my computer. QR codes
    238 can be printed or screenshotted and texted to yourself — or you can (pretty
    239 easily!) download the email app for an afternoon and delete it afterward. If
    240 you’re holding tightly to this argument, it’s useful to think about why.
    241 
    242 A chaser: “Not using a phone taught me what a phone is really for. It’s not for
    243 communicating with other people, getting directions, reading articles, looking
    244 at pictures, shopping for products, or playing games. A phone is a device for 
    245 muting the anxieties proper to being alive.”
    246 
    247 3.) App Time is Time, App Energy is Energy
    248 
    249 I entered the New Year with so many ideas for this newsletter: bizarre, thorny,
    250 wonderful, generative. I felt excited about digging into the big heart of the
    251 book. I could attribute some of that creative energy to working less over
    252 break, but I’m not that person who comes back from vacation bursting to work. I
    253 have more newsletter energy — and more time to execute it — because I’m not
    254 spraying that energy all over social media.
    255 
    256 Here’s how Julia Fontes [37]puts it in her post reflecting on the end of her
    257 year of “smart phone celibacy”:
    258 
    259     “This post isn’t going to conclude with me quitting all the sites. I do
    260     think that the way that they have sucked my attention away from the writing
    261     and made my newsletter worse is proof enough that I don’t want to continue
    262     to use them in the ways the marketing gurus recommend…..What I know for
    263     sure is that one year with the dumb phone culminated in the publication of
    264     my first book, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I know that
    265     moderation of anything that stimulates the dopaminergic response is nearly
    266     impossible for me. I am done beating myself up or putting in any kind of
    267     moral judgment about what I should or should not be able to control.”
    268 
    269 I want to spend less time promoting on social media — or just scrolling, let’s
    270 be honest, because that’s how I usually spend time when there to “promote”
    271 — and more time making stuff that’s promotable, that I’m proud of, that makes
    272 this entire enterprise thrive.
    273 
    274 4.) Not Posting as Privacy
    275 
    276 And privacy as valuable. Our lives don’t have to become others’ cheap food for
    277 consumption. This one bonked me right on the head:
    278 
    279 Here’s Hannah Power, [39]on leaving Instagram:
    280 
    281     “….the weird things that have happened as a direct consequence have been,
    282     well, weird. for instance, I haven’t missed it once. not once! I thought I
    283     would. I thought I would miss sharing my curated life, my walks through the
    284     streets of Lisbon, my pics screaming I am on holiday, but I haven’t.
    285     another weird thing that has come from my absence is loving my absence. I
    286     didn’t realise that my privacy was luxurious and I was just giving it away
    287     for free to people and Mark Zuckerberg. I didn’t realise privacy was a
    288     gift, a privilege even. I didn’t realise how cool it was to be somewhere
    289     and only you and the person you’re with know it. it was weird that I didn’t
    290     know this, or had forgotten this - like I was under a spell.
    291 
    292 It reminds me of something Freya Moon [40]wrote about the Gen-Z belief that
    293 posting is what makes something “real” — a boyfriend, a vacation, a meal. We
    294 have mistaken others’ recognition of a thing for actual experiencing the thing.
    295 At first, when I left Instagram, I thought (embarrassingly): but how will
    296 people know I’m going skiing, or see all this cozy puzzling, or know that I do
    297 indeed have friends and I hung out with them on New Year’s Eve?
    298 
    299 “People” may not know, but I do.
    300 
    301 5.) It’s Worth Hanging Out in the FOMO
    302 
    303 Over the last fifteen years I’ve watched incredibly talented writers who had
    304 ignored social media with good reason (they liked writing more than posting, 
    305 imagine) get pulled into starting a Twitter, an Instagram, a Facebook page, 
    306 whatever, because a marketing person at their publisher or an agent or someone
    307 they know in the industry convinced them that a social media presence is
    308 essential to a successful book launch. I understand where this wisdom is coming
    309 from, but I don’t buy it. A brand-new social media profile sells nothing. A
    310 Substack with a handful of posts and a listing of upcoming readings does the
    311 same thing as sending a big email to your contacts.
    312 
    313 I’m not fool enough to believe that a good book will sell just because it’s
    314 good. But a book sells through connections, and connections — the sort that
    315 make someone say yes of course let’s do a Q&A for your book! — are not
    316 primarily forged or maintained on social media. We take a look at our past and
    317 think of a friend that we made on Twitter or in a Facebook Group and think this
    318 is why I can’t leave! But those platforms don’t do the same thing they used to.
    319 My Instagram account doesn’t sell books. My newsletter — different story.
    320 
    321 Plus: what connections are you also missing by allocating so much of your
    322 creative time to social media? What happens when we consider those losses?
    323 
    324 I like what comedian Cynthia Girardian [42]wrote about the decision to delete
    325 her Instagram account:
    326 
    327     “….If I started on Instagram at 20 and I am now at the ripe age of 33, that
    328     means my whole adult life so far, I’ve spent it developing some sort of
    329     addiction to likes and external validation. And this means I will probably
    330     suffer from withdrawal syndrome from time to time: sometimes, since being
    331     off Instagram, I feel disconnected, isolated and lonely….Nothing seems to
    332     keep me as connected and as chronically online as Instagram and my 12.6K
    333     followers did, and so the questions remain:
    334 
    335     👽 Am I sabotaging my opportunities?
    336 
    337     👽 Are my friends and acquaintances going to forget about me?
    338 
    339     👽 Am I becoming the weird friend?
    340 
    341     👽 How am I going to establish contact or keep in touch with people / brands
    342     / potential work gigs from now on?
    343 
    344     👽 How am I going to share with the world the things I do?
    345 
    346     Not to make this my entire personality from now on, but to my own surprise,
    347     I want to offer some resistance and explore these uncomfortable feelings
    348     for a while. I am low-key excited, and I am certain that with time and
    349     space, all these questions will answer themselves.”
    350 
    351 In other words: what happens when we reintroduce the friction that social media
    352 smoothed? What’s worthwhile about re-learning some of the connective skills
    353 we’ve lost?
    354 
    355 This past Tuesday, I was reading the “What Are You Reading” thread and realized
    356 I’d missed [43]the big investigative piece about Neil Gaiman being an absolute
    357 creeper, which came out the day before. At first, I felt out of touch — and
    358 then I realized 1) I could go read it right then, and it would still have the
    359 same import; and 2) I could and should be more active about just visiting the
    360 websites of the publications I value and love, something I used to do every
    361 single time I opened up the computer. There are so many other ways to use the
    362 internet — some of them from our very recent past.
    363 
    364 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
    365 
    366 Many of you have resisted social media altogether. Others have always had a
    367 distant or measured relationship with it — or left when these companies proved,
    368 again and again, that they made you (and others) into a person you didn’t
    369 particularly like, or that the technology itself was so readily manipulated to
    370 serve our worst impulses. But a lot of us are sitting here with lives, both
    371 personal and professional, intertwined with these apps. We’ve sunk so much time
    372 into them; they hold not insignificant chunks of our recent past. We’ve
    373 negotiated misgivings and ambivalence; we’ve crafted complex and simple
    374 justifications to stay.
    375 
    376 So what is it about this moment that makes leaving — or significantly
    377 moderating — feel possible? The platforms feel toxic, but they’ve felt toxic
    378 for a while. They’re more toxic and they’re degrading, overridden by brands and
    379 AI. Their utility for connection (the thing that brought us there in the first
    380 place!) has deteriorated to the point of uselessness. The cultural norms of
    381 2005 to 2025 were produced and refined via social media, but the homes we built
    382 there — the understandings of self — feel unwelcoming and alien.
    383 
    384 The world, filtered through the apps, is not the world we want for ourselves.
    385 And in many cases, it’s not the actual world we inhabit.
    386 
    387 In a recent piece for the New York Times, Ezra Klein [44]argued that this
    388 feeling of discombobulation can be traced to “the unsteady, unpredictable
    389 emergence of a different world.” He’s talking about Trump, of course, and the
    390 anti-democracy politics he aims to ram through — but also AI’s maturing power
    391 and a rapidly warming planet that offers peepholes into an unspeakably hostile
    392 future every month. He concludes the piece with a quote from Antonio Gramsci:
    393 “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the
    394 time of monsters.”
    395 
    396 Climate monsters, cultural monsters, political monsters. You can’t fight them
    397 by consuming news, or quote-tweet dunking, or sharing a graphic. You can fight
    398 them through connection. Social apps might be the “easiest” place for that to
    399 happen — and by that, I mean it might the place with the least immediate
    400 friction — but that does not make them the place for them to gain and exercise
    401 power. If this is indeed a new world, we need new tactics, new tools, and new
    402 energy. None of which are hiding on Instagram.
    403 
    404 I’ve spent the last year oscillating between anger and disenchantment, hope and
    405 disillusionment. I want to break everything but also mend it. At times I want
    406 to hibernate, to turn inward, to fortify what’s mine — but also understand how
    407 vulnerable that will make me to all the challenges to come. How do we relearn
    408 how to talk to one another? To live with each other? To think and act with
    409 creativity and intention? How do we lead the lives we actually want to live,
    410 marked by care and passion?
    411 
    412 Dude, I’m working on it! A lot of us are. If someone has an easy answer for
    413 you, they have some sort of privilege that’s allowed them to shield themselves
    414 from the complications of the modern world. What I do know is this: I have a
    415 lot more time to think about these questions, to access empathy and so many
    416 other emotions, to experience the textures of each and every day, since I
    417 started spending less time on the sites where I’m supposed to document them.
    418 
    419 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
    420 
    421 For our discussion today, I don’t want to talk about the reasons why you have
    422 to stay — you don’t need to make the case. Everyone’s dealing with their own
    423 situation in the way that feels right to them. There is still very real utility
    424 in many corners of social media and moving a community off Facebook is not
    425 simple.
    426 
    427 Instead: how are you *feeling* about your current use? What would you like to
    428 change? Which argument to stay now feels flimsy *to you*? And do you also feel
    429 like we’re reaching a pivot point, or am I just high off all my new free time?
    430 
    431 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
    432 
    433 Also: as a way of connecting on smaller issues — and sharing pieces I’d usually
    434 share on Instagram or a previous iteration of Twitter — I’ve been playing
    435 around with Substack Chat. Feel free to totally ignore it, or dip in when you
    436 feel like it, whatever feels interesting and generative. It’s very low-key, but
    437 the same guidelines apply there as any other Culture Study comments section.
    438 You can find all chats [45]here.
    439 
    440 [46]
    441 [https]
    442 Join Anne Helen Petersen’s subscriber chat
    443 Available in the Substack app and on web
    444 Join chat
    445 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
    446 
    447 This Week’s Things I Read and Loved (it’s particularly good this week, gotta
    448 say; gift links whenever possible!)
    449 
    450 This post is for paid subscribers
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    489 [23] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6bd79790-a88b-487e-a0cf-72bb0cb42422_2310x1298.jpeg
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    491 [25] https://annehelen.substack.com/p/posting-less
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    503 [42] https://cynthiabague.substack.com/p/so-ive-deleted-my-instagram-accountnow?r=h567&utm_source=pocket_reader&triedRedirect=true
    504 [43] https://www.vulture.com/article/neil-gaiman-allegations-controversy-amanda-palmer-sandman-madoc.html?origSession=D2310056I8C3YDrVCPzJGxNg0nzMmVzcSekwODYkNmemSqkxTw%3D&_gl=1*qshuya*_gcl_aw*R0NMLjE3MzYwNTEzOTkuQ2p3S0NBaUExZU83QmhBVEVpd0FtMEVlLU0wN05BOWJnVGo3c0xNaFcyczRXd1FVZGl3b2lhWTQtdERhejd4c3VzQ3VlLXhzYi1CLUtSb0NoSmNRQXZEX0J3RQ..*FPAU*ODY2Mzc1MDA2LjE3MzYxOTg4MDY.*_ga*NjM4NzE2Mjg5LjE3MDk1OTEyMTA.*_ga_DNE38RK1HX*MTczNzA1NTYyNi41Mi4xLjE3MzcwNTU2MjYuMC4wLjc1NzQ5MDUwNQ..*_fplc*aXFkMnAzdTJGck1wanNUNzJBSjkzWENWWlglMkJWMVpqZFVPVWxFOVNHNjRPYnpyenA0dWJrYzJ2cDlHMXNZeThrVnpuWnJLJTJCREJYS2o1c2dxdnl5UTRYRUJUU09LSmVBdlpYUjJHVklFQWNncEYlMkJNYzYzczBrZkF6UXdqeUlnJTNEJTNE
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