I’m not going to lie – I entered Depth Year 2019 feeling like I’d made a horrible mistake. I should have prepared more. I should have stockpiled media. I shouldn’t have made such a dumb suggestion in the first place and I definitely shouldn’t have told anyone. Suddenly what seemed like a great idea became intensely constrictive.
That didn’t last, I’m glad to say. It turns out this first month has been hugely liberating. I’m feeling good about the whole thing. I’m feeling positive. I’m feeling like maybe I can keep it up for a year – at least if every month is as good as this.
My approach to feeling anxious about something is activity – I have found, every single time, that if I feel worried or trepidatious I will feel better if I make some progress towards resolving the thing that makes me feel so. In the case of the depth year, step one was to look for ways to make sure the time I spent was more mindful than it would be otherwise. I could spend an entire year frittering my life away on social media and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to reach for a book before I reached for Facebook. As such the first thing I did was look for ways to cut down my social media use. I didn’t want to go on a complete media freeze – I just wanted to stop spending so much time scrolling through news-feeds and tweets because I thought, and indeed still think, it’s making me unhappy.
As you all know, accessibility is one of my main passions. It’s the core of Meeple Like Us and the assumption all through the site is that accessibility is important to have. Our default position is that inaccessibility is an inherently undesirable state. It’s true too – but that doesn’t mean there is no role for inaccessibility. Sometimes inaccessibility has a powerful benefit – it creates friction. Friction is frustrating. Frustration is noticeable. If we notice we’re doing something, we can make a conscious decision as to whether it’s something we want to do. Inaccessibility, when used wisely, can be a safety net. That’s why you get a confirmation dialogue when you do something dangerous in an operating system – it’s an intentional barrier that is supposed to make you stop and think.
My problem with social media is that I will find myself checking Facebook and Twitter through muscle memory. It’s just a click of a bookmark, and then there it is. So – I made those bookmarks inaccessible. I removed Facebook from the bookmarks bar in my browser. I removed Amazon. I removed Twitter. I can still get to them, but I have to make the conscious effort to type in the URL. That inaccessibility makes me think ‘Wait, why am I doing this?’. I still find myself checking these sites far more than I would like, but less often than I have in the past. I sometimes now find hours have passed without idly checking for notifications.
I did the same thing with my mobile devices. I deleted apps if I could, and moved them somewhere awkward if I couldn’t. I switched off notifications. I made my social media experience pull rather than push. I need to decide that it’s time for me to check my updates – I’ve done everything I can to make sure Facebook and Twitter don’t have a role in deciding when should direct my attention their way.
I had to do this because I’d been researching a more elegant approach – a limiter for social media. What I wanted was a kind of social media chess clock – when I was actively engaged with a social media page it would track how long I was there. When I went over a particular amount in a day, it would stop me from being able to access the site until enough time had passed. I wanted to ration my attention, and I wanted software tools that helped me with that. Unfortunately I couldn’t find one that did everything I wanted:
- Let me define a time limit that is spent by a pool of apps
- Let that work across multiple platforms
- Let that work over multiple systems
I found tools that did some of what I needed, but nothing that did everything I wanted. The ones I found that came closest were also the most hypocritical – they demanded so much attention when I decided I didn’t want to use them that it just felt like a dodged bullet. So many emails, often with incredibly condescending overtones, yelling ‘LOOK AT ME NOTICE ME’. In the end I decided that I’d go the more difficult route of training my attention without relying on a technological solution. It’s probably for the best, but it does mean that I’ll stumble a lot more than I would otherwise.
It’s not that I think cutting down on social media is a primary depth year goal. It’s just a reaction to how social media is increasingly making me feel. I find my time on social media is often a low-grade of simmering unpleasantness – it seems to get ever more cliquey, ever more polarised, and ever more precarious. There’s such a culture of jumping on any passingly contentious remark and making it massive cultural faux-pas. There’s a growing tradition of dunking on those that point out faux-pas because their lack of higher level ‘wokeness’ is a faux-pas in and of itself. The primary goal of a lot of the twitter media traffic I see becoming most viral is a kind of virtue-gazumping.
I am constantly assaulted by tweet-storm lectures that have turned trivial and non-contentious observations into a kind of self-congratulatory virality. I consider myself to be *a bit* of a social justice warrior, but what I increasingly see online is more akin to social justice vigilantism. It feels unhealthy. It’s definitely counter-productive. I find it depressing to watch causes that I support undermined by the very people that claim allegiance to those causes as their personal brand.
Twitter in particular feels like a scorched earth battleground. Extremism of opinion is both the route to attention and a rot that eats away at that which people would profess to defend. That’s obviously not to say that every Twitter lecture or Facebook rant is destructive, but it only takes a few to really underline the problems of the platform. I constantly think about deleting my twitter account, but I keep it because there are lovely, wonderful people there and the darker aspects of social media doesn’t diminish their warmth.
It doesn’t help of course that we’re living through some dark times in the UK and the USA and much of my social media intake leaves me feeling sad on a regular basis. I want to get out of the habit of exposing myself to that as often as I do – I want to seek positivity rather than negativity. I don’t want to retreat into a bubble, but I do want to take better care of my own moods. I suspect here smaller and more intimate is better. Platforms like Ello or Mastadon might be worth exploring but the problem with looking for alternatives to big social media platforms is that nobody is there. When those platforms in turn become big, they develop many of the same problems from which the social media diaspora were seeking relief. I like how the Meeple Like Us Discord is becoming more chatty and it would be wonderful to see that improving over the course of the year and beyond.
I’m not especially worried about productivity losses to social media. I’ve never had a problem with getting things done. More it’s about improving the value of the time I spend – that if I have half an hour it’s spent in a way that doesn’t leave me feeling unhappier than I was before I spent it. There’s room for time-wasting in my depth year, but not self-destructive time-wasting. I’d like to cut down on social media as an act of self-care. The happy side-effect of that is that it gives me more time to invest in meaning.
On that note, this depth year so far has been good for actually improving my baseline sense of contentment. I no longer look at things that I don’t have and think about whether or not I should get them. The answer is decided – no! It’s actually amazingly liberating which is a point Rebecca Strang made in our Depth Year Facebook group. It takes the weight of a decision, even a frivolous and consumerist one, off your shoulders. It means when you want something to do you look around you and consider the options you have as opposed to the options you have plus the options you could acquire. I’m really liking that.
For me, the depth year was never about saving money and one of the things I want to do is channel a healthy percentage of what savings I make into charitable donations. I’ve decided that every month where I succeed in this I will bundle up a chunk of the money and donate it to our local food bank. Another chunk of the money will end up being sent into the Meeple Like Us bank account as a different sort of charitable donation. I know that seems kind of fiscally incestuous but there is a very significant firewall between ‘company funds’ and ‘my funds’. I want to use that portion of the money to ‘pay it forward’ – I’d like to commission some work for example and make sure people get paid for it. That’s not possible at the moment since there just isn’t enough money to make it happen. It could be a nice secondary benefit of this depth year process.
One of things I’d also like to record in this diary on a monthly basis is a list of the things that that tempted me over the course of the year, so I can check it out at the start of 2020. For this, I’m not creating a wish-list of purchases. Instead, what I want to find out is how much of it I’m still interested in getting when I can. If I still want all of it, that tells me something about myself. If I don’t want any of it, that also tells me something about myself. If I still want some of it that probably tells me something about those entries on the list. If I survive this depth year, that might become my new strategy – only get those things that I’m still keen on getting a year after I first wanted them. It strikes me as a worthwhile exercise to find out what things those might be.
So, this month I wanted:
- To watch the Marie Kondo tidying up show on Netflix, because it seemed appropriate for my interests at the moment.
- To watch Sex Education on Netflix, because having Gillian Anderson as a sex education teacher was basically my teenage fantasy.
- To buy the Humble Bundle photography bundle, because maybe I’d take the time to learn how to do photography properly?
- To watch Bird Box on Netflix, but it turned out I already had the novel so I read that instead.
- To back Shipwreck Arcana on Kickstarter, because people have told me that it’s like Hanabi but good.
Instead, I spent a lot more time on movies I already owned. Everyone that can read this can also read the Patreon roundup and I talked about them there – there were a lot of them. I’m trying out a new routine where instead of scrolling through social media I put a movie on my tablet and watch it in bed. This is good because it progresses me towards my goals while also making sure I can’t idly check Twitter while it’s playing. I need to stop the movie to make that happen. I can’t do that much during teaching time but I can on weekends and it seems like a better use of my time.
The problem there is that mostly what my tablet can access is Netflix, and Netflix in the UK is awful if you want to watch your way through a list of specific movies. It has thousands and thousands of movies and hardly any of them are ones I can watch. It’s actually pretty emblematic of the frustrations that led me to the depth year – I’d spend more time scrolling through a list of movies than I would watching any of them. My approach has been to add all the ones I can watch to a list and then copy the others from my media centre onto the device on a regular basis.
So, that’s month one of my depth year – a fulfilling experience so far. Part of that has been a more mindful consideration of what I want to be doing with my time and working out why certain things have been weighing me down. I’m feeling good about the rest of the year – if it all goes like this, 2019 should personally be a very positive experience indeed. And, let’s me honest, with the state of the world we all need reasons to be cheerful.