Delete social media
Or how the bro podcast scene shat all over the idea of getting better
Go on, delete your social media apps. Dare ya. Double dare ya.
It’s in the wind, written across the landscape. Like each and every year, the hills are alive with the sound of people saying, “I want to be more mindful” or “I want to stop doomscrolling” or “I can’t handle the news” or “I hate my life and everything in it so I should really, really chuck this horrible rectangle away and get a dumbphone instead.” My brother in Christ, right on. Each year I add my voice to this chorus, I boom, I holler, I may even conduct; how many other people developed a whole method of using different devices to get a handle on phone addiction and still failed? Truly, you’re reading the words of the Master Splinter of self deception.
Seriously though, delete the social media apps from your phone. Go on. You won’t regret it. Probably. You probably won’t regret it, so chuck those apps in the bin. I vouch for this approach, but it’s becoming increasingly tricky.
I’ve soured on writing about improving your life with tech. It’s become a sterile and flaccid field, innately unsexy, hospital-like but without any nurses or doctors or patients or uniforms or thermometers, just florescent lights and the stink of disinfectant. The podcasters are to blame. They ruined self-improvement. There’s a fine line between tweaking parts of your life to improve your health and happiness, and tumbling into the sexless, Action-Man-groined world of The Diary of a CEO / High Performance / Huberman Lab / Any Type Of Other Introspective Bro Podcast That’s Toxic In Its Desire For Non-Toxicity .
Wanting to improve yourself should be a positive. Getting up early and working out is good, you’ll feel better and probably get more things done. The issue is when this lifestyle becomes ouroboros-esque, a figurative auto-fellation where you’re so hooked on your own taste you can’t stop going down on yourself.
Life optimisation should have a reason; feeling better about yourself, wanting more time to paint Warhammer, writing some erotic fiction, whatever it is, it should be something.
This message missed the bro podcast scene, a group of people stuck in what I call the Bryan Johnson Paradox.
Sidenote: Sadly, this isn’t the Brian-with-an-“i”-Johnson Paradox, which would be named for AC/DC’s lead singer. Not entirely sure what his paradox would be, but we can work on that later.
Bryan Johnson is that American tech bro who’s obsessed with trying to live forever. He’s the one who injects himself with his son’s blood and tracks his son’s erections and will probably eventually be slain by his son in some Oedipal rage.
Johnson is the apex predator of the bro habit optimiser sect. He has the sort of Scrooge McDuck wealth where he can do all sorts of wacky-ass shit to spend another decade or two eking out an existence. It looks awful. Pretty much all his time is focused on elongating his life, meaning Johnson spends his life doing things to make him live longer while seemingly ignoring the things that actually make life worth living. It’s as though he based his life on a Greek myth without realising it was a cautionary tale, not an instruction. The very throbbing flesh of our time on Earth, the sweet bits you have to wolf down, the parts you revel in, are messy and bad for you and complicated and their whole point is letting the juice dribble down your chin; they don’t generally involve electromagnetic pelvic floor pulse machines. Unless that gets you off. Then it gets cool.
In essence, that’s the Bryan Johnson Paradox: living only for the sake of living longer.
It’s where the bro optimisers have ended up, addicted to the act of optimisation rather than what optimisation is meant to bring: being able to eat biscuits guilt-free in your oldest, most decrepit pair of pants. Streamlining your life should be about making time to do the things that make you feel good.
So, deleting social media.
When I got a new phone last autumn, I made the decision to remove social media apps from my phone. I could go into great depth about why I did this, but, fundamentally, I pissed away too much time flicking through feeds of stuff I don’t really care about. The amount I know about iShowSpeed is simply Too Much for a man staring down the barrel of 40.
The gambit worked. I’m doing better without social media apps. More time, less sense of dread. It’s okay.
Sidenote: Yeah, I redownloaded Instagram over Christmas as I was getting some new tattoos and that’s the only way artists communicate these days. Sure, I kept Instagram for like a month after that, but it’s deleted again now, so what do you want from me?
The key is avoiding militancy. Give yourself some slack. I have a spare phone I can check social media on if I want. If that’s too much effort, I can redownload it, post something, and then delete it again. I haven’t even abandoned the joy of endless scrolling, I now just use Apple News and try to read actual writing rather than wading through the racist freaks and porn bots on Twitter.
Delete social media, but do it for the right reasons. To live a better life. To achieve the things you want to. You know, like having more baths or reading a Lyndon B. Johnson biography or maybe even starting a podcast about how to optimise your life. Actually, if you want to do that last one, maybe just download some more social media apps. I hear good things about TikTok.