OFFSTAGE day 1: analog hour

my 2¢ on getting off social media a bit

Happy Day 1 of Offstage! Because this is my first real day of posting and the first day I’m sharing outside of Substack, I’m focusing on something that other people might find helpful: strategies I have to spend a bit less time online. I can’t brag about how much my screen time has lowered, but I can attest that posting on Instagram no longer makes me full-body anxious.

If I open my homepages on Substack or YouTube, I’ll find lots of video essays, think-pieces, and guides about how to get off the Internet and decrease “brain rot.” I appreciate the sentiment — I have concerns about the way the Internet affects young people’s development and often want to throw my phone out the window — but I find so much wrong with the way in which people talk about moving offline. First, most of this content serves to pad the ego of the creator rather than help the purported reader; it’s about the creator framing themself as morally superior, healthier, or more productive because they choose to spend more time offline. Second, this content portrays the pre-Internet world as pure and uncorrupted. The trope is tired. Everyone says the world was great until [insert event here] happened. You don’t miss the material conditions of your childhood, you just miss your childhood. Last, people on Substack tend to frame their recommendations as “if you do [x, y, and z], you will become happier and more fulfilled.” If you delete your Instagram, you will get back the attention span you had when you could read a chapter book in one sitting. That’s not how it works. We can’t shift back to a pre-Internet society that easily — it’s too embedded.

The strategy here isn’t removal but rather gradual shifts. You can’t — or at least shouldn’t — guilt people into getting off social media. You have to make them look forward to specific other things. This is rule one of educational pedagogy: you can’t tell people not to do something without giving them an alternative. I’ve replaced my teenage angst over my peers’ curated Instagram profiles with Wikipedia rabbit-holes and inoffensive lifestyle TikToks — to the point where I don’t want to go on Instagram stalking sprees like I used to. I have a few games that require dedicated focus; those are a step up from social media because my brain can’t spiral like it does when I passively scroll. From there, I switch games out for e-books. Whenever I’m in a reading slump, I find it easier to get back into e-books than I do to take an unread book off my shelf. From there, I power through a few easy e-books and get motivated to return to my physical books. Books get a bad rap; people see them as either too boring or too intellectual. In most cases, however, reading books you find fun is similar to being on social media. Both center around learning about people. Other hobbies work, too; I just see a lot of guidance on Substack toward creative or athletic hobbies when it’s an easier transition to shift into other kinds of consumption-related hobbies like reading or listening to music. Once you have a wider array of ways to fill your free time and create a gradient between online and offline activities rather than treating them like a binary, social media holds less of a monopoly over your brain’s conception of fun.

My next tip (that I may have shared with you already if we’re friends) is that I try to do something called ‘analog hour’ every night before I go to bed. There’s plenty to show that we should be off screens at least an hour before bed, but that can feel unattainable. My peak productivity hours are between about 10pm and 2am, so I usually have to cut myself off from work rather than winding down slowly. But I’ve committed to having the last thing I do each night be off screens — even if it’s just that I turn off my phone before brushing my teeth and changing into pajamas. I started doing this during my final year of college; I would turn in an essay at some ungodly hour, turn off all my electronics, and spend a few minutes doing anything I could think of off screens so that my brain could shut off before going to sleep. Analog hour sometimes lasts five minutes; sometimes it lasts an hour or two because I get into whatever I’m doing and don’t keep track of the time. I may lose a bit of sleep because of analog hour, but I sleep better. It’s not all that different from what scientists suggest about not using your phone before bed — but I find that framing it as a fun activity within a nighttime routine rather than the equivalent of telling a kid to eat their vegetables made it easier to add into my life.

Being off your phone doesn’t need to be a chore; treating it that way actually reinforces the power of technology over you rather than negating it. It’s easier to open Instagram than it is to craft something or go on a walk, but it’s easier to stare at the wall than it is to open Instagram. I don’t think being offline makes anyone a better person, but if it’s a goal of yours to spend less time online, I suggest finding ways to reframe this pursuit to make it feel less like work.