I have spent a decade scrolling through feeds. Between the first time I downloaded an app to share a flat white in Melbourne and last Tuesday, the scrolling stopped feeling like a choice. It felt like background radiation, the kind of low hum you stop noticing until someone switches it off. So I switched it off. For thirty days I deleted Instagram, X, TikTok and LinkedIn, logged out of everything, and asked a friend to change my passwords so I would not fold on a weak evening. Learn more about Cách Làm Bánh Mì Sandwich Tại Nhà đơn Giản Và Nhanh Gọn.
The experiment started as rebellion against my own attention span. By day three it became something else, a window into how much of my day was shaped by strangers, brands and rage-bait accounts I would not recognise on the street. I am writing this as a record, because the month revealed things I did not expect, and a couple I had half expected and tried to ignore.
I am an Australian writer who lives online for work and out of habit, so this was not a vow of silence. I still used email, still used WhatsApp to organise drinks in Surry Hills, still watched the news. The point was to cut the infinite scroll and the algorithmic drip, the part of the internet that pretends to be casual but is engineered to keep you tapping. What follows is what happened when I actually left that loop.
The first seventy-two hours were embarrassing. I reached for the phone on the train between Redfern and Central the way a smoker reaches for a pack after dinner. My thumb knew the path to the home screen so well that I caught myself opening folders that were never going to deliver a fix. I was fidgety, mildly bored, and convinced important things were happening without me.
By day four the urge settled into something more specific. I wanted to know what people thought about a football match, what a musician had said in a thread, whether a restaurant in Fitzroy had reopened. None of it was actually urgent. Most of it would still be true, or still be wrong, a week later. That realisation was strangely freeing, the way you feel when you cancel a subscription you never used.
What surprised me was the boredom itself. Without a feed to fall into I had to sit with the dead minutes, queuing at Bunnings, standing on the platform at Flinders Street, watching the kettle boil. I had forgotten that boredom is the seedbed of ideas. By the end of the first week I was drafting notes on a paper pad from a Newtown newsagent, and those notes became the bones of a piece I am still proud of.
One of the quietest changes was in how I spoke to actual humans. Sitting across from a friend at a cafe on Gertrude Street, I noticed I was no longer waiting for the other person to pause so I could glance at the table. I was no longer dropping half-read takes into chats to look like I was keeping up with the cultural cycle.
I started remembering small details again. My mate's kid had started school. Another friend was renovating a weatherboard in Brunswick and the council had pushed back on the heritage overlay. None of that would ever have shown up in my feed. It only existed because I was present for it, and presence, I am embarrassed to admit, had become a luxury I had been outsourcing to my phone.
There was also a strange lifting of ambient anxiety. The Australian media cycle is already loud, and the social layer on top amplifies whichever story is loudest that day, whether it is a debate about the Voice, a scandal in Canberra, or a fresh argument about house prices in Sydney. Without the algorithmic megaphone in my pocket, the country felt like a country again, not a permanent group chat running on fumes. I could choose when to engage with the news, instead of being ambushed at 11pm.
Books had become something I owned rather than read. Two novels sat on my bedside table in Glebe, spines still creased from the day I bought them. Within two weeks of quitting the feeds I had finished both and started an essay collection I had been meaning to pick up for the better part of a year. I also started cooking in a way that felt like practice, the slow, slightly nerdy kind I used to do before my evenings were eaten by short videos.
That is how I ended up spending a Sunday making my own bánh mì, a project I had been putting off forever. I followed a simple bánh mì recipe, pickled the carrots and daikon the night before, and slow-roasted a pork shoulder from the markets. The kitchen smelled like lemongrass for hours. The sandwiches were a mess. I ate two for lunch and felt absurdly proud of something that had nothing to do with an audience.
Beyond the kitchen, my taste in video flattened and sharpened at the same time. I stopped doomscrolling clips of strangers arguing about geopolitics and started watching long interviews, full films, and the occasional documentary about Australian wine regions. I was still consuming media, just not the kind engineered to keep me irritated. My attention span, which I had privately assumed was ruined, turned out to be intact. It had simply been buried.
I have never been a bad sleeper, but I have been a late one. The habit of checking the phone in bed, telling myself it was just one quick look, had been pushing my lights-out back by forty-five minutes most nights, and my evening screen time was the kind of thing I had been quietly lying to myself about. Without the apps, that drift stopped. I was in bed earlier, read paper pages until my eyes gave up, and woke up without the groggy awareness of headlines I had absorbed while half asleep.
The bigger shift was in my baseline anxiety. I am not a doctor and I am not pretending a month of digital detox cured anything, but the texture of my worry changed. Where I used to feel a vague, free-floating dread about the state of the world, picked up from posts arguing in a hundred directions, I started feeling concern with a name and a place. Cost of living in the eastern suburbs. A friend going through a divorce. A project at work that genuinely needed attention. Specific worries are easier to act on than a general hum of dread.
I also noticed I stopped performing my rest. I used to lie on the couch on a Sunday, supposedly relaxing, while actually scrolling through other people's lives and quietly comparing my unmade lounge to their styled interiors. Without the comparison engine in my pocket, a Sunday morning became a Sunday morning again, sometimes a long walk along the coast, sometimes absolutely nothing at all. Both were fine.
For most of the month, my window into current affairs was the ABC news app, a couple of newspapers, and conversations with people I trust. That sounds purer than it was, because those sources still carry their own angles. But reading them was fundamentally different from letting an algorithm choose what I saw. I could tell when an article was opinion, when it was reporting, and when a columnist was having a crack at someone.
I also read more Australian politics than I had in years, because I had to go looking for it rather than have it served. I followed the budget more closely, paid more attention to state-level decisions in Victoria and New South Wales, and tracked the small regulatory shifts usually drowned out by the louder online culture wars. The Privacy Act amendments being debated in Canberra, the slow grind of the Australian Privacy Principles as they get tested in real cases, all of it felt more like a civic landscape and less like a content stream.
What I missed was the local colour. I did not get the instant play-by-play of an AFL game, did not see a meme about a politician's press conference until two days later, and lost track of a small story about a Parramatta development I would otherwise have heard about within the hour. Those gaps were real, and they mattered. They just mattered less than I had assumed, and were easy to fill when I wanted to.
I did not stay off social media forever. That would be silly and dishonest, because part of running a small personal site is being reachable and part of the conversation. I reinstalled the apps on day thirty-one, one at a time, and turned off every notification. I removed the apps from my home screen and put them in a folder at the back, the digital equivalent of putting the biscuit tin on the top shelf.
What I did not do is go back to the way things were. I no longer check the phone first thing in the morning or take it into the bedroom. I batch my scrolling into one or two short windows a day instead of letting it bleed across every task. I also stopped following accounts that made me feel worse about my own life, which was most of them, and replaced them with a small list of writers, photographers, and a few old friends whose actual lives I wanted to keep up with.
The biggest thing I learned is that social media is not a villain. It is a tool, and like most tools it does whatever you let it do to you. A month without it did not fix my attention, sleep or career. It gave me back the feeling of being in charge of my own day, the only thing the apps had actually been taking. If you are an Australian who is tired and vaguely anxious, the cheapest experiment you can run is to delete the apps for a weekend. You will be bored. You will be fine. You might even cook something in your kitchen that nobody is watching.
If this stirred something, or you have your own story about pulling the plug, I would love to hear it. Virgle Kent takes pitches, collaborations and the occasional angry email through the contact page. Drop a note or shout into the void. The void, it turns out, replies.