77 Days of Pokémon Go

I have managed not to interact with social media for 77 whole days. Related: I have played a stupid amount of Pokémon Go.

I have been playing a stupid amount of Pokémon Go. For the last 77 days, though, I have played Pokémon Go mostly to hide from other applications on my phone. Around the start of August, I had a panic attack that was profoundly attributable to the way information was being presented to me on my newsfeed. I logged out of Instagram and Facebook and told myself I wasn't going to log back in. In all the ways that matter, I really haven't. This is my longest stretch off the online social market since 2013. I am proud of myself.

I don't quite know why this absence has stuck so far. I've tried before, usually making it three-ish weeks before dopamine addiction kicks my ass. Last time, I managed 24 days before I found out about the Wicked Part 1 press cycle and decided to hold space for it.

Leading up to this current absence was (and is) the end of my 20s. Change your life or get stuck like this forever; a bad concept that is loud right now anyway. Additionally, I guess I'd seen a few videos from paranoid former-US military members yelling about how social media has become a front of psychological warfare by our current media barons to keep disaffected populations docile. A choice way to phrase something that seems kind of true; the harshness resonated with me at the time. I also have a support system that's good at reminding me when my anxieties are uncontrollable only because my attention span is too short to think critically. I also was in a fucking car wreck that broke my heart and totaled my car at about the same time?? I'm fine, everyone was fine, but I wasn't in the mood for sharing online after it happened.

All that to say, this 77-day period of playing too much Pokémon GO began at weird emotional moment in my life, predicated on years of genuine struggle to stop looking at Instagram.

And! It is good. And it has been really weird. I feel transformed for the better, but my god??

I wanted to share aspects of my experience here, if you're interested. I dropped off of writing this letter partially because I had lost my attention span for it, and it took me 77 whole days to build it back. That seems like something worth talking about.

ASPECT 1: I am physically addicted to the Instagram user interface and miss it every single day. I don't know why I'm surprised. I spent so much of my free time on Insta and on Twitter before that; I had to look at the screen every 30 seconds or I felt itchy. And I was aware of this problem for over half my life! The first 30 days away from my newsfeed were insane. Just physically: I was tired all of the time. My eyes wouldn't stay focused. There was a hollowness just under the surface of my skin that made me feel like I needed to stretch all of the time. I had a headache. I couldn't sleep. Mentally? I felt listless. I could focus on work because that was an existing habit, but I could focus on almost nothing else. Pokémon GO was helpful because it is not a game that demands your attention short of being cute, but I wanted to fill my time with reading, being outside, seeing my friends, all things I love! Doing so made that hollowness under my skin really sharp.

After 30 days, the physical effects started to ebb. I still get a headache when I think about logging on though. I still feel like I need to stretch. I think about logging on to Instagram every single day. The low-lows are gone, but the high-highs are rarer, and I miss my friends.

I don't know if the language of addiction is appropriate here, but is this not some kind of withdrawal? It's been embarrassing to frame this as an addiction. It feels embarrassing to have been addicted to something for half my life. That said, I think I need the embarrassment and also some fear to keep this up. It is embarrassing to need notifications for physical stasis, and it is scary to think that the notifications could change my physicality so much again.

ASPECT 2: Trying to stay off my newsfeed is so isolating, man. Have you ever tried? I don't want to be accusatory, but it's about to come across that way and I do apologize! Suddenly and after many years, you don't know what your friends are doing. Suddenly and after many years, social connections maintained through convenience have to be maintained through unilateral structured effort. Suddenly and after many years, you are going back on the implicit agreement you have with your social circle to communicate via these addictive platforms. People are happy for you, envious of you even. But most people aren't going to change to support you. They're going to hope you come back.

And like I get it. I have hoped someone would come back online before. My wife got offline in 2021 and I kept bothering her about it. Thankfully, she has an iron will and just ignored me.

I don't know what to make of this experience. I am not going to expect people to accommodate or even understand a change that might disrupt a pillar of their own physical stasis. I guess if you're trying to make that change for yourself, which I recommend on no uncertain terms, do expect to feel a little bit lonely.

ASEPCT 3: I have to relearn how to read at a high level. It took me a whole month to read more than two pages of a literary fiction novel. It took me two months to be able to read a journal article. I assumed I still had this ability, which I’d worked hard to obtain and thought was intact as my UI habit progressed in late 2024. It was not. I love to read difficult work; I am horrified that I let myself lose this muscle.

ASPECT 4: Related to aspect 3, I was kind of relieved to find my horror turn to sadness instead of depression. Generally, things make me more sad than depressed now. Before I got offline, and for most of my life, it was the opposite.

This one is liberating. Depression as a reaction to my inability to control the world around me wasn't useful. Depression is numbing, anxiety-inducing, and ultimately nothing at all. I was being plied with horrible information all the time and I short-circuited. After about 45 days offline I stopped feeling nothing and started to feel sad. Sadness is better. I can identify things I can change when I am sad. I can self-regulate when I am sad. I can properly process information when I am sad. I can be reverent when I am sad. I'd forgotten all that was an option.

ASPECT 5: Without intent, I was performing all the time. My language performed the language of the internet; my thoughts performed the structure of the internet. All of it was for you, my lovely friends, but actually it was for me to get my dopamine on the cheap.

The thing is, I love posting. I love attention. I love being a person who surprises people. I love being a person upon which others can rely. I'm posting now, because on some level I am shameless enough to think I might have something valuable to say. That said, I had reached a point with my UI addiction where many of my thoughts were centered about my Instagram story. Insight be damned, value be damned, I had to stay posting. I was even stockpiling small, clever things I could say to my in-real-life friends later, an Instagram story for the real world. The likes were good; the views were better. People were coming back for the rehearsed performance and I was spending less and less timing having to think through my presentation. The dopamine was almost free.

This truncated system of thought created a few bad externalities. I was sometimes ignoring people I found to be a tougher audience, which sometimes meant ignoring nourishing friendships in service of the bit. I was also more prone to outrage, which is bad for critical thinking and mental health but great for notifications and a unified feeling of indignation (and maybe I got to feel smarter than everyone too.) There was also the fact of my disappearing vocabulary. In a story for another day, I have spent a lot of my life consciously adjusting my speech for my audience. I had started doing that less, which meant I was thinking less. I could draw my crowd, but the right word was always escaping me.

My wife talks a lot about the way the internet tends to create arbitrary and unexamined pseudo-morals in service of easier delineation of in-groups and out-groups absent real-world proximity. More specifically, she goes long about how these digital morals - things like the purported evils of owning a boat or the supposed cringey-ness of highly generalized feminism, for example - do nothing to improve or even capture real-world realities. We use them as proxies for vigilant and gracious thought, and for convenience, in order to spend less of our energy on thinking. (Belief that our thoughts shouldn’t require our energy is certainly of the moment.)

I had started to do something worse than creating pseudo-morals. I was creating pseudo-conversations, dark-mirror people, all to save me the energy of having to engage in order to guarantee my fix. The performance, both online and off, was a cheap way to get the benefits friendship without the effort. I do wonder if I actually saved any energy, or if the energy was taken from just under the surface of my skin.

After exiting stage left, I have had to spend time reforging more organic habits for interacting with my friends and loved ones. It has been good, exhausting work. I am alone a bit more. The time I spend with people is truer. Part of the motivation for delaying this letter was to make sure I wasn't still posting Instagram stories.

ASPECT 6: I have been able to replace the incessant flood of information from my newsfeed with reliable, actionable information that doesn't freeze me in place.

The thing about being online right now, and the thing about being alive more generally, is that everything is deeply sad. There is a lot to dread. That said, social media encourages its users to take on the role of sanctified witness with regard to absolutely everything. It is a useless, destructive horror to individually bear witness to every tragedy happening in the world. That is not to say that you have to be ignorant, for example, of the genocide in Gaza, the escalating climate crisis and predicate ecological massacre, the petty tyranny of the US government, the genocide in Sudan, the rise of a bloodthirsty far-right worldwide, etc., etc., etc.. But you cannot, as an individual, become a champion for everything that matters to you at the same time. At best, it will make you impotent to assist with anything you care about, and at worst it will make you fucking nuts.

If I can make one direct exhortation, it's to ask you to stop following the 24/7 news cycle from your cell phone, take a month off, and re-engage after thoroughly vetting a new set of news sources. You will be sad, but you might not be so depressed that you feel powerless. Actions you can take become clearer. It will also be more difficult to catch you off guard because you can better control when you get your non-urgent information.

Also, support local journalism and never listen to unstructured political chat podcasts.

ASPECT 7: I am more cognizant of how and where I prefer to spend my time. Related to my halted performance in aspect 5, my cognition has started to improve. I can now fully reflect on my own needs and desires. I can build and destroy boundaries where necessary. I am reading again. I enjoy the time I spend alone thinking through a concept again. I enjoy the time I spend alone. I am working out. I am drinking less. I don't spend evenings feeling aimless. It is better.

ASPECT 8: I recently watched a whole sunset without even meaning to. I had never done that before.

I started writing this post at 77 days. I'm up to 89 now!

Special shoutout to May, for watching me go Instagram mad and loving me anyway. I love you too!

Shoutout to Alec, whose diligent commitment to good conversation helped to clear up my online haze over the past few months.

Shoutout to “Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age” by Vauhini Vara, a grounding force of a book that made me feel less alone with all this.

And also to “Longshot” by Ann Nocenti and Art Adams, and “In the Mouth of Madness” directed by John Carpenter. More art to help make sense of this experience.

Shoutout to the 2025 NBA Champions, my team, the Oklahoma City Thunder. Just like in general.

And shoutout to Pokémon Go for boosting the shiny rates on the Teddiursa with the purple hat, y’all were real for that.