digital usage controls aren’t for me
Growing up with social media, especially post-2020 when my social media usage spiked like every other person in my position, has really impacted how I experience satisfaction and (can’t) exercise restraint. It is one thing to spend months at home on Zoom or doing your solitary work while scrolling TikTok at every inconvenience as an adult and a whole other mess when you do it at fourteen with ADHD. As a result, I have a very addictive personality that is plagued by impulsivity. Self-control is a foreign concept unheard of in the lands of mine once something captures my full attention.
Over the years, I’ve attempted various tactics that never addressed the problem which was craving satisfaction at the smallest of inconveniences. That makes the problem sound so abstract so I’ll give two examples: (1) Waiting in line? Pull out the phone and open anything or (2) hitting an obstacle while writing? Grab the phone and browse instead of thinking hard of how to achieve what I have in mind. What I’m describing is of course just behavior typical of an ADHD diagnosis, but it’s aggravated by the distraction being an addictive wormhole I can get lost in. It’s filled with blips of nothing, short enough for my attention span that is tirelessly trained to expect less and less friction to reach satisfaction.
At first, I tried placing time limits on my phone which worked for a while until I disabled them because I was depending on my phone for unpredictable periods meaning I couldn’t set a clean-cut time limit on the phone’s screen time. Putting an app limit on specific apps or app types (like social media or entertainment) never lasted into another lockdown, because, remember, we had them every couple of months again when cases rose. As soon I was locked up at home, all rules and routines were abandoned. There was just so little to do in our tiny apartment during lockdowns and social media became one of the few avenues of socializing and experiencing culture together with others. Not being online meant that I wasn’t seeing what my friends saw/talked about and, with no real alternative in sight, I succumbed to the pressure.
Consequently, I had a screen time of 10-12h a day, mostly spent on TikTok (not accounting for the time spent on my laptop in parallel). I could chart out an influencer feud’s history but not recall what I had had for dinner the night before. It really fucked with my brain. Brain rot, fried brain, chronically online, and more that I can’t recall anymore—I’ve experienced them all and jokingly applied each of them to myself and friends.
Around the time I started to care, which was around the release of The Social Dilemma, it seems that a whole industry of digital usage limiting apps sprung up. A really bloodsucking one. Not only do these apps often collect a shit ton of data about their users’ usage habits, they have the audacity to charge obscene amounts of money for a subpar service on iOS. The experience may be better on Android, though. That’s why I’ve resorted to making do with what the OS provides which in reality is nothing for what I’ll call a digital adult: me.
My parents didn’t have any oversight over what I did with my devices. They would urge me to do something other than scrolling on my phone when I’ve spent the entire day in bed on TikTok, but that’s about it. The phone offered significantly less friction and so it became my routine to (doom)scroll on it. My parents lacked the technical proficiency for parental controls (or anything else on a computing device). As a result, I was left to my own devices (hehe). Once I became aware of the ability to lock down screen time settings with a PIN to increase the friction of prolonging my time spent on timesinks, I gave that a shot. I set a 4-digit pin that I let my brother choose that I could eventually reset in less than a minute because screen time is for kids and I’m an adult on my iPhone. That’s what I meant by “digital adult.” Not a fully developed brain, but old enough to be indulge myself. I’m really fucking addicted to my phone, ADHD or not.
If you’re wondering why I didn’t quit social media while suffering through this, I actually did do that. I deleted all of my accounts and apps some time in 2021 for the first time. I’ve had phases of going away and then returning because of social pressure—when I was still in school—but nowadays my reasons for returning are often out of curiosity and very short-lived. Personally, I don’t believe deleting social media addressed my problem: that I grab for my phone to browse the web when I hit a cognitive wall. Wikipedia can be as addictive as TikTok given the right circumstances (which are often given in my life), and when that’s not available, I just cycle through various apps on my phone, eventually landing at my RSS reader as if refreshing it for the hundredth time in the last hour would magically deliver more than one new addition at best.
I didn’t start writing this post because anything has changed recently. Yes, I signed up for an evil site because I’m interested in seeing the alternate reality neo-Nazis are conjuring on there which I may or may not write about, but my struggles persist with or without it. I was considering putting a time limit on it, preemptively, but then realized that if I noticed I was spending too much time on it, the only “cure” would be to delete my account and unhealthily focus on something else.
I thought I’d write about this because I’m so sick and tired of my brain being messy, the shitty business models around time limit apps, the ineffectiveness of built-in tools, and the bots astroturfing alleged benefits from the latter two. Their claims never address the naturally impulsive and distraught. When they do, they claim studies have shown benefits from them. What studies? Who knows. Just a rhetorical device to provide legitimacy where there is none.