Lent

I have a weird relationship with religion. I’m irreligious, but religion has a certain draw for me. In the way that certain types are drawn towards mysticism or spirituality, I think I am drawn towards Christianity.

As a teenager, atheism felt cool. It felt edgy. Standing up to the man. Yeah big religion has been forced down our throats, and we’re rejecting it.

I was once at a party, and a friend told us he was a relatively devout Christian. We were all shocked. Another friend drunkenly realised this was his moment. All those nights alone watching Richard Dawkins were about to pay off. It was time for logic.

It was pretty tragic to watch. My christian friend shrugged off his atheist talking points nonchalantly, saying something like “I just think people should believe whatever brings them joy, and Christianity brings me joy”. That felt like the most punk thing ever at that moment. I think it was that moment I stopped being an atheist.

This was likely in 2014, which meant I got off the atheism train just before it derailed, revealing it was full of Nazis. Even Richard Dawkins is apparently on the side of the evangelicals now. I think I never really enjoyed the atheist arguments because they seems a bit shit. You can’t logic religion away, because fundamentally both atheists and theists believe that there was once nothing, then magically there was everything. They just disagree on timescales and mechanisms.

I think that, combined with my Irish heritage, makes me inclined to Christianity. In the same way a certain type of person will take on rituals from Buddhism or spirituality in an almost fetishistic way, I am inclined to do that with Christianity.

All that is a lot of throat clearing to get to my point. Today we ate pancakes, tomorrow I’m giving up social media for lent¹.

I think I’ve been trying to quit social media for about 7 years in various forms. I think I previously gave it up for lent in 2015, which was the last time I gave something up for lent.

I don’t think I need to make the case that social media is a net bad. That feels like stating the obvious. Facebook literally caused a genocide. The weird thing about social media that’s hard to remember is it used to be so good. Remember before your parents joined Facebook? It was actually good. If you’ve got 3 hours to kill, I strongly recommend Tantacrul’s amazing video essay on the topic. It really captures the nostalgia of Facebook, and how for a brief moment in time, how great it was. And then it follows the story, to it’s darkest places.

The two social media platforms I actually use are Reddit and Instagram. I realise Reddit isn’t the go to when you think of social media, but for me it serves that role. I actually started to spend a lot more time on Reddit consciously, as a way to cut down Instagram usage. That worked, and Reddit really has a lot of benefits over Instagram, but it still has most of the drawbacks. Infinite scroll, repetitive boring content, and occasional dopamine rushes.

I was in Barcelona last weekend, and I was trying to spend time reading. I noticed that when I was reading, be it articles or books, I felt a sense of calm I didn’t feel when I was on social media. I decided to uninstall Reddit and Instagram for a few days, which was really rewarding. So I’m trying to abstain until Easter.

I remember once hearing a bit of life advice, that if you want to take up a new activity, you have to decide what you’re not going to do in it’s place. I only have 24 hours in a day, so if I spend an hour doing yoga every night, that means I have to find that hour from somewhere. There’s going to be some trade-off, and you need to be conscious about it.

I think there’s the same issue to a lesser extent if you’re quitting something. If you smoke when you’re anxious to calm you down, what are you going to do instead if you quit smoking. Ideally you want something healthier, you don’t want to just be anxious.

Scrolling on social media has a real niche. It’s active behaviour that’s really passive. It’s like a super addictive knitting. So what am I going to do when I’m waiting in a queue? Or when I’m braindead on the sofa.

Part of me wants to say message a friend. That seems like a really healthy thing to do. And while I really hate WhatsApp, it’s not quite social media yet. Although inexplicably it has stories and actual real people inexplicably use them. That’s really weird.

But I’m not going to message a friend, because that causes a problem. The friend replies. Then I need to reply to them. And I have too much to do already. They probably sent a nice message that I shouldn’t just dismiss. Fuck I really need to reply to my messages. I’m sorry Katie, if I don’t text you back I will answer your question when I next see you.

What my current plan is, is to replace social media with a combination of RSS and Balatro. I’ve been slowly working over the course of this decade at cultivating a good RSS feed. Not too noisy, full of mostly interesting things, but some braindead² things. I recently got readwise reader which has a subscription, but doesn’t take VC funding, so it’s the second best thing it could be (after FOSS). I’ve been playing around with RSS readers since probably 2021, and this is the first once I’ve really loved. It’s innovation is bizarrely combining a read-it-later app with a RSS feed reader. But also, it just works, which is so rare in software.

So RSS is replacing Reddit, where I go where I want information, but when I’m braindead and would go on Instagram to look at dumb cycling memes, I’m instead going to play Balatro. If you’re not aware of Balatro, it’s basically a poker game where you get points for each hand you play, and power ups to improve your hand. It sounds dumb, but it’s so so addictive. I think it’s probably more addictive than social media, which may be a problem.

Why I like it though, is it takes just enough focus to quieten my mind. If meditation is about focusing your mind on a single thing to find some sort of peace, then I guess balatro counts as meditation.

So thus begins my 40 days. I’ve already spent all day today mentioning in every possible conversation that I’m quitting social media, so this probably won’t be the last I write about it. It’s exciting to have a new personality.

All this being said, I may slightly break my abstinence to post links to these articles on Instagram or Reddit, because literally nobody reads them otherwise. Maybe I can automate this somehow. We’ll see.

If you were interested, the cover photo is a picture of Wadi Rum desert I took when visiting in 2020. Honestly that place is so beautiful.