Any moment now it will begin – and then it won’t stop for a month. Because as we enter the new year, the twin horsemen of the joyless apocalypse – the anti-booze and anti-meat lobby – pounce upon the January blues like a starved dog on the Christmas leftovers. And they are merciless.
Give up drinking for the month, they’ll shout – that’ll really help you through the darkest days of the year. Or, better still, become a vegan for 30 days – oh, the horror of ‘Veganuary’ – and forgo meat, fish and dairy products at precisely the same time as almost nothing is growing out of the wintry, fallow soil in our hemisphere. Yes, that makes sense. About as much sense as asking Prince Andrew for a lecture on integrity.
But instead of embracing either of these absurd fads, there is something you can give up this January that really will do you good. And it’s not beer or wine or Bambi burgers. It’s social media.
I would argue that we’d be better off handing a packet of Woodbines to a teenager than a smartphone. At least the cigarettes will only kill them
Of course it is. You didn’t need the Australian parliament to ban under-16s from using social media to realise that it wasn’t an unalloyed boon for us or our wider world. Most of us are already aware of the way that it’s insinuated itself in our daily lives and manipulated many of us to behave in certain fashions. I would argue that we’d be better off handing a packet of Woodbines to a teenager than a smartphone. At least the cigarettes will only kill them. The smartphone and social media will probably make them miserable and lonely for life. They will certainly erode the foundations of their social landscape. Which is all far worse, and precisely why the Australian parliament is to be applauded for its efforts (which I don’t consider dissimilar to the decision here in 1933 to ban the sale of cigarettes to under-16s).
So I invite you to imagine what you would do with your January, if you allowed yourself to experience it through the prism of the real world – through real friends and relatives, rather than the lens of approbation of social media. Imagine what you could do. Imagine how freeing it would be.
Rather than talking at people online in parcels of output, how much better would it be if you instead talked to your neighbours or the person in the shop, every day or several times a day? Instead of sitting alone at home, fomenting arthritis in your thumbs and some as-yet-unidentified retinal complaint, what would it be like to go to the next room and speak to your spouse, say, or even to go outside?
Imagine a world where instead of engaging with a yoga or fitness app, you actually go to a yoga or fitness class, with other people. It’s what’s happened for generations before we put up our glass walls. You might make a friend, which is no bad thing, or learn something new. Either way it’s better than sitting at home, developing a crick in your neck from looking down all the time, and feeling miserable because you aren’t attracting sufficient quantities of ‘likes’. It’s better than feeling inadequate because you aren’t, say, in Mustique or on some synthetic ‘luxury’ island in the Seychelles swimming with vegan dolphins or sipping cocktails in a stilted house and receiving a life-changing massage while gazing down at mating leatherback turtles and wondering if they’re happier than you are.
Because it’s all rubbish. It’s all a bunkum. It’s bogus. It’s nothing short of a dreadful confection designed to induce not obesity (although it does because of all that sitting around scrolling) but, rather, a certain consumer and behavioural activation. And that’s because social media exists to sell us something – something, usually, we didn’t know we wanted and certainly don’t need. In other words, it’s the virtual equivalent of that aisle in the middle of Lidl which has nothing to do with grocery shopping but where everything is so cheap that you can’t stop yourself. And so the hole in the ground gets bigger.
People say that the House of Lords would never be invented today. Nor would we have invented vaping but for the centuries of tobacco use going back to Sir Walter Raleigh. One day we will realise that social media is little different – and that, like tobacco and alcohol, its distribution should be age-restricted. And that even for adults its use ought to fall within certain boundaries, rather as we advise with alcohol and other drugs.
So my recommendation for this January is to give yourself that long-promised for digital detox. Get rid of social media for a month and see how you feel at the end of it. My suspicion is that it might end up doing you more good than giving up booze, meat or possibly even fags, dreadful for our health as those are.
You could even go a step further and embrace a broader screen detox – and step away from the beginning-before-it-finishes world of Netflix and the streamers. Go to the cinema instead, if there’s still one near you, and hear other people laugh, or cry, and chew popcorn. Or you could pick up a book and do something deeply old-fashioned like reading words on the page by candlelight.
Either way, I urge you to go cold turkey on Facebook, X or Instagram or whatever you use. Switch it off for January. Rather than being part of an online community, go to the pub – and drink as heavily as you like until you can break the ice. Or go to church and engage with a real in-person community. Join in. For a month, stop checking your phone. I’ve checked mine more than 20 times while writing this article. I’m going to give it a try. And if I can’t manage the whole month perhaps I’ll instead give myself a couple of days off each week. All in all, I suspect it will be harder than giving up booze or meat… and that tells you all you need to know.
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