A Week Without Any Social Media: What Changed in My Life? | Beating Boredom This Spring Festival

Not bad.

The holiday has begun.

It's a chance to rest and reset, and it's also a stretch of time you have to get through. However you spend it, you probably don't want to let a rare holiday slip by the same way as always.

So here is our Spring Festival edition of Hack Your Life: two things a day. Turn left for a new life skill, turn right for a few strange games. We also ran some wild experiments on our own lives, to give your curiosity something fresh to chew on.

Happy New Year!

February 2 was a Friday. I got home early that evening, and by ten o'clock I had finished getting ready for bed, climbed under the covers, and pulled out my phone. Over the next two hours I switched back and forth between WeChat, Weibo and Douban, the social apps I use most.

That is how I usually spend the time before falling asleep, but that night I refreshed far more often than usual, and it ate up far more time.

Twelve days later I was due to start a three-day experiment: no social media at all. (Why three days turned into seven, more on that later.)

As a journalist, I am a heavy user of social media. I have more than 3,000 contacts on WeChat, and Moments is an important source of information for me — sometimes news reaches Moments faster than it reaches my push notifications. Twitter is literally one of my everyday story banks.

My Weibo and Douban timelines are carefully tended, sorted into groups by subject and update frequency, each suited to a different kind of spare moment.

But I also know that scrolling social media out of habit is not a good thing. A colleague keeps telling me that if all of your information comes from social media, something somewhere has gone wrong.

What I wanted to find out was this: if those spare moments did not go to Moments and Weibo, where would they go instead? Is social media what takes my attention?

After overdrawing several days' worth of social media in advance, I began.

Here is what I found.

No More Little Red Dots — Does It Really Feel Lighter?

The first problem was how to turn Moments off.

I clicked every clickable button in WeChat's settings and still could not find it. Friends are always announcing that they are shutting Moments down for good, and I had assumed there was a button you tap once. It turns out no such button exists.

In the end I had to Google it.

For a moment, watching the little red dot in the bottom right corner of WeChat vanish — no more alerts about new posts — things did feel lighter.

So much time has passed since then that I had to look it up again to write this.

I also made a new folder and put every social app on my phone inside it, to prevent stray taps (and to stop me from scrolling once I did tap one by mistake). As for not opening Weibo, Twitter and Facebook in a browser, that would have to come down to willpower.

By the time I finished all this it was past midnight. With no social media to lull me to sleep, I opened a podcast I had downloaded long ago and never listened to, and was asleep within minutes.

Some Real Socializing Instead — But What Do You Watch in Traffic?

The day before the experiment, a friend posted in Moments about putting together a weekend game of Werewolf, and I rushed to sign up. If I could not scroll social media, I would do some socializing in the flesh.

The likes and comments under that recruitment post quickly added up to a full game. The organizer pulled everyone into a WeChat group and we agreed to find a conference room in Wangjing on Saturday afternoon, and play from afternoon into the night.

That same day I also had lunch with college classmates, and in the evening a thank-you party thrown by a friend. On a normal weekend I avoid group gatherings and prefer my own company; for the experiment I crammed three of them into one day.

What I had not counted on was that Beijing traffic that Saturday was especially bad. Getting between three venues took twice as long as I had planned.

When we were designing the experiment, my editor made a point of ruling out apps that are not social networks in the usual sense — Taobao Live, for instance, or Mogujie Live. Whenever I used to get stuck in traffic, I would open one of those two and watch a livestream, and before I knew it I had placed quite a few orders.

At this point you may be expecting a conclusion along the lines of, "Because I couldn't scroll social media, I finished N books."

Partly true. I did finish two books while stuck in traffic, but both were novels. I also carried a book from this year's reading list in my bag, and over the whole week I barely opened it. I told myself the ride was too aggravating to concentrate, that I would not remember much anyway. So quitting social media did not hand me the ability to study.

More and More Apps End Up in the "Do Not Open" Folder

Because I had a lot of work lined up before the New Year, the plan was three days.

The first three days seemed to pass peacefully enough. But I only got through them on the faith that after 72 hours I could open everything and scroll to my heart's content.

My editor and I talked it over and agreed that three days would only prove I have decent willpower, not that the experiment had done its job. So it was stretched to a week.

That is when the problems started.

After the Nth notification from Taobao telling me a streamer I follow had gone live, I moved Taobao into the "temporarily sealed" folder and turned off its push notifications. The couriers, after all, had begun to stop shipping anyway.

To find a café to meet a friend I opened Dianping, and once I had the address that app went into the folder too. When Dianping first launched its "Review Headlines" feed, a friend of mine said, "How much free time do you have to have to keep scrolling the Dianping homepage?"

Sorry to say, I seem to be that person with too much free time. Dianping is still not smart enough at recommending articles and reviews from your browsing history — half of every ten items are of no interest — but I really have found plenty of restaurants, cafés, gyms and places like trampoline parks I would never have thought to look up.

There are many other apps like Taobao and Dianping turning social and content-driven, and if you are not careful you stay inside them far longer than you meant to.

Getting My Weibo Fix Off a Coworker's Screen

I follow a lot of pet bloggers on Instagram and Weibo. I can skip the beauty videos, but several days without cats online was hard going.

One day at the office a coworker had me look at his screen: a funny video, three and a half stars out of five. On a normal day I might not have made it through a third of it. This time I watched all of it and asked him to keep scrolling: "Four days without Weibo. I'm starving."

Without Moments, How Do You Keep Up With Friends?

I have a coworker who claims he never uses Moments, yet he knows about updates plenty of people have posted there. "Because I tap their profile picture and go straight to their Moments," he explained. Then a bonus remark — picture two eye-rolls here — "I just think scrolling a feed is a waste of time."

That route to a quick fix was closed to me as well: tapping into a friend's profile page to read their Moments was against the rules too.

As preparation, in the days before the experiment I went through the Moments and Weibo of the friends I would be seeing that week, so I would not fall too far behind their lives.

With the friends I had not thought to catch up on, there really was an embarrassing moment. I suddenly remembered one of them and texted to ask when her vacation started, only to learn she had become a mother the day before. She had of course announced it to the world with a photo in Moments.

My roommate was telling me about a mutual friend's news when she found out I was doing a social media detox. A lot of our conversations start the same way: "Did you see what so-and-so posted in Moments?"

This time I really hadn't.

"Then let me read it to you," she said.

How Do You Share a "Moments-able" Trip?

First, a definition. "Moments-able" is an entry in the QDaily Dictionary:

instagrammable An index of how well a trip is going, measured in photos: if every photo opportunity from breakfast to the sights to the sunset is worth a full nine-photo grid on Instagram, that is instagrammable; if by the end of the trip you can barely scrape a nine-photo grid together after five hours of editing, that is almost instagrammable; and if the whole trip is "five minutes of sightseeing for every two hours in line," the best meal was KFC, and every photo your partner took of you looks like a grimace, that is "how the hell am I supposed to make this instagrammable." In China, find and replace every "instagrammable" above with "Moments-able" and you are set.

On the fourth day I traveled for work to a place with beautiful scenery. (That was part of why I had wanted to keep the experiment to three days.)

I learned for the first time that the sea up north freezes in winter. From a distance, the black water runs all the way to the shore under a layer of frozen waves.

With Instagram and Moments both off-limits, I opened my family group, my coworker group and my friends' chat windows one by one, sent the photos to each, and told them what I had found. While I was at it I asked the friends with cats and babies to send me a few pictures, for a targeted cat-and-baby fix.

At the shore, the colleagues traveling with me even took a few "Moments-able" photos of me. Once the experiment ended, I posted a whole week of stored-up photos as one nine-photo grid.

I am usually quite active in Moments — active enough that once, after a week without a photo, a friend left a comment asking, "Ms. Tang hasn't posted a selfie in five days. What's going on?"

I have a rule for myself: no more than three posts a day, and at least two days between selfies.

That week, apart from one article I shared to Moments through QDaily's in-app share button, I posted nothing. This time nobody asked what was going on.

By the way, what you switch off in Settings is only the display of the Moments feed. Truly turning Moments off? No such thing.

No Weibo on Deadline, So I Ate Instead

I do not have many friends on Weibo, and everyone there looks like they are playing single-player, so I have gotten used to muttering to myself there. Any stray thought, I post it.

When do I have the most ideas? On deadline, of course. With the clock running out, a hundred brilliant thoughts that have nothing to do with the story at hand come bubbling up. Call it the spiritual power of the deadline.

Some nights, writing until dawn, I can post a dozen-odd Weibo updates in a row.

For the days I could not vent on Weibo, I switched my stress relief back to eating, eating, eating.

I could have kept the thoughts in my notes app and posted them all at once later, but I never turned those entries into anything. They just lie there in separate documents. I never went back to dig them out.

Before social media existed, where did all these thoughts go?

If You Also Want to Use Social Media Less, Here Is What I Learned

If you want to turn off Moments, do this: Settings – General – Discover Page Management.

Don't assume that turning off Moments will hand you hours of reading time. What keeps you from spending that time on books is your own laziness, not the Moments product.

If your contact list runs past a thousand people, managing your timeline becomes a necessary skill: group what needs grouping, mute what needs muting. No tool is yet smart enough to show you only what you need, and plenty of news apps simply dump everything they think you "want to see" on you, which is certainly not the best option. Beyond that, you have to learn to treat your own information anxiety.

If your Travel Frog is not enough for you, or you are the "cloud cat owner" type, then when you try to quit social media it helps to have a few friends who actually own cats — friends whose cats you can offer to feed over the holidays. You will build up a stock of cat photos, and you may not be far from having a cat of your own.

I am not trying to give tips on cloud cat ownership. My point is that if you have a hobby, don't let it dissolve into a social media feed.

The day the experiment ended was, again, a Friday.

That evening I went to a dinner to see a friend off. Knowing that in four hours I could scroll Moments, Weibo and Douban again left me keyed up. I ate and drank well, and afterward sat in a bar over a pot of tea with a friend I had not seen in ages, and then it was nearly time.

Just as I had a week earlier, I climbed under the covers, picked up my phone and waited for the moment to arrive.

The first lesson of the night: it turns out Moments only scrolls back thirteen hours. The feed has a bottom after all. It took me an hour and a half to reach the posts from thirteen hours earlier, and when I pulled the page up any further, all that loaded was a Didi Hitch carpool ad I had liked five days before.

I spent another half hour on Weibo, stayed up a little later than usual, and got a message from a friend asking for help: she needed me to go with her to the emergency room.

If I had not been marking up a week of social media all at once the moment the experiment ended, I might have missed her message.

That was my week without social media.

Cover image from Giphy