Oliver Burkeman has some cool ideas in his latest newsletter The Imperfectionist. However, the one about a digital detox caught my eye.

A digital detox will probably make you feel sad or anxious (but do it anyway): If you’re anything like me, you may have felt the urge in recent months to get more serious about relegating digital technology back to its proper role as a tool – something you pick up and use when it serves your purposes, then put back on the shelf, instead of marinating all day in the disordered world of the terminally online. Yet it’s striking how often this topic gets written about as if the moment you take social media off your phone, or begin a ritual of leaving your phone in the hallway at home, or switch to a dumbphone, you can expect to feel immediate peace and happiness. This is unlikely! As with other compulsive behaviours, we use aimless scrolling to distract from, or to paper over, emotions we don’t enjoy experiencing, especially sadness or anxiety. So it’s a good bet that when you step away from your devices, you’ll be spending more time, at least in the near term, with the emotions they were helping you avoid. Fortunately, in most cases, just knowing to expect this will enable you to resist the temptation to scurry back to the screens. (And incidentally, if you doubt that you use technology in this emotionally avoidant way, simply take some context where you’d usually always listen to a podcast or music – such as driving, or commuting by subway, or going for a run – and try how it feels not to do that. Weirdly harder than you expected, right?)

It is tough for me to do what Oliver is expressing. One thing I started doing is curtailing my constant listening to podcasts and moving to audiobooks. I thought I might feel like I was missing out on things, and that simply has not been my experience.

So far, so good.