Logging off

Coming up from air in a digital world

We often hear of “the attention economy”, a term that refers to human attention (mainly but not strictly limited to social media apps) as a commodity that helps advertisers and corporations maximise engagement and profit. So what I would like to explore and ask you to consider is the relationship between your attention, your quality of life, your will, and how removing yourself from these platforms has taken on its own kind of resistance.

There is no better way for me to make this argument than to share my own experience with you. I am in my early 30s so I belong to perhaps the last generation that played outside and slowly transitioned more towards the digital world. I remember what the transition was like. It felt pretty cool to be able to see your friends online and what they were doing, there was a sense of community and you mainly just had your friends on your profiles. I remember exactly what it felt like to log out, “well that’s it for today.”

There is no modern equivalent to logging off because that would hurt advertisers and the world that benefits from you spending hours and hours a day scrolling on whichever social media app you’re addicted to. It was Instagram for me. Living alone and spending days at a time just by myself outside of work, I started scrolling Instagram far more than ever before.

I was seeing higher screen time than I had in my whole life towards the end of 2025. I could actually feel the fuzzy and foggy feeling of my brain being completely overloaded with scrolling. I felt I couldn’t do a productive thing beyond what I had to. I felt a paralysis of decision, I wasn’t really doing anything but felt tired most of the day. I felt like a zombie.

I know I’m not alone, I know many of you reading this have felt that same way. I had dedicated such a large part of 2025 to writing and had made a lot of progress, but I could see that this was really impeding me, so I decided to do something about it. I started small. I got rid of the app on my phone and instead shifted to only scrolling on my laptop like I used to. I made the switch in November, hoping that this would be the change I needed. It didn’t take long for me to realise that this helped, but just a little. My screen time fell by no more than 10 to 20%. The algorithm and the habit were drilled deeply enough in me that I would continue to return to the laptop to scroll.

I bounced back and forth, downloading the application, removing it, downloading it, removing it, logging on, logging off. In December, I decided I needed to go completely off of it. I was supposed to be visiting home in a week and I thought, let this be the reset that I need. So I deactivated my account.

Initially I was anxious about what to do with my free time, of which I now had many more hours. I always felt I could be reading so much more if I wasn’t so distracted, so I started taking a book with me everywhere. If I felt the urge to scroll (which I still did for weeks), I would just read instead. Slowly and slowly I observed my habits and much did improve. From the start of this year till now, I have finished 6 books, currently on my 7th, all during a stretch that included Ramadan, a gout flare up, and war across the region.

Much has changed since I made the switch, and what has changed is far more than just retrieving my attention and reading more. First of all, that feeling of fuzziness and fog that used to occupy the front of my cranium is gone. I feel a lot more present. I feel that I actually get to control what I want to pay attention to. Before, wanting to do anything, I felt I was constantly fighting the urge to pick up my phone. It was like trying to fight gravity.

Now, I feel that I am able to direct my attention and it is no longer being controlled by an app that has me looking at people I mostly don’t care about, doing things that portray a lifestyle they probably don’t live. I feel liberated.

I started enjoying waking up to no notifications outside of work, other than from people I am actually in contact with, people who actually care and vice versa. Since Instagram was the only social media platform I struggled with and used regularly, I didn’t have to worry about other platforms. I had good friends who I barely talked to, we only used to send each other reels. Once I went off Instagram, I started getting on more calls with those friends. I realised that the false connection we feel we have with people far away on these platforms is actually the laziest way to maintain a relationship. And on the other side of that, you also learn that some people you only have a very superficial relationship with, and you are not too bothered when you stop sending each other memes.

So I got my attention back, I started feeling less anxious, and my relationships felt like they got deeper. But that wasn’t it. I had to figure out how to supplement where I got my news from. I started looking into different platforms, diversified my news diet, and realised that what I thought of as news on Instagram was short form content that was not built to teach me anything in any greater depth. I started reading more about history, reading different op-ed pieces, watching documentaries, and attempting to get to deeper ground through longer form analysis. I realised short form content wasn’t keeping me informed. It simply gave me the illusion that I was informed, which is dangerous because it made me feel like I didn’t need to look deeper at what was happening.

Now here is what I’m excited about. It’s only been 3 months since I did this (with the exception of a week in the middle when the war started). I look forward to no longer being in an echo chamber and being bombarded with opinions mostly similar to mine. I often wonder what I would think of an issue if I wasn’t constantly being told what the “right” thing to think or feel is. I also look forward to slowly falling out of touch with meme culture and being slightly out of touch with what’s happening online.

Now where does reading come into this? If you’re no longer consuming the way you once were, you can be more deliberate about what you consume. Perhaps you are like me. I love non-fiction, it is essential to me, but I consider fiction just as essential. As Paul Kalanithi wrote, your relationship to statistics changes when you become one. What narrative does is get you into the shoes of the subject. It is the closest we can come to experiencing a thing without experiencing it. It can make you happy, give you sorrow, make you cry, help you feel hopeful. Some lessons find their place in our beings only through story, and we can know something we already know more intimately if we read it in story. Reading also helps us build our attention muscle. You will find yourself being able to sustain your attention on something you may not find very interesting in the moment while it builds up to something far more interesting, without the cheap little hits. This is a great skill to have, one that can genuinely change your life.

Let us no longer let strangers on the internet tell us what to think, most of it is designed so that corporate overlords can continue being in charge of their digital kingdoms, where everything is curated for you while you are allowed to believe you choose your own subjects of interest and your own opinions.

If you would like to get started, I recommend beginning with something accessible. Don’t jump into Dostoevsky because you think you should, read what you want. Some of the most incredible books I have read over the last few months have been “The Art of Loving” by Erich Fromm, “The Razor’s Edge” by Somerset Maugham and “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro. If you would like something more accessible and fast paced, I would highly recommend “And Then There Were None” by Agatha Christie and “Billy Summers” by Stephen King, my favourite work by King.

For a seeing eye is dangerous to those who rule the blind.

Happy reading.