What I dreaded as a teenager has become my daily life for the past month.
What started as a broken wifi router has become the longest period since I can remember without access to wifi (at least @home). As I regulary want to decrese my time spent on the internet this might be what I needed to finally reach a new milestone…is what I thought in the beginning. However, I can now unfortunatly say that the opposite has occured. I can still use my regular phone data to use the internet and moreover, I have to start a hotspot when using my laptop (incl. work laptop) to study for university for example. Furhtermore, I can not use my desktop pc at all since it has no WLAN adapter, I can only access the web using LAN which never posed a problem–until now; hard to use LAN from a hotspot. The only place I used some social media was on this stationary pc. My habit was physically split from the rest of my daily routine which worked quite well. Without access to it the need for some kind of information/news/something (I can not even download my music like I was used to and have subsequently now subscribed to my first digital subscription service in quite a long time (apple music) which also sucks) built up and finally found its relief in reddit on my phones browser…
My screen time on my phone has reached up to 5h per day, per fucking day. I dont think it ever was that high for more than isolated days (though ofc my time per day using the internet was way higher was prob most of my life, however, I was on my pc most of the time and not my phone–this somehow makes a difference as to how I feel about it). I still have not installed any social media (apart from WhatsApp) but started to use reddit inside of my browser. A detrimental step.
Prior to this month, whenever I felt like decreasing my social media usage I could just delete my account and delete the application. As most platforms only offer their services once you have registered/logged in I was rather safe and rarely relapsed. Reddit on the other hand lets one browser quite freely (though one can not upvote or comment which I hardly care about). I have, therefore, once again, become addicted to reddit and do not know how I can stop since I literally can not deinstall the browser (I don’t have time to look up how to block the address or something similar as Im constantly browsing reddit) on my phone and I can not stop using my phone altogther; at least not yet.
I am rather weak resisting it. Not that I think I am an isolated case…I think this weakness is rather ordinary. Similar to how D.F. Wallace had no tv since he was not able to resist it as well. It being ordinary does not make it feel better though, not in the least. I feel shit and paradoxically can not wait for the wifi to arrive so I can–hopefully–once again stop using the internet (originally I planned on writing about the reason why there currently is no internet but I guess it turned into something else lol).