It has been approximately three days since I began craving a step back from the web, choosing to remove Mastodon from my life to concentrate on being more present in the world and working more deeply than I have in a long time. I won’t go into the reasons, but it is safe to say the benefits are already starting to show themselves, as well as the downsides.

Curiously, this isn’t the first time I have experienced this strange phenomenon. Back in 2022, when I first deactivated Twitter and before I adopted Mastodon, I went through a stage of picking up my phone with nothing to do with it, only to place it back down again. I found myself opening new tabs and typing in social.lol before realising there was no need to go there anymore, so I clicked the x a few seconds later. For all the good effects that this has had on me—and they are great—I do feel as isolated as I did back then due to low levels of interaction.

There is no solution to these feelings because there is nothing to solve. There is nothing wrong with being bored, and if it motivates me to do something more constructive instead, then all the better. It just would be nice to be able to use social media without wasting loads of my time on it. An issue that is entirely mine; I can’t even blame the algorithm with Mastodon. I just have a personality that is attracted to that kind of stuff.