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I posted a brand new blog post last week (you can read it here) for the first time in seven weeks. It felt amazing – I don’t mean the posting, I mean the complete digital detox I gave myself by taking a break from blogging. It turns out that putting the breaks on the blog and stepping away from social media was exactly what I needed.
My Complete Digital Detox
(why I stopped blogging and using social media)
When we were all sent home from work back in March I thought it would actually help boost my creativity, that I would have more time for writing and that I’d finally get those posts published that I’d been planning and pushing back. Instead the exact opposite happened. The sudden cancellation of plans, and the realisation that travelling during 2020 probably wouldn’t happen very much made me wonder how I would create travel content.
How could I continue to encourage people to travel when it’s the last thing we should be doing?
The fact is, running a travel blog is hard, and it’s made even harder when the world stops turning and you’re not going anywhere. I came to the conclusion that the best way for myself and my parents to avoid the virus was to not go out, so once a week I would pop to the supermarket and then head home. That was it. I had left the house for one hour every week, for 26 weeks. I haven’t seen a single friend or colleague in all that time and we have no other family living locally.
I still read travel related content and kept myself updated on other bloggers’ work, I discovered bloggers and vloggers that I’d never heard of before, I caught up with old videos from some of my favourite bloggers and I took another look at the list of places I wanted to visit and thought harder about why I wanted to visit those destinations.
I then thought about the reasons why I was finding social media such an unpleasant environment.
- Watching people continue to travel. I was finding it harder and harder to see photos and video popping up on my Instagram feeds as people (and people I actually know) continue to go on holiday and then complain that they were having to quarantine during or after these trips.
- Seeing a continuous stream of people in Facebook Groups asking where they could travel to without having to quarantine because they didn’t want their plans ruined.
- The anti-mask warriors with their shitty hashtags and stupid photos on Twitter. Claiming their human rights were being violated when they were ignoring the rights of those who want to remain healthy and alive.
- Realising that sometimes people have their priorities wrong and that there really is nothing you can say or do that will change that, except for not giving the the attention they crave.
I was suddenly becoming aware that the things I had loved about social media were no longer there. Twitter is no longer silly chatter between strangers and finding common interests and making new friends. Facebook is no longer harmlessly stalking old school and work mates. Instagram in no longer posting pretty photos and just liking the images that appeal. A digital detox was therefore essential.
I’ve made the decision that I’m going to be more stringent regarding who I follow, nasty comments, bullying, shaming, Trump supporters, people who are constantly promoting products and the over-use of bloody TikTok will be relegated to Room 101.
I don’t need that nonsense in my life or in my social media feed.
I’m not completely abandoning the blog, content will resume slowly but surely over the next few weeks, but I want to make it crystal clear that I am not encouraging the actual act of travel at the moment. There are so many ways that we can explore the world without leaving our houses. Read books and blogs, watch youtube videos and documentaries, listen to podcasts.
Dream about where you would like to go next, make some plans, write down your ideal itinerary, but don’t book anything just yet.
The world is slowly starting to turn again, and it will still be there, waiting for us.
Stay safe.
Have you taken a complete digital detox recently?
Let me know in the comments.