My most peaceful weekend at Cambridge involved not going on the internet.

I got up and made myself pancakes for breakfast before heading to the UL. I headed to the buttery for brunch, saw my friends, and spent the afternoon in a tranquil state of working. For dinner I ate with my friends in the buttery again – no planning involved – and afterwards, I popped over to the college library to check out a DVD purely because the title was the inspiration for a Fall Out Boy album. I watched half of it that evening, got a blissful nine hours sleep, and repeated the whole thing the next day. It was a great weekend, and not just because I’d eased academic pressure from my shoulders. But I couldn’t ignore the fact I felt a twinge of guilt – was it wrong to feel happy and to have had my phone off all weekend?

To me, social media isn’t just something I go on to pass time, or to catch up with friends. It’s a responsibility. I include replying to messages on my to-do list every week or so when I’ve got a build-up.

During second year, I would have an intense few days each week filled with deadlines, lectures, and practicals. During that time, I simply didn’t have time to check my phone. It would remain off all day, every day: I’d turn it off on Monday night before bed, and I’d be too busy to check it until Saturday when the fear of a surprise supervision deadline trumped my fear of dealing with however many emails and notifications I had accumulated during the week. I could understand fearing emails, as many emails carried responsibilities I didn’t have time to deal with. Fearing notifications, though, didn’t quite make sense. When did they become a chore? When did social media stop being fun and frivolous and start becoming an obligation instead?

“There is a fine line between us controlling technology and technology controlling us”

Social media had become too overwhelming for me. There was just too much data to absorb. I find data fascinating because of what it tells you about people but when you start to analyse every like, follow, comment, and even likes on comments, every interaction becomes something to evaluate.

That was the tipping point for me. Fun things shouldn’t be stressful.

I downloaded an app called Moment that tracked how much time I spent on my phone each day. The result of 40 or 50 minutes of phone time before bed horrified me – that time could’ve been extra sleep.

Cutting out social media was so similar to addiction management it scared me. There were times I wanted to throw my phone off Clare Bridge and others when I just needed it. I was as jittery as if I’d had five espressos. However, as soon as it was off I felt properly awake again. I could think in a straight line rather than jumping from messages to mail to messenger to WhatsApp to Instagram to Snapchat and back again, sometimes just mindlessly flicking through the screens without actually clicking on anything.

The problem isn’t social media itself. The real culprit is our addiction to it.

Nicholas Carr explains in The Shallows how notifications give us a dopamine hit that causes us to keep going back to check our phones. The social aspect of it leads us to regard it as a positive thing, even though our brains have been adapted to become habitually distracted every 10 minutes. Our ability to read long pieces of prose has diminished. We ‘take breaks’ by going on our phones when in fact we’re shovelling our brains with stimuli, causing us to sleep badly. We are going too fast, trying to multitask on multiple devices when we’re not even concentrating on one. There is no end to the evidence screaming out that something isn’t right with our consumption of social media and our relationship with smartphones. Yet, my defiance to not go on Facebook is either seen as a self-righteous act or a nuisance.

I started leaving my phone at home during the day and would get back in the evening with no desire to check my emails or messages. Were I still using Facebook, I’d have no idea where I’d find the time to do so. It terrifies me to think what I’ve been missing out on in all my hours spent on Facebook.

While my avoidance of Facebook now is mostly due to anxiety-driven fear, its attraction – other than as a tool for organising groups of people and events – is lost to me. To me, it’s like shouting into a void of other people shouting into a void and expecting people to listen to you. When people ask me why I haven’t replied to things, they take it for granted that I’ve seen their message; there’s a social expectation that we are aware of and consume everything in our social media network. Breaking that assumption has been much more difficult than I thought it would be. Recently, the death of a family member was announced only through WhatsApp, something I never check but is now the default medium for important family updates. People still invite me to events on Facebook and wonder why I don’t turn up, despite never having spoken to me in person.

Mainstream media has failed. We’re in a new age of news

Along with missing out on events, there are other consequences to a social-media-free life. I miss out on an entire subculture of interaction and it can be incredibly lonely. I skip all the FOMO present on social media but that doesn’t mean I don’t get FOMO of social media. The ‘oh, you haven’t seen that thing because you don’t go on the internet’ thing stops being cute after people get bored of explaining memes to me. What baffles me so much is that 10 or 15 years ago, our behaviour was completely different. People would arrange to meet again in person and they would turn up when they said they would as you couldn’t just drop someone a quick text cancelling half an hour before. There are mechanisms for organising people and events that don’t involve social media, we’re just not used to using them.

Technology hasn’t only made our lives more efficient, it’s also made them faster and more chaotic. It’s led to reduced attention spans, memory dependency, and procrastination, and yet many of the structures we’ve built to organise our lives are so dependent on social media that it is almost impossible to detangle oneself from it completely. The amalgamation of multiple messaging and emailing software on one portable device means there is never a sense of switching off or unplugging – instead, there is a sense of being lost in some infinite thing. When my phone is on, I feel anxious; when it’s off, I feel calm. Life in peaceful analogue oblivion isn’t perfect, but there is a fine line between us controlling technology and technology controlling us. I haven’t yet found the balance between fearing social media and craving it, but taking a break from it has made me more mindful and conscious about how I consume it