I am a chronic consumer of YouTube content. Ever since the platform’s inception, I was there with Fred, Dan and Phil, Smosh, PewdiePie, Markiplier, Jacksepticeye, and many more of the greats. This love for the platform has persisted into my adulthood, as it has for many other Gen Z-ers, and because of this, I’ve been alerted to a new trend entering cyberspace. “worldofxtra”, an influencer named Stan Fukase who has been featured on Instagram’s official page, has a clothing line, jewelry line, and successful channel, made a video recently on “dopamine detoxing”. Stan described how working with social media for his job is fun, but he hates the extra amount of time he wastes scrolling on TikTok, adding his total screentime up to eight hours! To combat this, he followed the methodologies laid out in the practice of detoxing from dopamine.
As we know, dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is colloquially referred to as the “happy” one, and algorithms typically present us with posts on social media that will trigger those feelings of happiness and satisfaction, keeping us hooked to our phones and overwhelmed with dopamine. We’ve all seen the experiments where people sit with a phone in front of them, gazing longingly at their devices, so close, yet so far. We’ve all experienced phantom buzzing from it, imagining an alert when no notification is actually on our lock screens. However, we get dopamine from many sources, like aesthetic beauty (admiring a new cafe and being drawn in by the decor to spend money on an overpriced latte), eating, completing a task, taking a warm shower; the list goes on. Essentially any pleasurable experience can translate to one that produces dopamine. Some “detoxers” go so far as fasting, which feels like a step too far for me. Although fasting is a part of some religious beliefs, it seems to have been recycled by media into something one should do to lose weight, or essentially self-flagellate, as all celebrity diets seem to promote (thanks Mark Wahlberg), rather than doing it out of respect for a higher being and purpose.
Stan seems to agree with me there, so he primarily focused on lowering his screen time, reaching the two-hour mark after a full day. He avoided listening to music and reading, and instead went on walks and tried not to overstimulate or distract his senses. Whether you think some of those practices were a little too heavy on the deprivation aspect, they helped him be extremely focused and live in the present during the day he did the challenge. Tailored to his life and mind, these may not be for you. I certainly couldn’t go through my day without listening to music!
You may think it’s a little ironic that I’ve looked to YouTubers as a primary source of information on the topic of ditching social media, but the very thing we want to escape is where we can find information and connection. All social media platforms are tools to help us find certain niches of content, and this type of content is taking over, particularly on smaller channels.
Jack Edwards and several other BookTubers participated in a trend where they swapped their daily screen time for reading since reading is seen as healthier and more intellectual and is a different type of content to consume, in comparison to an Instagram feed. “TheCottageFairy” presents us with a beautiful cottage-core life, with a million subscribers tuning in to watch her bake, sometimes only using ingredients she has grown, picked, or foraged, or walk through fields of wheat with blinding blue skies and a dog for her only companions. “Hygge”, or slow living, are practices that mirror these, although hers is a bit more of the off-the-grid, Walden Pond persuasion. James Scholz, along with smaller channels, explained the “dumb phone” (get it?) phenomenon, and several commenters shared tips amongst themselves on what type of cell service they could get, and where, along with their favorite models of cellphones.
There are many reasons Gen Z wants to ditch their phones, from encouraged overconsumption due to product placements and recommendations (a tag that reels), feelings of anxiety and depression from comparison, or as exacerbated by the algorithm consistently feeding us a certain type of emotional content.
We want to be more conscious of the food our mind consumes. We want to experience the real world, overcome our anxieties, and create long-lasting, tight-knit relationships with the people around us. While we can never go back to life without phones, or perhaps never live entirely without technology, we can prioritize our mental well-being by separating ourselves from the intangibility of the Internet and holding it up to a distanced, scrutinizing lens. While dopamine detoxing may not be the best way to go about it, being more conscious of our screen time is a reality we all want to make manifest, so maybe this will work for you too!