I remember it like it was yesterday. My son, Hugo, was sitting on the floor building a magna-tiles house. It kept falling over and I knew he was looking up at me for help.
But I was on my phone. Not doing anything particularly important, just doom scrolling through Instagram. Looking at the optimized version of people's lives that I vaguely know. Maybe it was someone I went to high school with or maybe it was a nondescript football player or unattainably attractive model who just happened to be into golf and Chelsea football club.
It doesn't matter because in one of the first moments where my son needed me, I was wasting my life looking at a screen.
It hit me hard; what the fuck am I doing?!
A couple of weeks later, I deleted Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok off my phone. A few months after that I began deleting the accounts entirely and now, almost two years since that magna-tiles house collapsed, I am free from the social media monster that was controlling me.
I didn't set out to reclaim my digital sovereignty or make a moral stand against social media companies. I just wanted to be a better parent.
What I didn't expect would be the joy that would come back into my life when I took control of my free time again. I started running and playing golf, I was present for my wife and friends in a way that I definitely hadn't been, I had conversations with people that were not split-screened against a phone.
I actually started seeing my life in technicolor again.
I am writing this because I don't think I'm the only one. A lot of us made a decision way back in high school or college, to get onto social media and be a part of this new thing, whatever it was. It oozed fun and became the way we connected with each other. Somewhere along the way though, it was less fun and stopped being a choice.