Tuesday, 14th January 2025

An observation: Email newsletters have started feeling more interesting, probably because my mind doesn’t feel overwhelmed with information already.

I worked on 4 different client projects today and I’m honestly amazed.

I don’t have any more calendar blocks for content creation & posting, and that feels so much lighter on my mind as compared to earlier.

Half a month in!

I opened Instagram for some work reference today, and didn’t feel the urge to scroll. I have, however, started opening Youtube Shorts quite a bit. I think the next challenge is to really reduce short form content creation – sometime in the future. Nothing urgent about this challenge.

Friday, 17th January 2025

I had yet another conversation with someone about the social media break and the only thing I feel while talking about it is: relief!

I can break down my Instagram habits into 3 parts:

• Consumption (for entertainment – watching reels in my free time, or as a distraction from what I should actually be doing) – a replacement for this is youtube shorts (while feel less vile for some reason, and OTT)
• Connection (sharing stuff with friends) – and this is the part I kinda miss but also all my friends have direct access to me if they really wanted to share something super relevant/important. Do we share so much simply because it’s too convenient?
• Creation (promoting my book, maintaining my online visibility as a form of networking within the creative community) – this is the part which seemed to be most energy-consuming actually and the absence of which feels like a big relief. In fact, this is the part which I’d felt was the most “legit” reason to be on Instagram — it’s work, right! But I had to give myself the permission to not work so hard on “being seen” and promoting myself.

What’s with this fear of becoming invisible?

Sunday, 19th January 2025

Clicking for my own memory-keeping (vs clicking for IG stories and feed) means I have actually started clicking in the landscape format again!

Monday, 20th January 2025

Someone placed an order for 10 books today, to be included as part of their team’s welcome kit!!!!!!

And this feels all the more special because I had been thinking about how the biggest drawback of not being on social media was the drop in (potential) book sales (because I am not talking about it online anymore). But behold the universe’s response to my concern ✨️ I’ll be packing and sending these 10 books tomorrow, yayy!

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Wednesday, 22nd January 2025

I was on my first podcast today!! It felt so natural talking to Taapsi on Down & Dirty with Dr. T because the topics were around routines, time management & mindfulness. Even though she’d given me a list of questions beforehand, she included a few more as she went about listening to me and the conversation flowed quite naturally. Excited to share it with people when it finally comes out 🙂

Sunday, 26th January 2025

We met a friend for coffee and got talking about “self-control”. For gut-health reasons, she has completely eliminated processed and spicy food, coffee and a whole bunch of other things from her diet.

So a lot of our conversation revolved around this idea of quitting things which feel very good but aren’t good for us. In my case, it’s been social media sending my brain into overdrive & in her case, it’s all these foods messing with her gut. For the first month, we’ve both managed to hold ourselves back pretty effectively, are feeling the positive effects and don’t know when we’ll want to reintroduce these intoxicants (and in what quantities).

But what’s made it possible? Our guess has been a combination of these three –

1. Feeling a deep conviction in the reason for doing this.
2. Going cold turkey. Not “cutting down” and leaving ourselves with the option of sometimes indulging, but just eliminating it completely.
3. Keeping alternatives handy, which we’ll divert our attention to.

I’m not drawing conclusions already. But it’s definitely been a fascinating thing to talk to people about.

Another thing that stood out was how “the thing to be eliminated” is so different for different people. Later, as Shobhit & I reflected on our afternoon conversation with our friend, we realised how it makes no sense for us to cut out processed food (“anything that comes out of a packet”) because of how high our calorie-requirement & how modest our time-availability is. Protein powder, hydration gels, soya chunks, even candies for calorie-replenishment during runs. For us, quite a few processed foods make total sense.

It also reminded me about my time at Vipassana. Our diets were quite restricted – Satvik food for lunch, then chai & murmure for an evening snack, and that’s it. Exercise was specifically prohibited at Vipassana, and one day, I could understand why. The calories from our meals were fine for sitting to meditate, and walking between our room & the meditation hall. And that’s about it. One day, I walked for half an hour around campus (slowly) while waiting for a specific session and felt so exhausted that I could collapse.

I don’t really have a point here, except that: All this that I’m doing with social media, and whatever others are doing in their own lives… None of this is “right” or “wrong” or “aspirational”. Maybe the underlying concepts and techniques are. But the goals need to be extremely individual.

Monday, 27th January 2025

I’ve been training for a 10K run at the end of February, and following Hal Higdon’s training plan which slowly builds up to 10K on race day itself. The longest distance suggested on that plan is 8.something. But after speaking to 2 other people who’ve done this distance, and following my own gut instinct about what feels right, I finally decided to do my first 10K distance run last night, to see what the distance feels like and build up some confidence. I took it really easy in the first half, and then started putting more effort in the later half. And I managed to do it!! 🙂 I was deliriously happy between the 9th & 10th kilometre, really couldn’t believe that I was actually finishing the distance and couldn’t help but smileeeeee. So so so happy!

Now, normally I’d share this experience on my Instagram stories “for my audience”, and sure enough – it would result in some appreciation and some interesting conversation about how to train and so on. In the absence of that platform yesterday, I decided to share this moment directly with a few friends & family members. And honestly – there were exactly 5 people I decided I really wanted to tell about this. Who’d really appreciate it, and there won’t be any nazar 😛 So yeah, told those people, received my compliments (🤣) and still spoke to one about training plans.

Week 3 & 4 Recap

Impact on Opportunities: That one order of 10 books really made me feel better on this front, because I’d been really thinking about (and trying to make peace with) how book sales are suffering.

Client work, which is my actual source of income, is thankfully not dependent on social media. I think LinkedIn & Instagram would serve as “social proof” but I don’t need to post regularly for that – I just need to maintain updated profiles.

Impact on Friendships: In the earlier part of the month, I attributed all the meet-ups with friends to the new-year-celebration/catchup-vibe. But in week 3 & 4, I don’t think that’s it. Either I’m meeting people more often, OR I’m feeling more present with them when I do meet them – because my battery isn’t already drained due to parasocial interactions. I had a 2-hour Zoom catchup with a close friend after a very long time. A bunch of us met up for Friday night karaoke, and then Sunday was another afternoon coffee catchup.

Impact on Experiences: I didn’t go for any new workshop or event, but definitely coffee at OCOC counts as an experience! So yes, still discovering new places thanks to friends.

I feel life is ‘full’ in a wholesome way. Or maybe it was always this way and because my brain isn’t drugged into numbness all the time, I’m being able to perceive it even more.