Quitting social media: The case for detox, How to free up time to daydream

We talk through our lives. We pray for one another. We have permission to give one another unsolicited advice. In November, they all encouraged me to drop my Twitter habit, at least for a little while. I jokingly called it an intervention. So I blocked Twitter. A colleague tweets articles I write including this newsletter from my account. Still, I can’t see Twitter even if I tried (and I have tried). I went from being on it nearly every day to being off it for two months now.

There is one way that leaving Twitter has benefited my life and my mind. The times when I checked Twitter were often the transition points in my day: when I sat down to work or I finished a task, waiting at a light or in line or to pick up my kids from school, going to the bathroom, the few minutes before I fell asleep. Freeing up those small, seemingly inconsequential moments has been transformative. These moments of quiet and emptiness throughout the day are nothing I really considered before. I don’t schedule them in my calendar, and I didn’t notice their departure when I began going online. But leaving these small moments of my day unfilled changed how I walk through time.

My new motto born of this experience is: Guard the margins those seemingly unimportant parts of our day and time. Margins on a page can seem like wasted space (wouldn’t it save trees if we wrote or printed across the whole page?), but all that blank space helps us to read and take in information. We need the blank spaces. We need moments when we get no input, no news, no videos, no memes, no opinions. We need moments when we space out, daydream, when our minds go blank.

These seemingly trivial moments of connection, mental space and beauty change me slowly over time. They weave a life worth living, thread by thread. These moments aren’t always peaceful. In small, blank moments, I may feel gratitude or delight, but just as often, I recall a hurtful conversation or notice that I feel tired or lonely. But this, too, is part of the gifts of these small moments. If we fill up those few minutes with distraction, we numb ourselves in tiny doses and cut ourselves off from our interior lives.

But leaving small moments empty, silent and, in some sense, useless is a tiny taste of a life “wrapped in silence and mystery.” Guarding the small silences in the corners of my day subtly rewires my brain, teaching me to allow my time and my thoughts to lie fallow for a minute, to be a little bored and a little blank.

My friend Timothy is a studied musician. He is a violist. I asked him about the function of small breaks in music of rests. He said that music, like a living creature, needs to breathe and these small breaks, however seemingly brief and unimportant, are what allows a piece of music to live and take flight. He told me that if you filled up every rest in a piece of music, listening to it would be exhausting and would eventually descend into an “undifferentiated mass” that we can’t really take in, attend to or enjoy. Rests in music, even short ones, create rhythm, variety and narrative. They help, he said, guide and change the course of a song. But he said you have to learn to “play the rests.” It seems easy. It doesn’t require technical skill, the way that it does to play a scale or an arpeggio. But to make good music, you have to learn to honour the small breaks in it.

Warren is an Opinion Writer with NYT©2022

The New York Times