Getting Off Our Phones in February

Digital Discernment, rather than Digital Detox as the way next month

For many months, now, I’ve had a one-sided beef with the philosophy on order in most spaces around how to change or balance our relationship with screens. It is often coming from an optimization-bro space, and in that space, the point of changing our relationship with tech is to be a better, more efficient machine ourselves.

This philosophy is part of the larger problem, and also leaves us in service of another, still not attuned way of operating. There are many terms that have offered this, and I think they do have their merit. I think trying a month without social media is useful, if you’ve never done it. However, many of us have, and have found that rather than creating a long term solution to our overuse or doom scrolling habits, we find we come back after the detox with no new skills built to help us navigate the compelling and engrossing tech we deal with in day to day life.

Enter, then, digital discernment. There’s digital minimalism, digital detoxes, dopamine detoxes, etc. When taken to their full nuanced points, these allow some attunement. This month, we’re starting with the attunement part, and trying to build skills and ways of relating to our tech, rather than cutting tech out all together.

Discernment, as a practice, allows us to ride the waves. It allows us to adapt, and to see tech and social media as tools, in which the dose is the poison. This includes building up our social media literacy knowledge, as well as creating space to slow down and discern why we use screens the way we do.

The workbook is out now, and if you get it, I highly recommend printing it. We are not going to delete apps—You can if you want to, but the point here is to build up our ability to relate to these apps in a way that lets us get on and off of them more in line with our values. If we get rid of the temptation, a month from now, our habits won’t be much different.

You can find the workbook here, on my Etsy. I appreciate, as always, your support of my writing, your attention, and when you purchase, your financial support. The main way my writing is compensated is through my journals, and I appreciate that support so much. It’s a dream to be paid to write for you all on these good, deep questions of daily living.

Regardless, I hope you’ll stick around, and if you do join us is changing our phone use this February, you’ll find most of it over on Tik Tok. The comment section and the way people discuss under videos is maybe my favorite part of all.

Journal here—> link

See you soon,

Margaret of Bad Art Everyday