No Instagram, Netflix or YouTube: Can I survive a four-week digital detox? – The Irish Times

In theory, I use social media solely to promote my work. In practice, I check it addictively. Even knowing it is a time-sink, I sit and scroll through aspirational interiors, influencers with filtered-to-perfection skin and occasionally interesting posts from people I like. I have ceded many hours, probably days, to these platforms that give so little and take so much. 2025 was a tough year in my life, and I used my phone as respite from the hard things happening around me. I half-read news articles and flicked between apps. When I had to put my phone down, I listened to podcasts in the shower and audiobooks while going to sleep. It’s no great revelation that smartphones pull us away from our immediate surroundings and the people closest to us, rendering us, as the American sociologist Sherry Turkle puts it, “forever elsewhere”. READ MORE They are “experience blockers” according to Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, the book that led to Australia’s recent ban on social media for under-16s. These are heavy condemnations from big thinkers. But when life is hard, a portable experience-blocker that can
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