The Analogue Quarter
April 10th 2026
Three and a half months is by far the longest period that I, a chronically-online millennial, have ever spent without opening social media. It’s nothing momentous. I have several friends who are ‘offline’, most of whom never got addicted to being online in the first place (these friends usually have Facebook and we make fun out of them for being akin to Boomers).
I took my first month-long break in January last year, 2025, and it was a big shock to my system, which was depressing to admit. That month, I managed to break the scroll, and for the 11 months that followed, I don’t think I ever scrolled through more than about six pieces of content on any social media app before checking myself and getting straight out of there. This did not, however, include long tangents like when you click through to a profile and then to someone they tagged, then google that person, and so on. I still wasted my precious time going down pointless rabbit holes and read comment sections full of bots arguing with human opinions. It’s a hellscape, is it not?!
My socials time (that basically means Instagram for me because TikTok is painful to my braintype I swear) started to creep up over the last few months of 2025, and I knew it was time for another break. Whoosh… I’m back in the room, kids! What a difference it immediately made that I wasn’t long-pressing on my screen, waiting to unpause a Reel, while my child was asking if drinks make wee and food makes poo. He wasn’t interrupting me because I wasn’t distracting myself. In the past three months, I have indeed yelled at that same child of mine when he repeatedly asked questions while I was doing a crossword, but – a crossword! How gloriously slow. If I take my pen from the paper, the pages won’t suddenly start turning themselves; I won’t lose my place. Life is moving at its intended pace, deliberately.
I thought about bulk-creating some content during my social-media break, as it coincided with my first regular childcare: I now get 15 hours a week child-free, when before this I had never had more than 4 free consecutive hours without my kid(s) since March 2018. I have a list of 50+ things I want to share, and I’ve filmed absolutely nothing so far. It turns out that 15 hours a week is just enough to work part-time as a yoga & fitness instructor with an ESOL hustle baked in, keep up with family-of-5 admin, keep the house from falling apart, and barely cook. I’m sure if you’re a mother reading this, you’ll relate. The motherhood load is big. My diary is the only place where my recent thoughts have been dumped, which is probably healthy unless you feel inspired by rants about the patriarchy. Which brings me on to…
Reading! RE: rants about the patriarchy, I finally read A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. I bloody loved it and gave it to a friend as soon as I’d finished. “The poet was forced to be passionate or bitter, unless indeed he chose to ‘hate women’, which meant more often than not that he was unattractive to them.” – that’s incel culture as described in 1928, almost a century ago. Read it, girlies.
In keeping with the whole Analogue Quarter, I also re-read Pride & Prejudice for the first time since school, then Animal Farm, and now I’m reading Mansfield Park (also by Jane Austen). It’s the first time I’ve read more than three books in one season since lockdown in 2020 because I never had time, but I’m realising that the time was there all along; it was just wasted scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Also exhausted by pregnancy/newborn etc, but that wasn’t an excuse every single night. I had inarguably gotten into a scroll-routine. On day 2 of this offline period, my thumb even opened Instagram like it was on autopilot and I had to shield my eyes – and that’s with the app having been nestled amongst all the others for the past year, and not on the homescreen. Yikes.
So it’s April 10th, and I still need a little more time before subjecting my eyes to hooks and short-form high-speed everything, littered with ads and always suggesting we watch More More More. For those who have never ‘created content’: influencers are encouraged to insert something hyper-curious in the first couple of seconds, in order to grab the viewer’s attention and encourage them to watch to the end of the video – this is the ‘hook’. This watch-time helps the content to be pushed out to more viewers, and boosts the value of the video, especially if it’s a collaboration with a brand but also for the influencer’s channel itself. Do you feel like you’re being treated like a stupid fish swimming towards its fate when you hear it’s called a ‘hook’? I do. I sometimes use these bits of advice in my own content (softer hooks, such as “Did you know…?” or “Here’s what no one tells you about…”) because if you don’t keep up with what the platform wants, you get left behind. If everyone who loves the same things that I love – slow living, mindful parenting, yoga and playful movement, an abundance of plants to support almost every aspect of life – if we all left social media because the platform is, as I stated before, a total hellscape, we’d be left with Shein hauls, celebrity before-and-after bait, and millionaire kidfluencers running the show.
My advice is to be discerning about who you’re letting influence you. We’ve normalised influencer culture, now, to the point that the word ‘influence’ feels shallow and weak. Replace it with ‘inspire’, and see who you’re letting inspire you as you spend your time scrolling post-dinner on the sofa (I don’t know about you, but that’s prime scroll-time for me).
Open a social media platform of your choice and if the person on your feed ticks none of the following boxes, unfollow. It’s spring cleaning, essentially.
I can hold your hand through this process, let’s do it!
Does this person/their content:
Make me laugh/smile
Inspire me to be a version of myself that I really want to be
Teach me something interesting
Teach me/inform me of important things that I’m realistically unlikely to go in search of elsewhere
Make me feel relaxed (me watching slime vids in 2018 tbh, YouTube is better for ASMR though as it sucks you in less; be aware of short-form ASMR)
Count as a friend/acquaintance/relative that I’d like to stay in touch with (some are obligations of course, you know your people best!)
To be more discerning, there’s a second step. The Red Flag List.
Unfollow the person if they:
Make you feel inferior or unworthy
Constantly post content you disagree with, like the aforementioned Shein hauls, promoting overconsumption, etc – take your ‘follower currency’ away from them
Exploit their kids to build their brand
Okay I might add more when I’m back online… I haven’t seen content for a while so I can’t think of any more!
Let me know if you managed to cull some people that you follow. And if that’s me, then thanks for hanging out for a bit; I’m sorry I stopped posting food content because I realised how allergic to gluten & oats I am and now my food looks and tastes largely boring and like dust. In my next life I’m coming back as focaccia.
So yes, it will feel hypocritical when I return to make my little reels and post my carousels, possibly supported by the odd collab with a purpose-driven brand, but I love the online-journal thing that I’ve been doing for 12 years now (!), and sometimes we have to compromise just to exist in a space. I’m glad to have had this quarter to remember how to exist in my real-life space, and I think/hope that it’s changed my relationship with social media for good.
That’s all for now. Thank you, January-April 2026, for showing me that it’s possible to watch an entire series on Netflix without going on any of the actors’ profiles and looking into their sexual orientation, ethnicity, or education. Not only have I learned I’m happily mediocre at crosswords; I have also learned that I’m a nosy bitch and I’m better suited to books and leaving others’ personal lives alone. It has been a fulfilling Analogue Quarter. 10/10 recommend. I hope you feel inspired to give a socials detox a go too, even for a week; it feels bloody amazing.
Love, Serena xxxxx xx x
