June 30, 2025: December 31st I deleted Instagram as part of my <1hr/day screen time goal. Last week, I jumped back on… for better or worse. For the first time in my life, I have a real job, full-time Monday-Friday in the office. Today is my 10th day. From globe-trotting entrepreneur to fully employed W2. And I’m loving it.

Quote for the Week: "The important thing is to just sit down at the table and talk. Some things are just easier to say across the remains of a shared meal.” Jessica B. Harris

Read time: 7 min

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The attention sucking, dopamine fueling, faux-friend building addiction machine

I felt robotic, emotionally gross and mentally diluted. The worst part was that I couldn’t help it, as if I were watching myself from a third-person perspective, looking inside my brain to see my thoughts, with total disgust, yet unable to change my actions.

Eventually, I had enough.

But only for a week. Maybe a little longer. Just long enough to feel better about myself. But inevitably, I went right back, sucked into the addiction.

In the final months of 2024, my screen time had ballooned out of control. I was spending too much time on my phone. Even though it was still below the national 5hrs/day average, I was on the little black box too much and it was starting to have a negative impact on my soul.

I scrolled while eating. I scrolled on the toilet. I scrolled while driving. I scrolled waiting in line, waiting for my food, waiting for anything.

“I used to do hard drugs in the 90’s” a friend of mine said. “We would go out Friday to Sunday, dancing all night until the sun came up, popping anything we could find. It was a blast, but then Monday came. I felt like a shell of a human, a depleted corpse, completely drained of any good feelings. I get that same hangover feeling I have after bingeing social media.”

My worst addiction became TikTok. If you’re on it, you know. If you’re not, don’t even. It’s one of the wildest apps ever invented and it sucks you into a black hole, both in the moment and on a longer timeline. Before you realize, hours have gone by. It’s a completely different drug from Instagram or Facebook, the fentanyl to the morphine.

My OD point was two-fold.

The first was on Kilimanjaro. For almost the entire hike, I was off my phone. Not just offline (there’s no service, so you literally can’t be online), but literally off my phone. Most of team used their phone for photos, but I instead rotated through my collection of five cameras. Not only was I offline, but I was off off.

Then, on the last night of the hike, after basically having hardly touching my phone for most of the trip, I sat in the tent with a friend to exchange an AirDrop of photos.

I clicked the side button. The phone started. I typed in my code… and then I did something that literally made me gag with self-loathing.

Almost as muscle memory, unconsciously, I clicked on my “Social Media” photo folder and tapped the Instagram icon. It all happened so fast. I didn’t even realize what I was doing. My thumb was a creature of habit, mindlessly programmed to seek the high.

In that moment, I knew I had a problem.

The other realization was a sequence of realizations:

Lying on the floor with my girlfriend. Sitting around a dinner table with my friends. Packing LIVE A GREAT STORY orders. Walking my sister’s dog. Reading in bed at night. Socializing with interesting strangers at a networking event.

In all these moments, and more, I could feel the magnetism of my phone pulling me away from the moment, prying me away from the present. I had a nagging craving, a feeling that wherever I was doing, scrolling TikTok would be a better choice of my time. Disgusting. So many moments I felt it. Sometimes I gave in. Often, I made justifications.

Eventually, I had had enough.

December 31st, I deleted all social media. In the following days, I unsubscribed from every email. I even deleted Gmail off my phone.

I was done with all of it. Time for a detox. Time to live offline.

What I Learned from 6 Months Off the Internet

1) Time Slows Downnnnnn

If you take nothing else from this newsletter, please take this.

Time is our most valuable asset and the more time you spend on a screen, the faster it flies away from you.

Three weeks into my digital sabbatical I realized that time was being weird. Days seemed long and the month was dragging on forever. Time had slowed down. What a gift. Turns out, there’s science to back this up:

Less screen time = more life

2) Boredom is a Gift

When I turned everything off, I got real bored… how cool.

I drove with no music. I went on walks with no distractions. I sat on random benches and just looked. I woke up in the morning and did nothing but drink coffee. I looked at more plants, clouds, people.

My mind just wandered and I got lost in it.

This was particularly helpful because I was kind of lost in life: no business, no job, no clear next step. The boredom let my mind explore all sorts of places it wouldn’t have otherwise visited.

With the constant distractions of everything, our brains are overstimulated to the max. Imagine giving your brain 2/3/4 hours back every day, what would it do with all the free time?

3) The World Goes On

I stopped paying attention to almost everything. No news updates. No pop culture. No stock market. No product releases. No nothing. I just turned it all off.

Turns out life is pretty calm when all you have to deal with is right in front of you.

Most of life’s stress is manufactured (mainly to sell us something, probably). Without a constant stream of outside influences piping stress directly into your brain, life flows much more smoothly.

4) Turning off Social Media means turning off friendships

It’s sad but it’s true.

Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat are just part of life these days, for everyone. It’s not unlike having a cell phone number for texting and calling. So when you step away from the apps, you will inevitably step away from connection to friends.

It’s easy to keep in touch with 500 friends on Instagram. It’s way harder in real life.

After about four months, I started to miss people. I missed out on my friends’ big life moments. I missed the updates, the easy catch-ups, the snippets of life from people I care about.

The trade-off was worth it, but eventually, I wanted to come back because I felt like I was missing out on a part of my social life, online and in-person.

Now that I’m back, I’m not so sure it’s the right solution.

5) People are addicted AF

As I started to digital detox, I realized just how much we use our phones. Studies say the national average is around 5 hours. For teens, it’s way more. The more I acknowledged the difference between my off-screen time and others on-screen time, the sadder I became. When you’re in the midst of the addiction, you don’t realize how much you’re missing out by unergonomically craning your necks down at a near 90-degree angle, staring at a blue screen that steals your life. It sadly just seems normal to pull out your phone at all times, all the time. Sure, you have justifications, I’ve heard them all. I even had them. I even feel them now creeping back in when I’m on the toilet reading texts. But the truth is, we absolutely do not need to be on our phones as much as we are. You can cut back. You probably should. But you probably won’t. These devices aren’t designed to be turned down. They’re designed by the smartest minds to hook you as much as possible. They ensnare you, me, all the humans across the world. It’s truly a global pandemic with no end in sight. Bummer for humans.

A preview of coming newsletters:

• Saturday, I said “hi” to my sister’s newborn baby. Sunday, I said “bye” to my grandmother, with a kiss on the forehead and tears streaming down from my cheeks. Sitting with my grandmother on her deathbed revealed a new understanding about life, a missing link in the equation of what I thought it meant to live a great story.

• Two years ago I found myself nearly stranded in downtown Nairobi, Kenya. The bus dropped me off in the downtown bus station well after sunset. No phone service. No accommodations. No plan. Not a good idea. So I went with my best choice and accepted the invitation to stay with the supposed pastor I had just met on the bus. Last week, he just sent me this photo of a bootleg, knockoff LIVE A GREAT STORY shirt. This week, he sent a dozen. The full story coming soon.

This new job got me (willingly) moving full speed with real long days (I love it). But that means I haven’t been able to write much, or to really do much else of anything for that matter. This was written in one pass, with only one round of edits. I look forward to spending more time refining this in the future, but for now, I’m glad to get this out.

See you next week,

-z

P.S. I’m raising money for a life-saving ambulance for my friend’s village in Kilimanjaro. We’re close to hitting our goal, please consider donating here.