Before I left for the Scottish Highlands, I told my friends a lie. I declared that I was going “off the grid”. Yes the town I am currently living in has a population of 161, according to most recent (2007) estimate. Yes this ‘town’ is actually called a ‘hamlet’, meaning “a small settlement, generally one smaller than a village”. And yes there is a bus that only comes thrice a week. However, anyone on my Close Friends Instagram story will know that I have not in fact lived out this oath of tech abstinence. My vision of ‘getting away from it all’ in true McCandless fashion was thrown askew the second I vlogged the experience of drinking my first IRN-BRU (Scotland’s Coca Cola). 

I deeply despise social media. I also regularly choose to engage with it. I identify as a ‘bad texter’, and my closest friends would agree, yet we ‘talk’ (by which I mean ‘text’) almost every other day. I consider posting pictures online for others to admire a vapid waste of time. I also crave the validation of receiving likes and comments from others my age who I hardly know at all. I could say I’m a hypocrite and leave it at that but when you write it all down it does seem too absurd not to dig a little deeper. My parents frequently tell me to “just delete the apps!!” , their hands waving in the air in an endeavour as fruitless as those giant inflatable men at petrol stations or theme parks that everyone notices and yet no one knows what they’re advertising. I look at my bewildered parents with a knowing tweak of the eyebrows, “it’s just not that simple”, I say – but it’s also a complexity that I do not understand. Why can’t we just delete the apps? It seems laughable that in the 21st century one of the biggest threats facing young people in terms of mental health and overall cognition is social media, a completely immaterial thing that is entirely dependent upon the battery life and wifi connection of what is otherwise just a black screen. 

The pace at which new online trends and terms evolve means that going offline for even a week leads to a sense of being left behind; references to memes and cultural gaffes flying straight overhead. At base level the impulse to participate is the same as the one to go to Coppers. You’ve consumed your body weight in jagerbombs and received a suggestive wink from the Wetherspoons bouncer and you’re ready to call it a night but you postpone the chipper, stomach the €10 entry fee, and brave Copper’s sticky dance floor because all your friends are going and ultimately you don’t want to miss out. This is the main reason that I don’t heed my parents’ advice and delete all the apps….FOMO!! Although social media is sometimes extremely useful – course group chats, updates from college societies, news clips, travel opportunities – it’s all getting to a point where I have to ask myself, might deleting it be worth suffering the few inconveniences?

This is another part of the problem though, we’re all incredibly terrified of inconvenience. I envision setting up camp in a tree like Julia Butterfly Hill, or living with chimps like Goodall, until that means peeing with no toilet roll and never fully ‘feeling clean’. To what extent has capitalism, now in its late stage as characterised online by Labubus and Dubai chocolate bars, fostered an intolerance to experiencing inconvenience? SO WHAT if I turn up to a lecture that was cancelled last minute because I didn’t have my phone? Or if I get a bit lost because it died? Our lives are supposed to be imperfect and chaotic and messy because we are human and this, I believe, is a necessary part of being alive. Having our phones constantly by our sides ensures none of this happens though because we are too tuned in to our screens to miss any possible change in the train timetable, work schedule, or friend’s estimated time of arrival. Our phones preempt, translate, and ultimately flatten the world for us. Always carrying them around ensures that we are instantly accessible to nearly all the people in our lives, all at once and at the same time, and this is not only overwhelming and exhausting because it brings the standard of communication to a much more intense (and much less meaningful) level, but it also prevents us from ever being fully present in our own lives. 

A recent study I found said that the average young person today will over the course of their life spend an estimated 25 years of that life on their phone. The black irony of this horrifying study was that it appeared on my Instagram feed. I can imagine Zuckerberg, Musk, and all the other cronies laughing about this together over whatever substance it is that hybrid-human-robots take (spoiler alert, it’s our data). These people and their companies must be held responsible for the intentionally addictive and deeply dangerous and harmful algorithms they have purposefully manufactured and irresponsibly unleashed upon an ever more isolated and vulnerable new generation of young developing minds. They know what they are doing and the fact of the matter is they do not care. This is how they make money. They do nothing to counteract the harmful effects of their creations because they can afford not to, quite literally. 

This means one thing: it is up to us. This may be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your overall outlook. I choose to see it as a good thing mainly because what are we thinking to expect social improvement from someone like Zuckerberg (a man who sustains himself by regularly going on hunting sprees). I would hope that any one of us could do a better job. 

I realise I have reached the end without explaining what it was I was doing in a hamlet in the Highlands. Give it a week and it’ll probably be up on LinkedIn.

***One day I will truly go off grid. You won’t know when, but when I do, you certainly won’t hear about it.