#SocialSundays

My phone tells me how many hours I spent on social media at the end of every week, and it scares me. 

When I flop on my bed after a hard day’s work and doomscroll for an hour, it's instinctive. When I flick through reels as I wait for the bus to arrive, it's mindless. When I send my friends memes to avoid making eye contact with strangers at a party, it’s almost subliminal. Our screentime eats away at our lives without us even noticing.

I encourage you to conceptualise your involvement on social media as real labour, a conscious activity that takes time and energy. By being intentional about our online activity, we can regain agency over it. This is especially important in a world where change is often achieved online.

For those of us engaged with political content and online activism, apps like Instagram and Twitter can feel like less of a passtime and more of a chore. Social media fatigue and activist burnout can cause us to become apathetic towards movements we really care about. Instagram accounts like @shityoushouldcareabout have been criticised for compelling young people to care about every single political cause, all around the world, all of the time. 

As a solution to this, I propose to you: #SocialSundays. One day a week when we all collectively agree to take a break from social media and socialise in the ‘real world’. No posts, stories, snaps, or tagging. 

It's a two-part concept, where we would abstain from posting our own content on social media and consuming anyone else's. This would prevent any potential FOMO from creeping in—if no one’s posting, there’s nothing to miss out on. 

Whether you believe that Sunday is the day of the Lord or the day of hangovers, we culturally recognise it to be a day of rest. Resting from social media for just one day a week could really improve our mental health and social lives. It would be nice to go out for Sunday brunch with the gang… without telling everyone exactly where you went and how many mimosas you drank. 

Personally, I miss the mystery of not knowing what folks are up to. Sundays could be for loved ones, for friendships where you sit around and talk about nothing, for exercise, for hunkering down to watch eight lectures in a row, for awkward but endearing first dates. It could be our hall pass to exist free of public observation or media consumption. 

So I’m making it a resolution for the rest of the year to not tell social media what I do on Sundays. I’m sure some weeks I’ll slip up, overcome by the pressing urge to share how quickly I solved the Wordle that day, or something equally frivolous. But on the whole, I’ll be better off for it, knowing that at least on Sundays, I don't owe anyone shit. 

Ngā manaakitanga, 

Janhavi Gosavi