How to Keep the Internet from Ruining Your Life When You Can’t Opt Out

Meghan Gunn
4 min readJan 4, 2021

I seem to be permanently online lately — I type all day in this hellscape, and I also can not and do not want to abstain from memes. So the past year, I’ve worked on making this a more livable space, one that has actually become a place of refuge instead of a necessary evil of the modern world. Here’s my advice if you’re in a similar predicament.

if you can’t do this, that is

Stop the morning doomscroll.

One way to feel like shit for the entire day is waking up and immediately scrolling through Twitter or Instagram. My apparently-masochistic self made this mistake today (Monday after the holidays). Everyone was bitching about the Slack outage (which reminded me I have no job lol), or posting their cute little vacation pics from Mexico (I am a sad pasty little creature quarantining in suburban VA at the moment). Now it’s 4 p.m. and I’m still crabby! Something about those first moments of the day is so formative to how our subconscious experiences the rest of it.

Curate (read: cull) social media entities.

Last summer I realized there was a direct correlation between my body dysmorphia and the number of IG influencers I was following. This seems totally obvious! BUT I didn’t even realize how bad my problem was until my mental health…

--

--