The Courage to Do Nothing

A proper day off, deleted my Instagram accounts, and blossoming creativity

Dear friends,

I hope you are well.

A rather shocking announcement is in order.

I just deleted my two Instagram accounts—the personal and The Gentle Roadmap ones. No regrets.

What brought this up, though, you might ask?

Nothing in particular. I just spent a day off at home, a Saturday coloured by the remainder of the Eowyn storm that was at its peak a day before.

Did the usual thing: breakfast, a light lunch (more of a snack, honestly), and then nipping out to the shops to buy some bits.

My mum was tired after a business trip, so she wasn’t available for our call (I need to work on my parents-daughter relationship as it’s tempting to blame my mum’s job for keeping her away from me). Back home, I cleaned up the bathroom and took forty winks.

Enjoyed the day that grew longer. It was almost five o’clock but the sky wasn’t dark out yet.

Anyway, does anyone know what the celestial object like a star we could see from the night sky these days was? I kept thinking it wasn’t a star but rather a planet. But I didn’t grow up stargazing much, let alone camping, so please enlighten me.

It wasn’t Mars because it wasn’t red, it was white or blue light (apologies if this sounds daft, I assumed Mars was red, and Venus was orange, probably because I watched too much Sailor Moon).

But that Saturday, although seemingly a mundane day off, was eventful for my long-term plan.

I deleted my Instagram accounts

The cosiness of my bed and the snug duvet were partially to blame on this account. I’d been thinking of removing the unnecessary load from my life, and social media proved to be more of a chore than a necessity.

I’d been off of it for two months, starting early December. It was quite a feat not to post anything regarding Christmas and New Year at a time when everyone seemed to be one-upping each other’s holiday posts.

I used to have two accounts, one was for my personal life, and another for The Gentle Roadmap. While the followers on the latter were very few, justifying the account deletion, the first one had at least a thousand followers. I’d used them only from my web browser as I’d deleted the apps from my phone months ago.

My Occam’s razor for deleting both accounts was these simple questions.

Do I feel inspired?

Whenever I checked my Instagram accounts, especially the personal one, my excitement ran to the bottom as if a dementor had zapped my need for connection. It was counterintuitive. As a sensitive extrovert who garnered energy from human interaction, why did Instagram have this effect on me?

I skipped checking out the stories. It was exhausting and I could somewhat sense what I would see, which was uninspiring, by the way. Person A would flaunt their gym body, person B about travelling, person C spamming us with pictures of their culinary journey, and so on.

As a person, I don’t have anything against their activities, and if they invite me to those activities, I’ll happily appreciate the moments. But packed into several audiovisual files, I was inundated.

Everything seemed suddenly boring and meaningless. And with the propensity of the casual scroll turning into doom-scrolling, my nerves would have been fried had I followed through.

I believe it’s called information obesity—not just overload. Anything in moderation is tolerable and even necessary, but when the amount of information picked up by our nerves is bloated, we become slow and sluggish, not comfortable in our skin.

Besides, when I’m on my personal account, I don’t even need to know what person D had for breakfast, which cities person E visited when they were in Japan, and so on. The excess of information didn’t serve any purpose other than hog my time, which could be reallocated to something better for my well-being (not just productivity, which I’ll address later).

Not only did I not feel inspired, but consuming their content also drained me. It wouldn’t do good for my day off, let alone my productive days, had I kept doing this.

Easy choice. Account deletion.

I felt more energised after pottering about the house or doing nothing in bed, trying to doze off. Case in point: this account deletion decision came after only about a few minutes of thinking of it in my nap time.

Next question.

Without the accounts, will I be able to socialise with people?

If you’ve read my squabble with LinkedIn, this recent issue has also thrown extra weight on the decision to delete the accounts.

Let’s take a few steps back. By “socialising”, it means getting or staying in touch with those we want to be in touch with, does it not?

Wouldn’t it mean any messaging services would do, then?

LinkedIn or Instagram posts and stories are the showcase for the activities—promoting ideas and what we’ve been up to, rather than the purpose of keeping in touch with somebody.

I’ve got other means to display my activities, such as Substack and other things in the pipeline.

As for socialising, I know their contact numbers or email addresses, which are sufficient for exchanging ideas or simply letting them know they matter.

How did I feel having these accounts alive in the background (to weigh in on the option for merely deactivating temporarily)?

Not great. It’s as though I chose to be informationally obese and obsessed with all the luggage. Having the accounts alive also signalled to my body to look at the accounts and their whole 9-yard trail occasionally, just as how you need to dust the antique china that’s doing nothing in your cabinet.

I’ve been living a minimalist life, part of it is to stay agile amidst the uncertainties, enabling me to pivot in my path. Digital minimalism dovetails this practice as the physical attributes grow fewer while the neural pathways of keeping life simple are strengthened. Not only will we want less clutter and fewer possessions, but we’ll also want a cleaner landscape in our digital ecosystem.

Letting go is easier than lugging all the digital info day in and day out. “In the background” is a lie we keep telling ourselves as your data is always there, accessible within one click of a link.

Last but not least, the practical question: what to do with the pictures or videos?

The pictures came from my phone alright, so they were merely copies. The originals, with the metadata, are with me and my backup system. It means I can always take a look when I miss the memory, sometime later, provided I maintain my backup well.

Rather, the real question I ought to ask is what to do with all the extra time.

The first days I went without social media (had been a few months sparse in between) my brain got to figure out what to do with all the extra time at hand.

As a matter of fact, we can’t write all the 8 hours in a day. Forcing the ideas out when it’s not its time, risks milking the creative process out and resulting in a watered-down essay.

Been there, done that.

Here’s the real kicker: you don’t have to do anything in your downtime.

You don’t have to sit in front of your laptop or journal and write anything. You could, but probably you’d just want to scribble something meaningless to occupy your fingers.

But the outcome doesn’t have to be a product.

How liberating is it to just stare out the window or listen to the thundering rain and blowing storm without a new piece of information?

Not everything is a commodity.

Excessive productivity hacks seem to convene in the principle that each second of our day must count. How much is each second worth? People are taught to divide their monthly wage, be it from the salary or any hustles, with the number of hours in a month.

But I disagree with this approach.

I have downtime, and not each hour must count towards my monthly income. This is a fallacy that is either brought about by or causes endless productivity worship.

Humans are not machines. And even then, machines in the assembly line have their overhaul time, so their hourly cost or contribution is calculated based on their operating hours, not their entire lifetime.

Similarly, there are times you’re not producing anything, and that’s alright.

We don’t live in a vacuum, alright. Simple maths provides the answer to how many hours we have to work to keep the roof over our heads and bring food to the table. We need to produce and sell X amount of products to equate the revenue that becomes our income to sustain our lives.

But the hours we’re off work don’t always mean 100% side hustling.

This made me wonder. If we’re allowed to have extra time to do nothing and it’s economically impossible to produce things 24/7, why do we choose to be hooked to our phones, social media, and a constant stream of information in our “free time”?

We are afraid of doing nothing.

There’s an immediate cause and then there’s a root cause.

When we resort to consuming content in our downtime (yes, even Substack as I keep opening a new tab of Substack whenever I’m not writing or reading something else), it’s caused by boredom. This is the immediate cause.

We’re bored creatures. And since we’ve been training our brains to check for something, to be on the constant lookout for information, social media is just a neutral actor which happens to be in our way by convenience.

Perhaps it’s the evolutionary hang-up that the reward for being constantly vigilant is safety from predators, poisonous plants, or tribal upheavals, thus a longer life. Now, with fewer life-or-death scenarios looming in our daily lives, the wiring still seeks something out, and that something is inevitably any information with a lower barrier to access.

But what underpins the boredom if not fear of doing nothing?

The existential crisis might provide an answer as to what belies this fear.

• Perhaps we’re afraid to confront our wild thoughts.

• Or, we’ve been conditioned since childhood to keep busy by watching our parents work or the ever-humming telly in the background. That either our feet are supposed to be always on the go or the background noise to fill the space.

• Our brains become high in stimulation.

• So when we have nothing to do we’re bored.

Modern life alludes to the vast stimulation and an arbitrary standard of being fast. You have ten minutes of waiting time for something. What do you do? Whipping up your phone, probably, checking the latest feed or refreshing your email.

You can just stand in the queue, you know.

Without time wasted going down the rabbit hole of my social media accounts, I regained extra time and a sense of dullness in my brain.

What did I do with the extra time at the weekend?

• writing

• calling my parents and having a loooong video call with them

• napping on both Saturday and Sunday, which was an achievement

• baking a random pan of cinnamon rolls with my rye starter (not too sweet, but next time I won’t omit the extra butter and milk. The cinnamon gave this mouthfeel taste)

• without social media accounts, I broke the neural pathway of opening Instagram from my web browser

• recalling my childhood: what did I do then when I didn’t have access to the internet?

Someone on Substack posted a note about us enjoying our childhood not because of the absence of the internet, but rather, because of the mindfulness of being in the present moment.

That hit the nail on the proverbial head because the root cause was the mindfulness state we were in.

The courage to do nothing

This is a wordplay hinting at “The Courage to be Disliked”, an intriguing book based on the Adlerian philosophy and its sequel, The Courage to Be Happy, which I have read both (not wanting to discuss the opposite camps of the reviews of the books).

Could you now sit with your thoughts and feelings as an inevitable consequence of not having social media at your fingertips?

Without distractions to run to, any setbacks in life will have you lick your wounds in private, not airing anything on meaningless Instagram stories or TikTok reels.

Also, it doesn’t fly so much to keep posting your random pictures on Substack, for example, without the narratives. The vibe is conversational essay writing and amicable discourse here.

Without doom-scrolling, you’ll find yourself reading more long-form articles or listening to a longer podcast. You’ll engage in nourishing discussions and eye-opening friendly debates.

But more importantly, you’ll find that you can just be.

Deleting social media accounts is not for everyone. You might still need it for your business, totally okay. But if you don’t need it, and it proves to be more of a distraction rather than a tool, kissing it goodbye is probably wise.

In this age of distraction, lying still with only our thoughts is an act of rebellion.

Blossoming creativity

With nothing on the horizon, creativity blossoms. Without anything crowding out our inner creative thoughts, they can emerge and shine.

It doesn’t mean that I can write effortlessly without thinking of how to structure the essay best. But it means that I don’t need to think of any topics because they present themselves like mushrooms in the rainy season (this is my native idiom cropping up).

The bottom line is I don’t regret deleting my accounts.

My body felt it and my mind knew it, that sooner or later these accounts would become baggage which pulled me down.

So, on a Saturday afternoon, those two accounts were gone.

And my journey started anew.

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Before you close the tab . . .

The Gentle Roadmap is a publication centred on my reflection on a holistic healing journey. As a practising Catholic, the articles sometimes portray my layperson experience with the faith. If you like my writing and want to be notified of new posts, please subscribe (it’s always free). You’re always welcome here regardless.

Until next time,