Back in April, I put myself on an Internet media diet. If I’m going to visit a place, and the Internet is a place (one could even say an endless distraction library), I’m not headed there on a routine basis if I feel worse when I leave. Misery may love company, as a Soul Asylum cassette tape once informed me in my youth, but I’d grown tired of visiting Frustrated Incorporated in my off-time.
I was done with all things outside my locus of control: political chatter, current events, world affairs. Done. Real outrage, manufactured outrage. Equally done. And clickbait. Dreaded clickbait in the form of articles and essays alike.
So, I made a change in my Internet consumption.
I cut out the excess calories with little to no nutritional value. If I felt a website caused any level of stress, anger, or was purposely written as clickbait in a veiled attempt to get me to visit, I restricted the entire url from future viewing. If the site was plastered with one ad after the next, I restricted those sites too.
Sure, I can use Reader Mode or a content blocker to ditch ads, but they shouldn’t run all those ads on their site in the first place. Want to run a few that don’t get in the way of my reading experience to pay the bills? Go for it. More than that, you get blacklisted.
How I Managed My Internet Media Diet
I set up a website block list on my phone and laptop.
I have an iPhone and Mac, so the process to do this is simple. Inside were urls for every news website you can think of: local news, national news, mainstream news, lesser known outlets. The list is endless.
If you write on the platform Substack, I can’t read what you write because I blocked the entire site. With that said, Substack was interestingly more difficult to block on my laptop than my phone. But I figured out whatever workaround they have in place and so now it’s blocked.
But I didn’t limit the block list strictly to current events or politics. As an NBA fan, I’ve long grown tired of overly dramatic articles trying to stir the pot and the magazines, editors, and writers who contribute to the nonsense.
To thwart their efforts, I decided to limit my consumption of NBA media to one site: The Ringer. I’m a fan of what The Ringer offers in terms of content: long form essays by authors that don’t take themselves too seriously, written with humor, intelligence, and sprinkled-in nostalgic pop culture references. Yes, please.
I could point to a plethora of essays The Ringer has put out worthy of any diehard fan’s time. But instead, I’ll point to one of their more recent pieces, a 10 minute nod to the game’s hard hat wearing, lunch pail toting unsung heroes by Tyler Parker called, “Ode to the Menaces.”
Are there other NBA sites on the world wide web that may be worth reading? Of course. The difference for me, however, is The Ringer doesn’t drop in a login screen or a soft or hard paywall on their website like, cough, The Athletic which is owned by The New York Times — and loves itself some login screens in order for you to keep reading.
I went all-in on the Screen Time function.
Screen Time is easy to set-up on my phone and laptop. It’s easy to bypass, too. But instead of bypassing it, as I’ve done many times in the past, I tried something new: adhering to the Screen Time limits I set. A novel idea. Apparently, as I’ve grown older, my self-control and ability to self-regulate has grown too. Who would’ve ever thought?
Have you grown tired of the Internet?
If you’re feeling downtrodden by how the Internet makes you feel after you put down your phone or close your laptop, do what I did: go on an Internet media diet. It makes a big difference — and dare I say it, makes you happier and less stressed and anxious.
The odd thing about something as vast as the Internet is we often make it much smaller than it needs to be. We get in a habit of visiting the same handful of websites, even if mentally and emotionally we are all the poorer because of it.
The Internet is still a fun place. You just have to rediscover sites that once made it that way and stop visiting the ones that have sucked all the joy out of it.
You can apply this principle not just to news websites, but to social media, blogs, or entertainment sites. Bookmark the sites that don’t intentionally sabotage your well-being for clicks and ad revenue. Block those that do.
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