Help! I’ve been bitten by a vampire and it’s sucking away my time

I n all the furore over leaked Facebook documents, one tiny number appears to have escaped most people’s attention: 3.58. 3.58 billion, that is, which refers to the number of monthly users that Facebook has across its “family of apps”. This family includes Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, and I’m willing to lay a sizeable bet that you are one of those 3.58 billion.

I know I am. In fact, despite my best efforts, I fall into the “daily active people” category. What a DAP.

This is despite uninstalling the Facebook app from my phone about six months ago in an attempt to escape my daily need to check it, only to find myself loading up the website to scroll through inane videos and tennis highlights.

Multiple times, every day. Have I mentioned that I’m a complete DAP?

I’ve largely escaped the grip of Instagram – I soon realised my life was too boring to share pictures of it – and have an odd pathological hatred of Messenger in all its forms, but I check WhatsApp every time I switch on my phone. “Someone must want to talk to me, surely?” my needy inner self cries out.

It’s a habit, and by this time we know that the social media giants – all of them – have a game plan that involves nurturing that habit into something unbreakable. It’s clearly working for Facebook, because every figure in its latest earnings report was on the up. Whether it was monthly users, income or profit, the percentage increases were in double figures. Little wonder that Facebook’s share price nudged up even on the day that Frances Haugen was talking to MPs about her frustrating experience in the company’s safety team.

I won’t venture into the dangerous territory of whether Haugen was right to blow the whistle on the company’s practices, or if Mark Zuckerberg was correct to say that “we are seeing a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company”, or if it’s somewhere in between. What I’m interested in is how I can fight back against these social media companies to reclaim the time that I spend on their platforms. It’s not that I hate Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or any of the other vampires that suck hours from my life as surely as Dracula bit into the necks of his prey – it’s just that I want to take control again. To, just occasionally, be bored.

That means breaking some habits. Whether it’s scrolling through a feed first thing in the morning, launching WhatsApp whenever I see that little green phone icon, or reaching into my pocket as soon as

I sit down on the sofa at night.

There’s no need. I’m scratching the itch that reinforces the habit that creates the itch in the first place.

As things stand, I only have a handful of weapons. Work, exercise, sleep. Those are the three things that stop me from scratching that itch – mostly – but I need something else. The best idea I’ve had yet is replacing my phone with a Nokia 6210. But you must have a better suggestion, surely? Perhaps you could send me a tweet?