Noisedialling

Social media, messenger apps, and notifications in general are a massive drain on my sanity and attention. That's almost definitely true for you, too, and odds are you either rationalise it as a necessary evil or have stopped noticing.

I've been very intentional about how I handle this problem for years now. It's probably made me difficult to deal with in some capacities (though I've also had comments on how it's changed other people's expectations around communication into a more positive mode). What I've found is that, while less noise is usually better for me, that's not universally true.

I've pared back what spaces I'm actually present on and participate in -- e.g. I've been off Facebook since 2018 or so. That's something that I have almost no qualms or regrets about, but I do notice the lack of a 'stable' (for a given value thereof) social network that's been constructed diachronically over the course of my life (vs spaces that have grown around a single interest or career). But I'd say that's still been almost entirely a good thing.

In practice, I often turn off or bury notifications from the messenging systems I actually use (e.g. WhatsApp and Discord), so that I have to go the them rather than having them come to me. There's a flipside to that, which is that sometimes (particularly when co-ordinating with someone or expecting to hear back on something), that leads to compulsive checking of those apps which is far more stressful and distracting than a push notification. That's usually a sign that I need to turn up the noise for a while. I could write a whole post of how I approach siloing off email, but that's for another time.

Rather than treating noiselessness as an end goal, I've come to regard it as something that happens in phase. Sometimes, I need to be in a high-noise state (active notifications, Twitter on phone if necessary, less use of focus modes) and at other times in a low-noise state (suppress notifications, no SoMe on phone or ideally at all, phone almost perpetually in a focus mode). The practice of switching is also useful, beyond the recognition of having multiple states -- the contrast of moving from one to the other makes each more effective, and feels like I've given myself another lever of active control.

That's all it's about really: living intentionally and modulating my signal and noise as required.