Bài đọc 2
Last spring, I realised that I was checking my phone more than a hundred times a day. I picked it up the moment I woke, scrolled through social media while eating, and often stayed up past midnight watching short videos. So I decided to try an experiment: for thirty days, I would delete every social media app from my phone.
The first three days were strange. My hand kept reaching for my phone without my deciding to do it, especially when I was waiting for a bus or standing in a queue. I felt restless and slightly anxious, as if I was missing something important. I was not, of course. When I later checked what had happened during that time, almost nothing I had missed mattered at all.
By the end of the first week, something unexpected happened: I started noticing things. I noticed the old man who fed pigeons outside my office every morning. I noticed that I had not read a book for over a year. I bought one on my way home and finished it in four days.
My sleep improved too. Without videos to watch in bed, I was usually asleep by eleven, and I woke up feeling less tired. I also found I had more time than I had realised. According to my phone's own statistics, I had been spending almost three hours a day on social media, more than twenty hours a week.
Not everything was easy. I missed some invitations because friends assumed everyone had seen their posts, and I felt left out when colleagues discussed things that had gone viral. To solve this, I asked close friends to send me a text message for anything important, which worked surprisingly well.
When the thirty days ended, I reinstalled one app, the one I use to keep in touch with relatives abroad. The others I have not missed. I do not think social media is evil, but the experiment showed me how much of my attention I had been giving away without noticing.