This month, GQ is asking writers to share their counterintuitive wellness resolutions for 2025. Find all of the stories here.
I was never a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. They seemed almost damaging to me—choosing an arbitrary date to focus on one lifestyle decision when you probably have much bigger problems. Lose ten pounds when you hate your job and your boyfriend? Stop vaping when what you really need is to stop being a walking doormat who vapes to relieve the stress of being a walking doormat?
Then, a New Year’s resolution changed my life.
Last year, I decided to stop using food delivery apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats. What I discovered is that in order for a New Year’s resolution, or really any goal, to be effective, is that it must be about tackling a small part of a much larger problem. By attempting to live up to that goal, you also learn a lot about how your brain, life, and the world work.
Technology has so suffused our daily existence that it’s hard to realize how dependent our lives have become on it. We click and scroll and pay for things online without giving it a second thought, not realizing that as we do so, we’re also signaling to ourselves just how much agency, just how many of our days and weeks and years (not to mention how much money!) we’re okay with sacrificing to tech companies.
A spider builds its web to be invisible so insects don’t even realize they’re flying into it, and in such a way that the harder you struggle once ensnared, the harder it becomes to escape.
The internet, I’ve realized, works exactly the same way.
A year or two ago, I was completely ensnared in this technological web, flailing around as apps devoured my time and money. And because I’d built my life around these “conveniences,” leaving them behind seemed more and more difficult the longer I was on them. If I left Twitter, I’d lose my platform and money as a journalist; if I left Instagram, I’d lose my friends. And so I’d wake up and immediately open Twitter, then Instagram, scroll for an hour or more, and then do it again periodically (or constantly) throughout the day. And when it was dinner time, I’d often open DoorDash.
The weaker I was—hungover, sick, tired—the stronger the power of the apps was. I found myself lying on the couch watching hours of Instagram Reels while waiting for pizza. It was sad.
But it wasn’t anything in my life that made me want to stop. it was seeing all the other trapped flies around me. Like, get out of here guys—don’t you know you’re gonna die? Online, people would respond to criticism of social media and apps by coming up with any excuse in the book—it was actually the pandemic that made everyone use their phones, or that suburban infrastructure made it hard to get out of the house. I realized I needed to leave before it was too late.
