Taking social media and email off my smartphone has made me happier | Nikesh Shukla

Having the power to pick and choose when you interact with people is empowering, but negative comments were becoming hard to ignore

I feel happy today," my daughter announces as we walk to her nursery. "That's lovely to hear," I tell her. "What's made you happy?" She thinks about it. "I don't know," she says, after a few minutes of reflection. "This morning, when I opened-ed my eyes, I smiled and I was just happy." "That's so nice," I say. "Hearing that makes me happy. You've made me happy." "I know," she says. I look at the baby, who is listening intently to our conversation, not that she possesses enough vocabulary to reply. It doesn't matter. She is always listening. She understands a lot. "Are you happy?" I ask the baby. She smiles and she nods slowly three times.

I haven't been happy recently. It's been largely a feeling of being overworked and moving from project to project without ever getting the opportunity to reflect on a piece of work and enjoy the satisfaction of completing it. Then there's the correspondence about the project. If you write and put stuff into the public sphere, people have a space within which to give you feedback. In the form of social media posts, comments and emails. Which is their right. But every now and then, a piece of "feedback" will undo you.