I keep realizing how unhealthily addicted I am to scrolling instagram videos. It’s really bad. Not only that, it constantly makes me feel like crap. Not just with the amount of procrastinating I do, but some of the content that pops up in my feed honestly feels like it’s curated to divide people even more. No wonder our society is so messed up. We’ve got algorithms feeding drama to us, negativity gains the most attention it seems, and we see it over and over. I see posts constantly of men and women ganging up on each other. The gender wars are very apparent and very cultivated through social media. Same as racial wars, very apparent and cultivated. No wonder people hate each other. It’s constantly shoved in our faces and planted there until it warps our perception and becomes our reality. We’re literally being programmed to hate each other. Anyways, I see it, I recognize it, and I see the negative impact it has on my life, my mental health, and productivity and I’m just feeling really done with it. I’m cutting myself off. For the next two weeks, I’m weening myself off of it. Starting with deleting the Instagram app from my phone. And before new year’s day, I’m going to delete my instagram account completely. Same with Google. I kept it around primarily for the recaptcha feature, but I found a really great alternative so now I have no reason to keep it. So Google’s going in the trash too. I deleted my Twitter earlier this year and haven’t regretted it for a second. All that’s really left to delete is my Facebook, which I am reluctantly still holding on to primarily because of the marketplace feature. It’s just so convenient and everyone uses it. It’s much faster to sell things through there. I have to be careful though because sometimes I’ll catch myself just mindlessly scrolling Facebook as well. Luckily, there are browser addons I can get to remove the news feed so I think I’m going to do that.
Hopefully these changes will help me go into 2024 with more mental clarity, develop better content consumption habits, better mental health, be more positive, be more productive, build new healthy habits, and distance myself further from big tech. It really is a process.