The fight against internet distraction
I was feeling pretty bad lately. For a pretty long time now I'm dissatisfied with a lot of stuff. Dysphoria is hell and I realized that social media multiplies the strength of it a lot and makes me feel even worse.
The inspiration
As ironic as it sounds - I'm a huge fan of Luke Smith1. We differ a lot and I don't agree with some of his views / opinions. However I think the guy has a lot of good takes, especially on the terrible influence of social media as well as the bloated state of the internet.
Additionaly Luke has a lot of great Linux tutorials and advocates for people to be independent not only in the internet but especially in real life.
I watched one of his videos, where he explains how and why he lived pretty much two years without internet at home.2 I sadly can't just take the plug out and go dark because I'm not alone and I also work from home. And I'm never driving to the office again period. However I thought that I can reduce my internet usage in a different way.
But why all that? Not only because being in the internet communities multiplied the feeling of my dysphoria but also because being online is a time waster and gives you this weird feeling of being always "connected" to the vast and open hostile internet world. I wasted too much time already doing basically nothing else than scrolling YouTube / Discord / Reddit.
It was a bare minimum dopamine rush that's the easiest thing to do but in the long run it makes me feel terrible and useless.
Take out the trash
All the time that I wasted on browsing social media, could be used to do something practical. I could work on my own website (this site is a fruit of the first week of going offline actually), read a book, work out or practice makeup.
That's why I have decided to try reducing my personal internet time to the minimum according to a couple of rules:
- Remove all social media apps from my smartphone
- Remove all shopping apps from my smartphone
- Use my smartphone only for the following things:
- Texting
- Calling
- Taking photos
- Google maps if I need to drive to a new place
Breaking free
It's been already around a week of this reduced internet usage and I'm starting to see positive changes in how I feel in general.
At first I felt lost when I couldn't access all my communities and internet friends whenever I wanted to. But after a week of this social media app break I noticed that it only impacts me positively. I'm not a PR person of a celebrity that needs to constantly engage with fans. After a week of being basically offline on Discord / Reddit I got about 4 notifications where someone actually mentioned me or replied to my message.
Apps like Steam or our Ebay equivalent kept pestering me before with annoying notifications concerning discounts on my wishlists and stuff like that. I firmly believe that getting rid of those notifications will actually improve my spending habits.
All of this constantly being on and at the tip of your fingers gives you this little dopamine rush. Before I literally felt like I just have too much stuff going on. There was too much info to take in and I couldn't think clear. Focused too much on the internet world rather than the real one you should be mostly concerned about.
Removing all of that noise allowed me to reset my mind. After a while the initial weird feeling subsided. Right now I'm feeling free and I can think clearly now. I'm not constantly wondering about this huge internet world that simply ceases to exist once you actually log off.
News sites are terrible and you should stop browsing them
Another great little gem are news websites. No matter if it's a covid pandemic, a war or anything else - you just doomscroll. All the time we kept scrolling, sitting under our blankets feeling more paranoidal with each clickbaity negative article we read.
News sites and news in general just thrive on negative stories. There's rarely good news stories. It's like they are trying their hardest to show the most negative, repulsive and shocking stuff they can in order to shock you and force you into your little corner of fear and paranoia.
If you read the news daily, the outside world is basically a warzone zombie apocalypse filled with hatred and psychopaths waiting for you at every corner.
You should just stop reading this nonsense. This also applies to TV - but thankfully we don't have a TV in our house and we're never getting one.
If a goddamn football field-sized asteroid is coming our way, not only will everyone else surely tell you about it but you'll be better off spending your time elsewhere than clicking away ads and cookie notifications on a bloated javascript news page.
1 Luke's website: https://lukesmith.xyz/