The past few days I’ve decided to initiate some sea changes in my life. Most notably, I am trying to limit my usage of social media from here on forward, and I want to dedicate more time to my hobbies and to my sleep. Quite honestly, I made this decision on the spur of the moment at 1 am a few days ago, after watching a ColdFusion video about social media. For the past two or so years, I’ve been hearing a lot of news and information about the detrimental effects of Facebook usage, to name one of many social networks. Compound these with the Cambridge Analytica scandal and my own opinion of Facebook was rapidly taking a dive. The primary reasons I remained on Facebook were to use its Messenger function, and to look at all the memes that were posted in the various groups I was in.
Ultimately, looking content that entertained me for a few seconds but that had little to no substance was the primary reason I visited Facebook.com, Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit. Thinking about it disappoints me. The cost I incurred for scrolling for endless feeds of mindless memes and other frivolity were my time, my attention, and my mental health. Is this a fee I am willing to pay for several more years? And if I choose to do so, how will this effect my own future? I have some ambition, as I believe most people do, but how well can I pursue such ambition without prioritizing them properly and effectively? I am coming to a point in life where I know that I must focus my efforts or else the opportunities that I have been graced with will vaporize.
It never really struck me how much time I spent on these mediums until the day after I made the decision to uninstall all of these apps. I kept on reaching for my phone and trying to find something to scroll through, quite unconsciously, before realizing that I no longer had anything to scroll. Granted, some of this extra time I have replaced with watching movies, TV shows, and playing games. However, as far as entertainment comes, I believe these still rank above meme content. There are stories with important messages and powerful themes locked away waiting to be discovered. Games, movies, and TV shows (and even books!) can be stunning aesthetic achievements. They may explore new directions in storytelling, espouse novel and revolutionary ideas, or simply be some damned good narratives, and yet I have willingly deprived myself of these stories for the past few years.
So what then, do I propose to do with my new time? Read. More then before. I’ve replaced Facebook with Feedly. Instead of stupid memes I’m looking at news, ideas, reviews. I have a section dedicated to food and recipes, and have bookmarked several as to try. I plan on reading at least 12 books this year. A modest goal in comparison to my past self but far better than the past few years. I’m trying to rekindle this past joy of mine by starting with short stories. I just finished You Think It, I’ll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld. Many of the stories in the book, despite being of older female individuals, nonetheless spoke to me. The human emotions they feel as they judge and try to avoid judgement. I particularly think the last story in the book “Do-Over” was stunning. But I digress.
Furthermore I plan on working on my hobbies. Specifically, that of conworlding and conlanging. Again, this is something which I have sparingly done the past few years. And I think this is unacceptable. How could something which caused so much joy, provoked so much intellectual curiosity, simply stop being something I do?
Ultimately, I think that my attention span has dropped considerably, and this is the cause for my no longer reading, my non-conworlding. As I spent more time on social media, I spent more time consuming smaller doses of media and entertainment. This was to the point that I become restless with longer mediums: TV shows, books, hobbying, especially when the ability to satisfy myself was but a few clicks away instead of many minutes, hours, days.
I guess the question now is, what is inherently bad with deriving most of your entertainment from Facebook and Twitter? On the one hand, I want to say nothing, it is valid to find enjoyment on these platforms. The problem is in when these problems parasitize your life as I believe it did mine. From 2012 onward, there was rarely a day where I did not spend at least a few hours browsing social media. This is a problem I developed, where occasionally checking Facebook in 2012 became incessantly scrolling and scrolling through Facebook trying to see the newest Subtle Asian Traits post in 2019. This is a problem I need to fix. If I never came to this point, perhaps I never would need to take the drastic step and drop it all.
This blog post is what I hope to be the first of many. Public so that I am accountable. But ideally so small that it can still function as a semi-private journal. I plan to post a weekly what-went-down, although I’m not sure how that will go since I’m not sure how to balance privacy on a public blog post. In addition, I plan to post thoughts on every book I read, show I watch, etc. I plan to post progress on my conworlding efforts. Finally, I plan to just post my thoughts, so I can collect them all before I forget and they disappear.
