2023-03-06
I used to have such a case where I had spent most of my free time on YouTube and TikTok and reading manhwa and manga. This blog post is a compilation of the realizations and observations I had from that part of my life that I have somewhat regret (sometimes I don't as it also served as an invaluable lesson in doing and achieving things in life).
Participating in social media and consuming content in a healthy manner is always welcome. Mindlessly scrolling through social media and video platofrms are unhealthy but there is always a right time and amount for everything.
We are not addicted to our phones. It is the media that we endlessly consume that we are addicted to. The easy accessibility of myriad of diverse media that we can consume on very low cost is what drives our addiction. These are the reasons why we rae addicted to phones that are obvious but I still want to reiterate.
Why is it that in the human experience, boredom hurts us mentally? Or maybe uncomfortable is the more apt word. Either way, it's not an experience that we want to tolerate when we can easily choose not to be in. To alleviate this boredom, we now immediately rely on our smartphones, or more specifically the media that we access using our phones. We experience something we don't want to, and there is an easy "solution" right in our pockets. We all know this is such ane asy and obvious decision to make.
And this is where the addiction kicks in.
Everytime we are left bored, instead of being alone with our thoughts (yes, it will be uncomfortable at first), we immediately resort to our precious novel, easy-to-access, and "entertaining" media. We lose an important human experience that has been experienced by the human race for millenia. The necessary experience of being alone with your thoughts and letting your mind wander.
Technically, it is not lost, we just have access to it more infrequently and with shorter duration. We now experience this in the form of "shower thoughts". Ideas that have sprouted from nothingness, from the very act of nothingness, from letting our mind stare at a blank space. Ideas that are derived from our life and the accumulated experience. Don't you agree that finding and formulating on our own a thought that is new to us such a good experience?
Now, why should we let our mind wander? Well, because it's such a good experience of letting our minds do its thing. And that's thinking. And not to freaking consume everything that presents itself to the mind. Like wtf, it's like eating too much food and not digesting it. What's the fucking purpose? The point should be to nourish ourselves to act and fulfill ourselves as human beings and not just to mindlessly do stuff, which in this case is passively consuming media.
And easy choices doesn't mean they're the best ones. Our minds are hardwired for the easy choices to conserve energy. We only do the things that we "know" will be beneficial to us (more like obviously know in a way that is surface-level and presented-straight-in-front-of-our-face). Doing things for the long-term gain is not an easy task to do for this reason.
Delayed gratification is a hard thing to do. It means delaying the rewards in exchange of compounding them to be gained in a later time instead of just enjoying whatever we are doing in the short term. This doesn't mean that we should not enjoy the moment. It means that we should enjoy the moment sacrificing the future we will live in.
Delayed gratification looks at the benefits that will be gained in the larger scale. Yes, watching and consuming all these media might be good for us at the immediate moment as it relieves he uncomfy feeling of being bored, but in the long run it definitely does more harm than good.
It diverts our attention away from the more meaningful acts of life. There is this concept in economics, I forgot the name, which states that by choosing soemthing, we sacrifice all the other things we could've chosen or in other words, by choosing something, we lose all the could've-beens.
Being infront of the screen for hours and mindlessly scrolling and consuming these shallow pain reliever content is an act that deprives us of what makes life beareable and worth living. And that is gaining achivements through pain and hardwork.
I'd even stand with the view that this stems from our biology and ethnology. As the human race spent tens or hundreds of thousands of years as hunter-gatherers, it makes sense that achieving something meaningful (a successful hunt and foreaging) though difficult and dangerous would be fulfilling.
Novelty means being new.
Experiencing something new is undeniably pleasurable. When we were children, every day presents itself as an opportunity to see and do something new. Our curiousity makes us experience and do stuff that influenced us grow into the people that we are now.
Even now that we are no longer toddlers, we still enjoy the novel things in life. It gives life color, adds spice, and some may even say it gives theirs meaning.
But is the novelty that we experience by consuming media in the Internet really the experience that we enjoyed in childhood?
I'd argue that it is not. These are experiences that have no purpose. I can say that because consuming these media does not present positive value to the lives of people, or if it does only very seldom. Vlogs and news, more often than not, do not result to meaningful change in the behavior and mindset of the viewers and readers. Yes, we get informed, but does it lead us to make better decisions? To be better persons? I know they don't.
From where I can see things, we even digress in how we act as persons. We somehow tolerate people to do socially unacceptable acts just for the sake it being something "new, unique, bizarre" when it is just bare outrageous and rude.
Novelty is shiny but don't be fooled by it. Examine it, what it does, its intention, and what it is meant to be used for.
Oh, I love this. Who would deny that consuming media and "participating" in social media is "entertaining"? Who would deny the value of media when it comes to feeding our minds with amusing content? Who would say that they consume media so much yet they are not "satisfied" with it?
Well, without limit and passively consuming media really is "entertaining". That is, if "entertaining" means alleviating the boredom that you are experiencing. It is "entertaining" if entertainment means shallow form of content meant to distract you from the more meaningful, beneficial, and fulfilling acts of life. It is entertaining if entertainment means anything that distracts you from whatever you're supposed to be doing in this world.
It is not entertaining. Yes, it hooks us up, but that is all it is. Just hooking our attention and making us addicted. That is what most of the commercial Internet has been doing these years. They are all after our precious attention to either force us ads or make us pay to continue this addiction to generate revenue from us. And we easily give them our attention.
But that doesn't mean that we haven't experienced entertainment from watching or consuming media. When we were kids, we consume a lot of media mostly in the form of cartoon shows and movies. We wholeheartedly enjoyed those. Not just because of the media but because of the resulting experiences it brought us. It allowed us to have something to talk about with our friends. It allowed us to explore our imagination. It allowed us to create our own fictitious worlds with the character. It allowed us to delve deeper into the story and as if we got to know more about the characters. We enjoyed not only the content but also the experiences it brought to us outside of it just being media.
Notice that in the first paragraph of this section I have also put in parentheses the word "satisfied". Let's be honest. After watching these YouTube and TikTok videos and vlogs, are we really satisfied? or are we just addicted in these and just craving for the next thing? We have a hunger that instead of being satisfied is just exacerbated.
One example that I can give is the difference between watching a generic isekai anime and watching a Studio Ghibli film. Yes, they are in different genres, but I have always experienced the same thing. I feel drained, wanting the next episode, and just generally unsatisfied with the isekai anime. I was not that satisfied, but it got me hooked and addicted to the isekai genre.
Ghibli films on the other hand offer an experience that are of course significantly shorter than what an anime series can offer, but these movies are works of art. They make us think and appreciate the whole movie. They convey meaning that is beyond what isekai does. They convey stories that a lot of attention has been put into. They don't get us merely hooked to the movies. They do what isekai does not. They touch our minds and heart.
This is the worst part. Passively consuming these ungodly amount of unhealthy content is an epidemic. It became a habit of signficant portion of the population. And habits are hard to interfere with.
Habits are great and life changing when used wisely, but destructive habits are major disasters. Unhealthy habits lead us on a free-fall of corruption through acts that we are semi-aware of. Habits are the acts that we consciously but not attentively do.
What is worse is that it is not a habit that we do at certain situations or when we encounter a certain stimulus, but all the time. We are on our phones consuming media and using social media all the damn time.
We are not using its social aspect. Its purpose and way of generating is hooking our attention. Our attention are hooked by controversial and outrageous servings that generally appeal to our primal emotions. The problem with appealing to our emotions is that the algorithm that run these social media platforms, out of statistics, came to the conclusion that those that anger us are the ones that drive the most engagement and thus are more promoted. Who would want to live in a world that is full of hate? Exactly. Then why are you in it?