What we consume, consumes us.

Content for me is everything I consume through my senses every day. The social media I scroll through on my phone, the food I eat, the people I talk to, and the podcasts I listen to—everything for me is content.

I feel a newborn baby is like an empty book. It doesn’t know anything and is completely blank. The baby starts to capture memories and knowledge about the world the moment it comes out of the mother’s womb.

The people and environment around the baby write in this blank book and shape the baby’s personality and character. Therefore, most of our traits, big or small actions we perform, are probably a result of what we observed and practiced in our childhood.

As we grow up, we start taking control of our lives. We make decisions for ourselves, and the involvement, or as I should say, the number of people writing in your book reduces. Those who are still writing do so because they are important to you, and you care about what they think about you.

The content of this book is you. Your personality, habits, character — it’s basically a portrait of yours. When you meet someone, interact with them, or even the things you do when you are alone are portrayed in this book.

The moment we stumble upon an obstacle in our life or the time we learn some lesson, we fail at some task or we don’t perform at some point in our lives, we go through our book and make changes there. We make changes so that the mistake does not happen again.

But what if we were already careful and choosy from the start? What if we made very precise choices about what we consume and what we don’t?

In today’s world, where any information is easily accessible from anywhere in the world, it’s difficult to pick the right content from this sea of data. In a world full of people with not so real personalities, it’s difficult to choose the right people to stay and spend time with.

This is the generation of instant gratification, and living on pure dopamine from delayed gratification is very difficult. Scrolling through reels on Instagram and going through tweets endlessly is very common. Every reel we watch gives us a dose of dopamine; we feel good and a slight incompleteness. Incompleteness drives us to watch another reel, and we are in a loop till we know it.

These social algorithms know us, know us more than we know ourselves. Let’s take an example here. Imagine two people, X and Y, support different political parties, Party 1 and Party 2. X and Y are both new to social media and have just made their accounts there. As X and Y are scrolling through social media, each one of them sees a post about their favorite party, and just like everyone else, they like the post and follow the account.

Now that the algorithm knows what X and Y like, it starts showing them posts about their favorite political parties again and again. Their liking towards the respective parties keeps on increasing. Not only this, the algorithm shows content that develops hatred for Party 2 in X’s mind and hatred for Party 1 in Y’s mind. In such a volatile world, this content is enough to provoke anyone.

This is something we all witness. Instead of X and Y, it could be me and you. Instead of the political parties, it could be two ideologies, each one of us follows. And just like that, we can get shaped, or our book can get rewritten in different ways.

You may say, “Nah, this does not happen with me. I have never gotten manipulated like that.” Haven’t you? Haven’t you started using a phrase you saw in a meme on social media in your real life? Haven’t you started to adopt habits and actions from your favorite movie character? Haven’t you sought attention on your latest international trip photos from your friends on social media?

We all have done something like that in our lives. And to be honest, that is not a problem. The problem is WHAT we consume. We don’t know what we should consume. It’s like we just pick the first thing from the menu chart, we like it, so we keep having it and never revisit the menu for something better, something really good for us. This consumption makes us develop certain expectations from our life and the society. We expect others to like us because we used a famous dialogue in a day-to-day conversation to make it funny. We expect our boyfriend to behave the same way Damon treated Elena. We may not directly think like that, but our unconscious mind gets influenced, and our actions show it.

Enough of social media, let’s talk about people. People and the environment around us tell a lot about us. We reap what we sow. The same is the case for the people around you and the environment you live in. A junkie is always found with other junkies, and an entrepreneur with other businessmen. Living with scavengers, even Simba, the King of Pride Land, started eating bugs. And there we think we are all doing just fine.

Actually, we don’t know what’s good for us. It’s too difficult for us to figure that out as well as work in that direction afterwards. We humans get so attached to people and places that even if it’s bad for us, we tend to stick to them. This is because we can’t seem to imagine a future without them.

Here are a few steps, a simple procedure for you to identify if you are in the right place or among the right people or not. I personally run these steps like a feedback loop every now and then to keep myself focused on my goal.

1. Write down your goals & priorities

The logic is simple: if you don’t know where you want to go, how will you decide which path you have to take? People often get lost here because they never set their goals. Self-improvement is a journey, and growth is everything needed on this journey. But on this journey, with multiple routes and no destination, you will have to decide when and where you are going to stay, take a break, and enjoy the journey.

If you don’t decide what you want to do or achieve in your life, you are just going to stay stagnant. You’ll live life most probably based on others’ choices and calls.

Take out your diary and make a list of short-term, intermediate, and long-term goals. Fill in the list with what and how you feel comfortable. You will have a clearer view of what you want and don’t want for yourself.

Example

Short term

1. Reduce my screen time to 2 hours.
2. Learn to play the keyboard.
3. Become a better public speaker.

Intermediate

1. Get a 3.5 or higher GPA this semester.
2. Go on a trek to the Himalayas.

Long term

1. Get myself a decent paying job.
2. Get my master’s degree.

Its also important to sort your priorities out. We often lose ourselves in the middle of helping out others. Put yourself first. How can we elevate ourselves to the next level if we keep putting others above us?

2. Find out if you will reach the goal with your current company and habits

Now that you have decided your goals and know where your next checkpoint is, the next step is assessing your current position. What are you consuming? What kind of people do you deal with on a regular basis? What kind of content do you watch?

Take out a notebook and lay out a day in your life. Count how many hours in a week you spend partying and how many hours you spend studying. Take note of whom you spend time with and where you spend your time. Evaluate if your current actions are going to help you reach your goals. Find out whom you should tend to more often and whom you should avoid.

Example

People I meet

1. Jack for studies
2. Party with John and company

Time allotment

1. 3 hours social media
2. 5hours/week study
3. 8 hours/week partying and movies and other enjoyment
4. 6 hour/day sleep
5. 30 mins daily exercise

Content I watch

1. Dance videos
2. Action and adventure movies
3. Lectures

Will I be able to score a 3.5+ GPA if I study 5 hours a week? Will I have great mental and physical health if I compromise on my sleep? Should I group study with Jack, or are we just wasting time together? Does watching dancing reels for 3 hours a day help me in any way?

The answers to these questions should be aligned with your goals. If we don’t question our actions, how will we know where we have some room for improvement?

If your actions are supporting your goals, then excellent! Daily exercise keeps me fit for the trek and prevents me from becoming a couch potato. Enough sleep gives me extra hours in the day to upskill myself. Studying with Jack gives us synergy, motivating each other. You just have to stick to it and consistently stay on track. Results may take time, but if your actions and environment are oriented according to your targets, then how can it go wrong?

But if you feel you are on the wrong path, spending 8 hours a week partying, perhaps you can cut that time in half and use the extra 4 hours for something more productive like reading and other hobbies. If you find yourself watching a lot of adventure and action movies and they occupy your mind all day, you should probably cut down on that.

These are some shortcomings in our actions. Don’t be disappointed; shortcomings are better than being good at something. That’s because shortcomings give you a huge room to improve, to learn new things, and you can experiment more since you don’t have much to lose.

Personally, if there is something not working for me, I follow the following framework to change my environment and company:

Displace & Reallocate the Time Spent

Displace yourself. If the table you are sitting at is not helping you reach your goals, get up and go find another table. Cut off all ties with them. If your friends are always asking you to go out, watch movies, and party and never really talk about how you are planning to achieve your dreams, cut them off. No ties at all.

This is a little hard at first. When we are too attached to people and environments, it’s difficult to just cut them off even if we know they are bad for us. Humans are loss-averse; they weigh losses more than gains, even if both are of the same amount. We don’t want to break up with our toxic boyfriend and be alone. Loneliness is what people fear. But in the long term, it’s just going to drive you into the ground.

If you can’t detach yourself from others even after a lot of effort, try reallocating your time. If you can’t entirely stop giving time to things unhealthy for your goal, start giving more time to the healthy things. If you want to be in better company but can’t leave your current company, then you should start giving more time to the people you want to be like. In this case, even if you are attending the content of your life you know is bad for you, you can also start consuming healthy content.

Once you start consuming content according to your goals, you will be shocked how fast you change and become a better person. If you can’t displace yourself from the table, start eating on both. At first, it might be difficult, but eventually, you will lean towards the table with all the better and healthy stuff for you.

Conclusion

Self-improvement doesn’t come from huge changes made in a few seconds; it’s the other way around. You don’t have to decide that you are going to completely stop cigarettes the next day. It’s going to mess up your mental state. You can take it slow. Reduce your cigarette count from 2 per day to 1 per day. Maybe the first few days will be difficult, but this gradual change will be easier on your brain and mind to embrace than abrupt ones.

If you want to stop scrolling social media for hours, start with adding a timer to the apps. Then gradually decrease it until you have your scrolling in control and only watch relevant content.

The point here is to allocate enough time to everything. You don’t have to work 26 hours a day, and you don’t have to delete your existence from social media. You just have to weigh the priorities of the goals you noted in the first two steps and work accordingly.

If I am spending 3 hours on Instagram watching dancing videos, it’s not helping me achieve a 3.5+ GPA. So I put a timer on Instagram for an hour and give the rest of my time to studies. I could unfollow content that is not really relevant to me and start following trekking pages to learn more about the Himalayan treks I want to do.

We do not need to make our life all about our goals and ambitions, nor become total workers. Meanwhile, we should also party hard! Go easy on ourselves at times when we are not as focused as we need to be. Let ourselves loose. Take breaks. Burnout is the last thing you want to do to yourself because you need your best version whenever you choose self-improvement.

What we consume consumes us, and we surely want to get consumed in our dreamlands. We just have to figure out what we should consume so that we get to walk our dreamlands and work on that.