Time Dilation: Hack to social media detox

I want to share a story where I was tracking to get out of an habit and I found one thing and one thing alone challenging: Time. Let me explain.

We all understand that life moves faster as you grow older. If that concept is something new to you, I would highly recommend watching this video from Casey Neistat, explaining that and more —

So now that we understand that, let me come back to the original problem. That social media algorithms knows these and are trying to hack into it, the attention problem. Human beings would always incline towards something that would grab our attention, and there are many ways that this could happen — beautiful videos, strong story telling or just brutal world is going to end news hacks. But what they all have in common is that — they tend to pack a lot of information in a very small time frame. That is why you end up doom scrolling for hours, binge watching a TV series or spending hours on end on YouTube. It is small bursts of attention hacks X multiple times. The social media companies gain your attention, so that they can target ads. But you end up fast burning adult hood.

Let me explain further, if time is supposed to be moving faster as you get older and that is multiplied by the amount of attention we lease to social media. We are basically fast tracking our way to adulthood. Isn’t that just one big irony? It was mind blowing when I came to this conclusion. How did I come across this myself? — When I was tracking the number of days I wanted to cross before getting over an Habit and I found that time was moving incredibly slowly between my eternal attention leasing to YouTube, Instagram etc etc. Here is an image of me trying to get over just two weeks —

I realized that it was just insanely hard for me to make any progress what so ever, it felt like time was just stuck when ever I looked at this. But then I realized how I was spending time in between all of these days and I realized the more time I was spending time on Social Media, the more slower time felt it was moving. It is such a crazy dichotomy. I believe they do this because if we feel that time is moving slowly, we won’t be as guilty to have leased all that to a social media app.

Photo by <a href=”https://unsplash.com/@nate_dumlao?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Nathan Dumlao</a> on <a href=”https://unsplash.com/photos/5Hl5reICevY?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Unsplash</a>

I always had a mental cue in my head to slow things down, I have always found that it helps in more than one way. Here are some of the things that I found to bring it back to reality -

1. The basics — meditations and journaling.
2. Reading a book — I have always found it to be a litmus test for how fast my brain is working. If I can’t sit to read a page.
3. Fishing — Just spending a day out in nature, trying to catch a fish.
4. Gardening — The patience required and the multi-dimensional nature of growing your own plants.
5. Staring at the wall — This is taken straight from the Book — Steal Like an Artist.
6. Sleeping — Spending time with your thoughts, before you finally go to sleep.
7. Cooking — Another multi-dimensional problem, that requires you to slow down and slow the problem.

I am pretty sure for some of you out there it is pretty obvious all of this. Your mental model is synced and you feel all of these to be second nature. But I am pretty sure, there is a growing population, trying to figure out why this is seeming to be more challenging and what are ways to solve that issue. I am hoping I can be a place of conversation for that. Please feel free to share some of your experience and ways you deal with breaking or detoxing from social media!

Ps — Here is how my personal challenge has been going. Making progress, getting there!

Getting there😌