Mindless Content Consumption Affects Your Life And You Know It
Everyone’s competing for your attention. Platforms such as Youtube, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, are among the titans that implement strategies and ways to sucker you into dedicating your time to them.
The main job of these big platforms is to figure out what makes a person tick.
What are the psychological triggers they can use to make you spend more time consuming what they offer?
And so they figured out how to exploit addiction to their interest.
The key is to give you what you want with the click of a button, a scroll of a finger, a swipe, and so on.
How about the moments when you’d find yourself laying in bed at 2 A.M mindlessly scrolling through pictures and posts?
You know sleep is important and yet you come to the point where being still with yourself is an issue and not consuming not scrolling or having any sort of intake of media feels scary.
As if you’re missing on something, perhaps an answer to something that’s been bugging you.
Behind our dependency is an underlying fear of living our lives.
We see others’ stories and we want to be a part of those more than we do want to be involved in ours.
Every video you watch and every picture you look at can lead to a bias as to what is supposedly portrayed in the online world versus real life.
You find yourself in a dark room behind a glowing screen. Comparing yourself to others’ standards and wondering how have they got it figured out whereas you don’t?
Actually, when it comes to consuming content I’ve realized that I used it as an escape and source of procrastination from action. Because that’s what it is (in my case).
Disclaimer: Consume responsibly!
You scroll and like and share and tweet and do all those things for two main reasons.
- To share with others. That desire to share comes with reasons as well. A craving for dopamine — to be liked and acknowledged.
- To consume entertainment— videos, live streams, pictures, jokes, gossip, and whatnot.
The problem becomes when one hour turns to two and then they add up and you are nowhere near to get started on your work.
You come up with excuses that you will start to write that paragraph or article, or you will work on that project once you will finish this video.
Yet here is the big catch,
Another recommended video plays right after the one you’ve just watched.
Time’s ticking.
Consumption vs Creation
What I’ve noticed is that creating something is hard.
It takes time and focus and the results aren’t always guaranteed.
Then there is a tint of an imposter syndrome and the intrusive doubts that intensify that reasoning and desire to postpone from getting yourself started.
It’s in moments like these that the issue of consumption becomes more evident.
In my case, my lack of action usually boils down to I have nothing good or worthy to say. Others can say or do it better than me.
But at the same time, I know that practice makes perfect. Especially when it comes to writing.
And if you start even with one sentence then you can work on that.
Ultimately, I shouldn’t let my perfectionism rob me of getting better at this craft.
It might not be the best work out there. But it’s already one step that I’ve taken towards improving myself.
Tune out the noise.
Give yourself 5 minutes to throw up the chaos from inside onto the blank screen.
Assemble it one paragraph at a time.
Edit. Rewrite it. Weed out what doesn’t need to be there. Keep it simple.
You are already one step closer to making something out of nothing.
That’s a good start.
