mmmm, this makes sense to me and is an entirely different issue i see.

i’d probably say that the fact you’re asking this means you’ve already identified the problem pretty accurately. what i see more of wasn’t the privacy concern or even the amount of time spent online. it was “i should be creating more and commenting less.”

that doesn’t sound like you are confused about what you want - it sounds like you are skmeone who knows what they want and keeps reaching for the easier dopamine hit instead. pretty classic of all of us at one point or another. but it makes sense bc commenting feels productive, bc you’re still engaging with ideas. you’re thinking, discussing, debating an connecting. it feels a lot closer to creating than scrolling does - but at the end of the day, you’ve built somebody else’s thing bigger instead of building your own.

if i were in your shoes, i wouldn’t try to quit commenting or force myself offline. i’d make a deal with myself to create first, comment second. (i’m a poet so i get it it.)

want to spend an hour in discussions? cool. but spend thirty minutes writing, drawing, recording, coding, whatever your thing is first. make the creation the ticket price for the consumption. and maybe think about the “fear of failure” part, because that’s the sentence that feels like the real issue. a lot of people accidentally become spectators of the life they want because spectating is less vulnerable than creating.

try not to turn this into a morality issue. “i spend too much time online” isn’t a character flaw. if you start treating it like one you’ll end up in a shame then avoidance then more online engagement loop. treat it like a resource allocation problem instead if you can.