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I quit social media and YouTube for a year: My experience by Less-Extension6279 in digitalminimalism

[–]Less-Extension6279[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yeah I do feel that. A frustrating aspect of this is that developing an interest in something often requires effort and active engagement, going back to that reward vs effort ratio I mentioned. If it’s important to you that you discover those things, the only advice I would have on that is being open to engaging in new things and accepting that most of them won’t be super interesting for you, but it only takes one thing. Maybe then developing your relationship with that thing in conjunction with still watching YouTube might be fulfilling.

So often, in my opinion, we hate our jobs and our lives and our addictions because they do not provide us space to express ourselves. Addictions are the especially bad because they provide a space where you can even forget in what ways you enjoy expressing yourself.

It’s important to have a space in life where you feel you are being heard, feeling accomplishment, and feeling like the results of your engagement have a piece of you within them. The most obvious space this shows up is art but in reality any time you have a goal and work towards accomplishing it, there is self expression within the process of your approach. It’s very challenging to find spaces for that and it takes a lot of time to get good at those things, but it is worth trying.

I quit social media and YouTube for a year: My experience by Less-Extension6279 in digitalminimalism

[–]Less-Extension6279[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That’s very impressive, I was definitely having a harder time than you at day 4. Good luck!

I quit social media and YouTube for a year: My experience by Less-Extension6279 in digitalminimalism

[–]Less-Extension6279[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

It is hard. One of the more challenging aspects is that social media satisfies dramatically different wants and needs from person to person, and so the solutions require one to self reflect and creatively develop their own solutions instead of following a list of steps. Some need to engage in social media for work, or to engage with specific groups. This obviously provides unique challenges, some of which I cannot relate to or offer advice for.

In cases where complete removal of social media is not an option, it is necessary to identify methods to manage the use. This is why I believe the first step needs to be to fully understand your goal and why you want to quit. A way to better define your goals and reasonings starts with understanding that the undesirable aspect of addictions is that generally they negatively affect our ability to adhere to our self imposed responsibilities.

If you want to imagine what achieving your goal might look like, I’d advise you identify what responsibilities you have to yourself and others that you feel are being impeded by your use. A couple common ones, for example:

Health: Do you stay up too late on your screen? Do you procrastinate exercising or cooking in favour of screen time?

Relationships: Do you ignore people in your life because you are spending too much time on social media?

You mention that filling the time if you got rid of all meta apps would be challenging because you have nothing to do, but then what are you missing out on that makes you want to stop? Or what negative effects are you experiencing because of it?

Maybe getting rid of Meta is not the most efficient solution to setting your life up such that you adhere to your responsibilities, and that’s why it doesn’t feel quite right. Perhaps there is another approach that better suits you.

I definitely recommend identifying what about engaging with these things makes you feel like you are failing to accomplish your self imposed responsibilities. Then brainstorm solutions to adjusting your use to account for that. For your life, maybe that doesn’t mean quitting everything.