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by Aaronmacaron 893 days ago
For me the key to success was to accept and to internalize the following facts:

- 95% of content and posts have no value and are simply a waste of time

- Using any of the usual platforms for more than 10 minutes will damage me and make me a worse person (mental health, attention span, it makes me angry, etc...)

- Basically the only reason why I use those services is to kill time and to avoid responsibilities which I have in the real world

- All of those services have net negative effect on society and humanity and by using them I support a system which I despise

To summarize roughly: There is simply no value in using any of these platforms. Doing virtually anything else will be better for me and the world.

Once I really accepted those facts it was not really that hard to stop using them. The problem was that for a long time I told myself (at least subconsciously) that there is some value in using some of those services.

For example I told myself "I'm really exhausted now and I wouldn't be doing anything productive anyways, so I might aswell doomscroll for a bit." Or "There really is some high quality content on YouTube, it'd be a shame to miss the quality videos if I abandon the platform as a whole."

You need to get to a point where your brain immediately calls bullshit as soon as you come up with an excuse like this.

Edit: formatting

1 comments

I was with you until YouTube. I would say the educational value of YouTube with channels like 3Blue1Brown, Fermilab (Don), PBS Space Time, etc. makes it an educational resource second to none.

Sure there is a lot of garbage on YouTube, but it's fairly easy to avoid the dark alleys.