Detoxing from social media + Forgot this place existed for a while

I had completely forgotten about SpaceHey for quite a while, up until today when I remembered about it!

Anyways, as of "lately", and by "lately" I mean actual years, I have had this problem of just consuming media for hours at a time, up to the point where I would do absolutely nothing all day but watch youtube video essays or scroll through tiktok or reddit or tumblr and keep gaining information I would lose immedietaly after.

It has really impacted my life negatively! I have become very lazy!! And social media is one toxic son of a bitch, too! It does anything it can to keep you hooked on it to the point where life without it just feels empty. And, I mean, of course it feels empty, I've spent so much time scrolling through dumb videos, precious time I could've spent finding myself an hobby to distract myself!

I have started going on my detoxing journey about a week ago, and it immedietly crashed and failed and exploded in a dumpster fire, and I think much of it was due to my approach to it

My original approach and why I think it failed

I started off by just completely locking all access to the youtube site. Which is most likely the approach everyone initially takes when detoxing from something. But such a forceful way of getting rid of addictions almost never works, relapsing is really easy, and in my case, I had both the lock and the key at my full disposal, so I could-- AND DID!-- unlock it. Which is mistake n#1

I would say I lasted about a day with it, but honestly that'd be lying. I've spent at most like maybe 12 hours? idk I didn't count

I think the flaws to my approach were that, once again, I could just turn the filter on and off whenever I wanted, so nothing except my very low motivation was stopping me from just unlocking the filter

And also, IT WAS SIMPLY ANNOYING! LIKE, VERY ANNOYING! Which is mistake n#2

Even outside of just consuming the usual slop, I still need platforms such as Youtube or Reddit to look up shit, important shit, stuff like looking up problems I'm facing! And with access to such tools being barred off, I'd be have to either go to some obscure forum that probably doesn't have the answer I'm looking for, or get fucked!

So for those occasions, I turned off the filter. Which is mistake n#3

By just turning it off and on, I simply normalized being able to turn off the filter and go back to watching my slop, and with an addiction as big as mine, it eventually just turned to me turning it off completely.

My current approach

So, this time, instead of completely barring out access to the websites I'm so addicted to, I've decided to take a different approach, one that was suggested to me by a friend:

Instead of making it impossible to access my addiction, I should make it painfully inconvenient.

This, to me, translated to adding a 30 second wait before being able to access them. This inconveniences me, and, I can't lie, really worked for me!

Sometimes I'd turn on Youtube, be met by the "WAIT JUST A FEW SECONDS!!!" screen, and then after not even 10 seconds I'm like "Meh, I can do something better" and go do something more fun and productive and worth remembering, like coding, or playing TF2 (granted, that isn't very productive, but it's better than sitting still all day and doing absolutely nothing but doomscrolling)

As of right now it's only been like 2 or 3 days since I've set up the 30 second wait. If you want to detox from social media as well, something I really strongly recommend you also do, the tools I currently use are Pause by Freedom (Scroll down and click on Install Pause or whatever it is) and, on my phone, I am using iChoseTo, I don't know if it's available for iOS, I know it is available for Android as that is what I'm using

Why the hell am I back here?

I really mostly needed an hobby. I do know that SpaceHey is technically "social media", but I am personally using it as just a personal blog, and will be using it as just that for a bit. Why? Because I really, desperately need a hobby!

And I've also just really been thinking a lot about starting a blog where I just write random shit that comes to my mind, as well as experiences I've had, aspirations, coding adventures, and other stuff. This blog isn't really gonna be themed after much of anything. I might scroll a bit through blogs posted on this place, sometimes? But I'm not really gonna doom scroll on it, mostly cuz that's just not why I'm here

So yea, welcome to my personal blog, I guess?

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