More and more we might be feeling like we aren’t accomplishing enough things throughout our days. Of course, there is something for us to blame – our phones and gadgets, mindless online scrolling and social media usage.. but those would all be pretty common excuses today. I learned from my own social media usage that instead of focusing on counting how much time I waste on it, its better to right away act upon this problem and think about how I can minimize my phone/social media usage.

People make a big mistake thinking that this technological era is bad, and I would also think that way for a while – after all when you are sitting in the train in NYC and you see every single person in your train cart on their phones, it seems kind of NPC like – very robotic, when we are human. I constantly think about how cool it would be if I traveled back in time to early 2000s/ mid 90s and sat in the train for one day seeing people reading books and newspapers, or just doing nothing. But oh well, we are here today and the reality might seem either too cool to be true or scarier than anyone could ever imagine back then. There is definitely no in between.

Coming back to the topic of utilizing our time properly on things we really need, well, besides doing our daily tasks/ work tasks or studying – chronic social media and phone users should definitely pay attention to how they spend their ” off time ” or the free time. Personally, I started noticing that as soon as I would finish a task – whether it would be work things, studying or errands, I would feel relived from them and right away of on my phone to scroll through instagram or tiktok, rather than lets say – read a book. To me, for quite some time, reading a book, a magazine or even watching the news on a TV seemed like another timeless task – to ” relax ” from all those previous tasks I had upon me. I would also just go and look at what various popular content creators are posting 24/7 or check out totally irrelevant and zero knowledge giving tiktok videos, in hopes of take my brain off the ” work ” I was doing beforehand. But that is when you may go wrong – that is how our social media addiction can begin developing and progress to the point of us wanting to check what someone we know is posting right now, where someone is traveling to, what everyone is up to.. instead of focusing on our own selves, improving our lives and gaining knowledge from actually useful resources and not totally meaningless videos. Just think about how bizarre it is to think that social media would help ease your anxiety from a daily life or improve your ” mental health ” when the first thing you see anytime you open your instagram account/tiktok/gmail is probably breaking news and negativity that unconsciously our brains take in and keep memorizing. Thats not to say that reading news is bad, but hearing about the news organically on TV – the actual place where in the last century people were learning the news from, seems better, at least to me. I believe that social media was meant to be a safe space at some point, created to to share all the knowledge the world has to offer and showcase people traveling around the world / exploring new places and stuff like that but people made it vulgar, moralless, and totally pointless to use in certain instances.

I believe that while social media is obviously not going anywhere and the reader of this blog post, just like me, is probably on multiple social media platforms – we can definitely bring back reading a book during our free time and instead of going on tiktok to cure our time alone or busy work schedule – create a journal, write, think about how we can improve our planet, and make a monthly plan of how many books we should be reading. Setting up a screen time on an iPhone, if you are the user of Apple, may be helpful – but not always. Even after I set up screen time on my phone I can’t even count how many times I have ignored it – which is terrible. I might not snooze my alarm but I definitely snooze my screen time constantly. So I have realized that just having a book in my hand or in my bag – no matter where I go – with me, is something that works for me personally. Just excluding the hourly scrolling through tiktok, if you use that app ( I know how addictive it gets to keep on scrolling ) while the app still exists, and coming on there once a day in the evening for 30 mins is what I got used to and what helps me stay off hours of scrolling. This is all considering the fact that I like staying up-to-date on certain tiktok lawyers I listen to and seeing any updates on the topics they discuss. Instagram-wise, I am still yet to stop constantly opening the app to check what’s new in my feed or what story people I follow uploaded now, but I also set myself a daily instagram usage plan which I am currently following. Other social media apps I don’t use that much, but I am definitely not planning on ever creating another social media account, be there a new app appearing g out of the blue – those two and Twitter are definitely enough for me.

Overall, I will never stop repeating that we should capitalize on using social media for a cause – to learn something new, create something that we would have not been able to achieve without technology, help this world out with the resources social media platforms provide us.