2022-12-26

I missed a day.

I thought about sneakily publishing yesterday’s post today, but I decided against it. I want my writing to be brutally honest so I have to talk about my shortcomings openly.

It would be nice to say that I missed a post for a noble reason, but there is none. I just opened up Instagram at 6pm yesterday — you know, just to take a quick break — and proceeded to watch reels until 7am, when I deinstalled the app. Yep, 13 hours down the drain. Thirteen fucking hours.

Shiny screens and video games have always had an intense influence on me, but Instagram’s neverending, fast-adapting short videos are addictive on another level.

I am currently abstaining from YouTube, for the exact same reason. Instagram was a new addition which I installed for managing the account of my mother’s dancing school. Still, I created my own account — to my own demise — and proceeded to fall into the drooling scrolling coma. Luckily for me, it is easy to delete Instagram. I don’t depend on it professionally, and I don’t need to use it on a daily basis. Others are tied much more closely to it and it is much harder for them to quit Zuckerberg’s addiction machine.

I don’t know how problematic Instagram / TikTok use is in general, and I assume it is not as bad mine. Yet, I suspect that the we waste a gigantic number of hours on these platforms and it seems insane to me that we as a society tolerate them. We give their carefully engineered addiction algorithms full reign over our brains. This is a very important topic to me and I will go into more detail about it in future articles.

Going back to yesterday, I actually wrote a part of a post, but I didn’t finish it.