Apps like twitter, instagram, facebook, .... you name it, all have something in common. Guess what, we can scroll through them for rest of our lives and would still be not able to catch up with it.
Doing things is hard in life. To get anything meaningful you need to do hard things. Many jobs even will pay for your strength either mental or physical. Imagine you get to experience all the fun in the world with just a scroll of your finger. How good would that be? Exactly, very fun right. This is exactly what doom scrolling is.
I have always been addicted to apps through out my life, and if you think you are not just check your analytics to see you spend more than 4hrs on that shitty photo app scrolling through all the reels/shorts. I am the victim of the same but on a different app. Twitter is something that I find really fun to scroll through since so many people are winning in the hopes that I will have something magical come my way and I will also win.
I do have a few responsibilites in my day but my heart for a reason knows that I am not getting things done or at least not happy with what I do. I can do better, infact much more better. Instead of opening x.com on my laptop randomly when something is loading or some piece of code is being compiled. I want to do better and infact I can do much better.
Few months ago, I did a small change in my daily life. I deleted all the apps that were distracting for me -- snapchat, instagram and twitter. For a couple of days, life was weired. I had a habit of opening phone every once in a while to scroll. And then I was what do I do now? Download and play a game or something. Rather I just left that on table and started doing some actual work.
The above strategy sounds great right? Indeed it's great but I found a hack naturally. I started scrolling in my browser instead. At first I was not used to the interface since all the button's don't work properly there. But as time went on I was again addicted there. I started to get the hang of the web UI and doom scrolling had be again. 😔
The reason why I am wring this is just because I wanted to be accountable. I want to do something great in my life and that 6.1" brick of glass can't stop me. This is a sort of an experiment. I will write the follow up as how this approach went by after a few months in my blog itself. So, yeah starting today, I will try to have less than 1h of screen time in social apps and will not doom scroll. This is a challenge for me and I will make it.
If you found this blog meaningful please share your feedback at hi@sarg.am. I would love to read and reply all your emails. Have a nice day or night!