Detaching From Social Media

I have struggled recently with being more present online than in the real world.

In Benin, I spent a lot of the hottest part of the day on reels or watching Netflix. I had so much downtime that I connected myself. I even became overly stressed because I was constantly plugged into the news and falling into algorithms that made me angry or sad, and I kept watching and consuming. 

Now, during my first semester in Taiwan, I was still in this funk. I rarely picked up my books (which I brought 8 of to Taiwan, and now we have 27 in the apartment...). I just couldn't motivate myself. This wasn't all due to social media; I was trying to deal with homesickness, missing Benin and my friends, and having trouble making good connections here in Taiwan. But social media was the makeshift band-aid that prevented me from dealing and just pushing off. This AI boom also makes it even harder to be creative. I didn't want to write blogs or edit them, but let the AI do it. But what the heck is the point of a blog if it isn't written by a human with human emotions and human mistakes?

It's funny because I know how much social media traps you. We have talked about it in classes and debates. There are multiple published works on how algorithms trap you into certain feelings or into escaping reality, and now, short-form media is reducing attention spans and making it harder to really stay focused on one thing. Shorts are designed to keep you watching and to slip in ads to make money.

You may think, "Oh, how are shorts any different from just watching YouTube or a movie?" Here is the thing: when watching short-form media like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook Reels, or YouTube Shorts, we, as consumers, are not actively choosing what to watch. We don't put in any effort to decide what we are looking at; it is all carefully curated for us.

That trap of ease dulls our general curiosity. If I go on YouTube and search for a video, I am in control of the content I watch, which serves a purpose. My purpose.

But that wouldn't make the tech companies make more money, so they need a way to trap us into feeling like we want to watch all this garbage thrown at us, and then suddenly 2 hours pass by, and we watched 500 reels, but dont remember more than 10 of them.

What Im saying is this stuff is bad, it's evil, but I am the only one who can control my brain and time. Our most valuable asset in life is time and attention. Both social media companies are trying to steal from us.

I found myself taking a break from Instagram, and every time I was even remotely bored, my hands would reach for it and find it gone. Then I went to Facebook and started using it way more than usual, and I realized it was the same issue. YouTube Reels is a thing you can't escape from; it's my last resort, but luckily, I think my habit is breaking. I dont even like Facebook! And YouTube Shorts suck! But my brain needed a way to turn off, and I am not the one who manufactured this switch; I used it too often.

I finally feel like I can focus on things for a little longer. There are still some improvements I need to make to my life, but deleting Instagram, Facebook, and other distractions really helped a lot.

I can still use the applications when on my computer, as there is no way to delete them from here. But I am more actively paying attention to what im doing. I go on Facebook to post about my trip or reply to a message, not just to scroll.

Let's all look within ourselves and see the effects that social media, AI slop, and short-form content are having on us.

What im saying is, in this time of AI and technology doing every job that we once dreamed of. Maybe we should stop running forward and take a break to look around.