I'm taking a break from Reddit
Several years ago I started to whittle down the platforms I visited frequently after I took stalk of 1: What I was getting out of them and 2: How much damn time I was spending on them.
This all started from daily self-reflecting journaling I jumped back in to (shout out to the 750 words community and through that I realized I was wasting hours doing literally nothing and retaining even less. I've talked about Brick before in previous posts but I got that for a holiday present shortly after and I haven't looked back. Through brick I broke the straglehold and then simply deactived and then deleted everything, almost.
While Reddit might have been Bricked on my phone I told myself it's fine on my laptop. It's for when I need to do a deep dive extremely niche hobby I've just uncovered and need to spend hours obsessing over. Or perhaps I need to see what's going on in my local neighborhood subreddit.
So, now, even after two years of smarmily touting my absence of social media the reality is I still spent an inordinate amount of time just scrolling.
You see Reddit and to a larger degree YouTube give me the false opinion that I'm learning something. I'm doing deep dives. I'm taking away educated content. The reality is I'm doom scrolling through engineering and AI subreddits while likely reading incensing things directly from bots talking to bots talking to bots feeding into my brain.
Simply folks, I can't take it anymore and I realize I haven't learned one tangible thing from simply mindlessly going to Reddit that would be considered healthy or worthwhile. I have however noticed after shutting my laptop I am more nervous, less relaxed, and have no idea where all the time went.
We tackle the hydra one head at a time and for now I know the pull is so great (wild to type) that I'm giving myself an full October time out from the platform. Whether I return or not is unknown but if I do return the plan is fully utilitarian. Searches when I need to review or find additional areas to learn something. The days of me jumping on are, hopefully, gone.
Our time is important and these corporations entire push is to increase user and user time. They'll stop at no cost to feed on you like some capitalistic vampire. You deserve to live your life without watching it go by as the screen flickers across catastrophic sensationalized news in all it's glory.
So what will I do with my time? I know that I"m going to uncover a huge pocket of time (as this happened when I left all other platforms) and with that I hope to be bored to be honest. I hope to sit and tap and bemoan my existence for a bit. Usually after that boredom does this amazing thing, it makes us think and then create if we're not spoon fed easy access dopamine. So I'm hoping I'll be here more and a few other smaller places. Where I can create instead of consume and the focus can shift away from what I'm not doing into a more wonderful world of what I want to see put out into the world.