Why I Started This Website

After spending several years mindlessly consuming content, I recently began to eliminate some sources of endless information consumption. It's been six months since I stopped habitually using social media, replacing it instead with reading the news and other articles online.

The transition from social media to other media was not actually as hard as I anticipated. While I did have occasions where I was left exploring the utility apps on my phone (trying to get the stopwatch to stop on 12.34) or going down Wikipedia rabbit holes, as I tried anything to suppress the urge to re-install Instagram, I pretty quickly began to see a shift in the type of content that I was consuming and the impact that it was having on my way of thinking. Instead of mindlessly reading and saving philosophy quotes, I started to read more fully fledged articles. And while I have yet to fully develop a habit of reading true long-form content, even the switch from endless short quotes on Instagram pages to more fully developed articles allowed me to be more thoughtful about what information I consume.

I switched from consuming information fed to me by an algorithm (unconscious) to only consuming information that I searched for (conscious). This change alone helped to alleviate some of the dependency that I had on endless loops of auto-suggested information and gave me time to reflect on my relationship with media in general. After the first few months I realized that for me, the issue with social media was not the content itself, but the way that it was delivered. For the last few months I have been able to strike a healthy balance between still being informed as to what is happing with my friends while not getting sucked into spending more time on social media than I want to. My solution has been twofold. The first part of the solution is that I've told myself that I can only view social media information if I search for it. For example, if I have a thought about a friend and wonder how they're doing, I set a timer for 10 minutes and then allow myself to scroll down their page. However, I limit myself to using the search function and not getting drawn into endless scrolling on the home or recommended pages. The second part of my solution is that I allow myself unlimited social media access with friends or on others' devices. For example, one thing that I missed was being able to send reels to my friends and my family. Now, I allow myself to go through the shared reels with them (either in-person or synchronously on the phone) which ends up facilitating a deeper connection than purely sending the reels. Through these two rules, I have been able to curb the unhealthy parts of my relationship with social media while still retaining many of the positive benefits like being able to see what old friends are doing and keeping in touch with family.

However, my lack of dependency on social media has only partially solved the problem. Through my increased awareness of my relationship with content consumption, have begun to realize how much of my time I spend consuming instead of creating. While now I have replaced my impulse to scroll with news articles or ebooks, the need to consume is still there nonetheless. In a world characterized by an abundance of information, I've realized that I will always be able to find information to fill my desire for more, leaving me ultimately unsatisfied and overwhelmed. Enter this website. Through my quest to eliminate thoughtless information consumption, I began to realize that even the more thoughtful consumption still exists as an unhealthy form of avoidance. Whenever I don't want to actually be present with my thoughts, I simply open the news. Whenever I don't want to confront the gnawing feeling to actually do something, there's always an ebook. Suffice to say that my consumption - whether thoughtful or thoughtless - still served as a distraction from my intrinsic desire to create. With this website, I am not intending these articles to be for an audience. Instead, I view it as an opportunity to actually follow through on the impulse which I have been ignoring for so long. I hope to create a small weekly habit of creation - a breath of fresh air every Thursday to counter the endless flood of information thrust upon me every other waking moment. I have no idea what to expect from this journey of creation, so different from how I've lived my life the past few years, but I am excited to see what I discover about myself along the way.