DISCLAIMER – This is not lifestyle advice, just an
honest account. I won’t tell others how to live their lives.
Blaise Pascal once wrote, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability
to sit quietly in a room alone.”
I’ll get back to this quote at the end, but keep it in mind.
Along with deleting my Facebook, Instagram, Deviantart
(I used to draw), Reddit, and all other social media, I’ve gone a step further
and deleted all other news apps and accounts — Medium app, Inshorts, Wikipedia
among others. That is, I’ve sworn off all news websites, reading the newspaper
(I was one of those teenagers who read the newspaper everyday) and any other
source of information that I did not actively search for. The only exceptions
are e-mail and Whatsapp (and YWS of course), but the reason is that a simple
cost-benefit analysis told me deleting those would be detrimental.
If I could summarize the answer to the title of this
article in a few words, I would. But there are a lot of reasons, each helping
with the decision to quit. Here they are —
1.I am dumb as hell —
This was the hardest to accept. An F in
an exam in my second year of undergrad studies led me to introspect on what
went wrong and where. (For someone who scored comfortably above 90% marks all
throughout school and thought he would never fail at academics, that was a nice
mental version of a sucker punch from Rocky). So I unpeeled the layers of lies
that had been fed to me, either by myself or the world around me — I
reconstructed the slippery slope up to where I started sliding. This was tough,
because there was no place to hide, not even in my head, and about the age of
11 was where I stopped. That was when I had made my Facebook account.
Here is one example of how out of hands
things were already getting back then. I skipped my grandma’s funeral to
harvest my Farmville crops in time. I went to the town where she had
died hundreds of kilometres away, and went back home on
realizing there was no internet there. She and I had been close too, she had
taken amazing care of me and my sisters at a time when my mother was struggling
with many other problems I did not care about, so that was a significantly
terrible thing to do even as a child. And then, like the dumb kid I was (and
still am), I stayed on Facebook for eight more
years. I let it give me instant gratification and escape for up
to 8 hours a day, and a healthy amount of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).
I got hooked onto the dopamine hits from
getting 70 FB notifications a day, of sad stories I could sympathise with, bad
people I could demonize, and puppies I could call kawaii, Pepes
I could steal and repost, and weirdos I could validate with my own and feel
validated in turn.
2. I am very dumb—
I thought I could do it all. Have a
healthy general awareness, loads of hobbies, and keep a good
GPA in a tough CS degree while increasing technical acumen (thankfully my awkwardness
kept me from adding romantic interests to that list, I wasn’t that dumb.) The last few years of my life
told me that that experiment was a no-go.
Here’s where news and social media come
in. I used to read a lot even as a kid, from magazines to newspapers to books,
I devoured all except my textbooks. I started consuming a lot of political
content as my own freedom and lack of direction increased. Initially via memes,
and then videos, blogs and articles, I went down the rabbit hole. All that
content was part of a vicious feedback loop on social media that sucked me in,
and wasted whole days — I couldn’t just read the news
for 15 minutes and be done. I had to share it, add my opinion,
point out flaws, reply to comments and feed into the mental image of who
everyone thought I was. And I felt worse at the end of it. I didn’t persevere
with any of the constructive things that were a part of me. I didn’t do any
significant amount of what Cal Newport calls deep work (highly recommended reading). I
had instead destroyed my attention span, reducing it from three hours to about
15 minutes.
I had this privileged life, and I was
wasting opportunities that not a lot of people in my country get. I was so
disgusted with my state of affairs that I remember saying to a concerned and
intelligent friend, “So what if a brutal murder and rape happened a few miles
away? It didn’t happen to me or anyone I cared about. I cannot do anything significant
about it. I would only end up worse with no one else helped.”
So when I got the F, I pressed F to pay
respect to all my social media and news accounts, and removed them.
Consequently, when I appeared for the exam the second time 2 months after I failed,
I scored higher than anyone in my year though I hadn’t spent a lot of time
studying. I just did it with a bit more time and focus.
I agree that this disconnection with the news might often
leave me clueless. So what if my ignorance is revealed when I don’t know
someone famous or important? I don’t need to
play that part.
3. I am kind of stupid —
I do not truly know of the things I talk
about, and that is wrong on a deeper level than keeping up appearances. It is
different from the first reason because that was about how social media heightened
my low EQ and sociopathic tendencies, whereas this one is simply a lack of
understanding of the subtlety of intellectual discussion. I was told I was
smart and had a good awareness of a wide range of topics, which turned out to
be a lie. The superficial understanding these media give, was dangerous because
I wasn’t stretching and straining my brain-muscles, just attaining shallow
understanding on all manner of things.
I’ll take the example of a recent phenomenon
— Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. I instantly became a fan when I first came across him
online as he seemed to say all the right things. The one intellectual with spine, I called him. Then, as a flood of opinion
pieces and liberal friends (all of them online, of course) pointed out flaws, I
took a balanced position. He says some right things of
course; he’s a smart man and an academic. But when confronted, he tries to get
out by a lot of meaningless talk, hiding his true motives whatever they may be. This
seemed to make sense. But then I re-watched a video clip of him answering a
linguist, one in which I had initially dismissed him as trying to dance around
the actual question. But this time, I had read a tiny book called Very short Introduction to Objectivity, and I was
shocked. What I’d taken to be a word-salad excuse was actually a reply trying
to clarify the differences between judgement, and the truth. This time I had a tiny inkling of the
impossible complexity of these ideas that philosophers had debated throughout
the centuries. They could not be given a clear/concise answer to unless the
question elaborated what it asked for, and left no other possible answers open.
Peterson still had his flaws, but my own flaws had been revealed to me, by
myself.
I simply could not keep inhaling all
this information, all these words and images, when I was so obviously out of my
depth. And that applied to the whole of my online presence, and large chunks of
my real life. So I decided to gain real understanding, one at a time.
If you have read this far, I assume you found some
part interesting, so I suggest an experiment for you, inspired from Pascal’s
quote. Think of any of the hard-but-rewarding things you want to do, and how
much focused time would be required to have some significant progress (like reaching
a checkpoint in a video game). When you’re relaxed and fresh, try to do that
small amount of outlined work in a single go. If you do it in the time you
thought you would, while not being distracted by your phone or others, then
congratulations, you have the amount of focus required to do the hard-but-good
things in the smallest manageable chunks. If you could not, then you realize
that you could not do even the smallest part of what you thought you would have
to do, at your current capacity (or your current player level, if you will).
And that will be your cue to gain more XP and level up, before reality kicks in and makes you.
Have a chilled out day, because that’s just like, my
opinion, man.
Points: 200
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