#obv. disclaimer that going cold turkey isn’t the solution either

[highfire3]

something that i’ve been trying to internalize about social media and the internet in general is that just because something is getting a lot of attention/upvotes/reblogs/views/engagement doesn’t mean that I have to read it.

I can scroll past the doomsday news headlines, the politically explosive reddit posts, the twitter threads filled with misinformation, reels upon reels filled with CONTENT - I don’t need that.

I can get dopamine in other more sustainable ways, I can do tasks in real life that are engaging and interesting instead of following the algorithms whims, and just because theres two thousand comments on a reddit thread doesn’t mean I have to open it or read it or think about it. There’s so much happening in the world, but seeing it through a subset of the internet world isn’t something that I have to do. It isn’t healthy and its OK to not know what headlines are breaking, or what people think of the new game, or what the latest developments are in the field that I’m studying. It is not going to kill someone if I don’t watch the latest [youtuber]’s video, the instagram stories that I miss are not going to have an unending impact on my life.

It’s ok to get off the internet, and to do something, anything else. The internet will never go away, the stream of fresh content will never cease, the headlines you miss will be washed away day after month after year by new crises and problems - and if they’re important enough to be remembered, their reverberations will make it into your life in other ways.

Trust in yourself, you don’t need the algorithm, you don’t need to turn your brain off, you have everything you need within you and around you.