Social networks and dopamine cravings are eating up our time without us even knowing it. Sure, everyone knows that they spend a good amount of their waking hours scrolling through social feeds, but that’s only the obvious aspect. The hidden part becomes clear only when you try something like dopamine fasting or social network fasting. That’s when you actually realize how much more time you have for other things. The time that you didn’t know you had.
Another thing is that when you try dopamine fasting, the things that seemed undoable or too much effort or even not that important start to feel achievable and worthy of your time and effort. It’s sad that we waste so much time on social networks.
I don’t find social apps useful at all. They may be popular and profitable, but they are not right. They are just wrong. They make you do things that you don’t want to do without any significant benefit.
One of the problems with social apps is that they are so shallow and they just encourage shallow content. The whole system rewards the wrong things. It just gives you dopamine for seeing a post and moving to the next one. It rewards you with the excitement of being viewed and being liked. It also uses sex appeal to attract audience too much. TikTok is the worst in that regard.
YouTube is a little different. It’s a social app that has a good side too. You can spend hours there watching cats and nonsense, but you can also learn things on this platform. Actually, many people use YouTube as a learning platform. And it has good stuff.
I know social apps can be changed and they will be changed. But meanwhile, we need to protect our time, our peace of mind and sanity from them. One of the solutions can be an AI assistant that helps us to explore only the things that we want and really care for and can filter out many other things. Something that we can train in our conscious times that can help us in our down times. Something that can prevent us from going down the rabbit hole and spending our time doing things that we think are useless. And something that can replace them wisely with things that can actually be valuable and help us to develop useful habits.