How short form content is ruining your life silently.
You’re in your 20s, you’re in college, you’re broke, you have debts to pay, you’re not happy with where you are. And instead of doing something to improve your life all you do is scroll through reels and shorts.
You want to get rid of it but you can’t. Just within a few seconds, hundreds of unnecessary different pieces of information, nudity, vulgarity, and many more cheap dopamine hits like these are ruining your life silently.
As a result, just after an hour of unconscious scrolling, you feel exhausted, you feel sleepy, you feel demotivated and you realize that you ended up doing something that you didn’t even intend to do. You might have unlocked your phone for a different purpose but you ended up wasting time on Instagram.
I once had a conversation with one of the engineers from Meta and he told me how the smartest minds in the world are working 24x7 to make you lose your sleep and they make money out of your attention.
In simple terms, your behavior are being controlled by algorithms. Everything that you are doing, everything that you are searching for, and every person you are talking to or chatting to are being tracked so that these algorithms can show you things that will keep you hooked to your screens all day long!
Remember that the more time you waste on Instagram reels and YouTube shorts, the more money the tech giants and the creators make. I don’t mean to say that as a consumer we are not gaining anything.
We do learn a lot from creators out there but scrolling through reels and shorts all day long, watching anything that comes in front of us, we’re frying our brains unconsciously.
Our brain is not made to switch between different information at the same time. You are training yourself to be chronically distracted!
I have some pretty interesting statistics to share with you guys so make sure you stick to the end of this email because this can act as a wake-up call for you.
The dots in the screen represent an adult life in months assuming life expectancy as 90 years. So if you are 18 years old right now, this is an optimistic estimate of the remaining months of your life.
1/3 rd of this time → sleeping
126 months → school/college/uni/work/career
18 months → driving
36 months → cooking/eating
36 months → errands
27 months → hygiene/bathroom
Leaves you with 334 free months.
Now this remaining free time should be spent doing things that you have always wanted to do. Following your passion, tick the boxes on your bucket list, build a business, and travel the world. Basically how you spend this remaining time will determine the quality of your life which means it will also determine the type of person you become.
The body, mind, and character that you will have in the future will be determined by how you use your time today. Now if I ask you what you are going to do in this remaining time, I’m sure binge-watching Netflix or scrolling through TikTok didn’t come to your mind but let me show you the data.
An average 18-year-old spends 93% of their remaining time looking at their screens and doing unproductive things.
Now imagine at the age of 90, if you look at this visualization and realize how you wasted your time and did not do things that you could have done just because you were distracted.
It’s like over 26 years of screen time! That’s crazy! Imagine what 26 years of screen time can do to you. Not just your eyes, but your mental health will be gone as well.
Now one more thing to look at is that I have only talked about the negatives of social media but it has hundreds of benefits as well. Only because of social media, you can read this thing. Wiping out social media completely is a dumb idea because it will leave us completely disconnected from the world.
The only solution to this is to become sensible as a consumer! You have to understand whether you are doing something by your choice or you are being made to do it. If you are reading this right now it means you opened this email by your choice or maybe you wanted a solution to your social media addiction. Awareness is the key, my friend.
The motive of this email was to make you aware. Treat this as a wake-up call.
Thank you.