online detox is not working
Inspired by posts from Imperfect and Ava
I've been thinking about this for a while but couldn't gather my thoughts together. I wrote that I was planning to do an online detox in December, but in reality, all I wanted was to get rid of doomscrolling on Twitter, as I was spending too much time on it every day.
How do people quit smoking? No, not through willpower - it doesn't work long-term. You don't smoke for a week, two, maximum several months, but you're never free from the thought "I wish I could stand on the balcony with a cigarette right now." That's why people replace smoking with other habits - going to the gym, meditation (doesn't help me), or some other activity where you don't think about the old habit because you literally have no time.
Why was I on Twitter? I was bored - it's simply a fact I didn't want to acknowledge. So I decided - what could I replace this harmful habit with? And I came up with... games. To be honest, I played very little this year, just a couple dozen hours of Genshin throughout the year, and that's it. I don't see anything wrong with games if they don't interfere with main tasks and don't cause negative emotions.
Besides games, I found a new activity - reading other people's blogs. Until recently, I didn't even know that Bearblog has a system similar to Hackernews, where you can see other people's posts (thanks to Ava for the tip). I'm very interested in reading what other people think about, especially since it's much better implemented than Twitter, where between interesting posts you get visual garbage like memes and ads.