So I've made the recognition that nearly everyone has made at some point that social media is having an unhealthy effect on their life. But I don't want my goal to be simply "use it less". Instead my goal is "use social media only to the degree that it adds value to my life", which if that means I end up using it less? That's fine. But I'm not gonna focus on quantity of screentime cause I've found that approach is not healthy for me.
Cohost has been useful to me in working toward my goal. One feature that makes it better than Tumblr or Twitter is that it does not have the infinite scroll. When I reach the bottom of the page, I have to ask myself "do I want to read more posts?" Sometimes the answer is "no" and then I log off and do something else. But sometimes the answer is "yes". And I do not consider that "yes" to be a failure.
It's real easy when dealing with unhealthy social media use to fall into the trap of pathologizing pleasure itself. Because culturally our popular idea of addiction has a lot in common with the idea of sin.
That last post is dead-on and reminds me of the way some people have started talking about "dopamine." (i.e., the spiritual essence of Reward, since real life dopamine has numerous functions in the body that have nothing to do with pleasure or motivation)
Dopamine fasting, dopamine detox, anti-dopamine parenting... did you mean: asceticism?
Like absolutely don't dump your kids/self in front of YouTube Autoplay for 14 hours a day, but that's because it's a really flat and limited experience, not because it's too easy to enjoy and you must only do things that are difficult to enjoy.
