Social media, short content, and digital hygiene
Here I want to describe my attitude toward social media, short videos, and similar types of content. It didn’t happen as a result of deliberate willpower — it happened on its own, and I don’t fully understand why.
I used to scroll through the VK feed. It was generally interesting, but over time I increasingly caught myself with a feeling of wasted time after another scrolling session. It wasn’t moral judgment — it felt more like a bodily reaction. I started opening it less and less, and eventually stopped altogether.
At the same time, there were Telegram channels and chats. At different periods I had around 15–20 channels. I would subscribe and unsubscribe, but the overwhelming majority of posts were never read.
The chats were different, usually focused on narrow topics. Some had no off-topic chatter and were moderated. Sometimes I would read them entirely because something important might appear. And after such reading sessions, the same feeling of wasted life would return — I realized that 90%+ of it wasn’t needed by me.
For a while I watched YouTube Shorts. It quickly became tiring, again because of the feeling of micro-doses of information replacing each other without leaving a trace. Or rather, they did leave a trace — just not the kind I wanted. It felt more like exhaustion than pleasant mental engagement or meaningful impressions.
I tried TikTok a couple of times, but that didn’t work for me at all. I never really used Instagram, Facebook, or similar platforms. I haven’t played computer games in a long time, and I didn’t like mobile games.
Gradually I moved away from these formats. It felt like a simple shift of focus, a cooling down. And I do have doubts — maybe I’m missing something without all of this?
Then digital hygiene also began, just as gradually and on its own. I completely cleaned all my email inboxes and started from scratch. Now I have Inbox Zero. For more than a year I’ve been keeping notes, saving, structuring, and processing information. To some extent I started using GTD (not on the first attempt). I clean up files, screenshots, reorganize folders. Then I suddenly realized that Inbox Zero could exist in Telegram as well, in the form of an “unread” folder. I liked that. It turned out not to be difficult. And if something stays unread there for too long, it probably means I don’t need it — so I leave or unsubscribe.
Perhaps where I once felt pleasure, an unpleasant oversaturation began to appear — like sensory overload — and the signal turned into noise. I also understand that I have a limited capacity for consuming information. For example, I generally can’t read more than about an hour a day (when it comes to books and similar material). I can’t watch YouTube or TV series for half a day either.
And this doesn’t mean that my life is full of exciting events, so I don’t need social feeds. I’m often bored. I often don’t know what to do. But apparently it’s more comfortable for me to be bored than to get stuck in social media. I can sit down at the computer not knowing what to do, try one thing, then another, find something interesting — or not. But that’s not the same as getting stuck on YouTube.
I don’t know why it’s like this. Perhaps it’s some type of nervous system, maybe a certain way of thinking. At one point I needed to follow around 30 Telegram channels and keep track of events in them. After a week I was horrified — for the first time in my life I experienced real information overload. My brain was literally screaming “enough, I can’t take this anymore,” and the only option was to unsubscribe from everything. Mental health is more important.
I see that topics like dopamine addiction and information overload are often discussed now. In popular science circles this is frequently presented as a feature of the brain that we are essentially slaves to. And information overload is described as an inevitability of the world we live in.
It’s a big topic. I don’t know exactly how it all works — maybe I just got lucky. But there is a choice for everyone. It just seems that the effort required differs greatly from person to person: someone gets tired and quits, while someone else has to seriously fight the habit. At the same time, the content itself is neither good nor bad — what matters is how a person feels while consuming it.