I genuinely cannot remember what i did with y time before social media and that terrifies me more than any horror film could.

Like what was i doing? Reading? Staring at walls?

I must have had the same 24 hours. The same restless 11pm energy. The same "I don't want to sleep yet" feeling.

But somehow I survived without a For you page.

Now i can't sit in a waiting room for 4 minutes without opening Instagram, closing it, opening Twitter, losing it, again opening Instagram and somehow an hour has passed and i have learned nothing except that a dog in Japan can skateboard.

The scary part isn't that social media taking our time.

It's that we don't even remember what we did with that time before. It's just gone like it never existed.

Comments

Linda_The_Explorer•2 months ago•2

That's actually sad if you cannot remember your life before social media unless you were too young. Looking back at pictures or talking with friends/family could help bring back memories.

For me it's scary how much time we waste on social media doomscrolling. We waste years just to watch funny videos, read shit posts/rants or follow lives of people we don't know.

Perhaps moving forward with life you can be more intentional of your social media usage and just pay attention to your life off screen. Put limits how much time you spend on socials and fix your feed by unfollowing accounts & marking content not relevant to you. For example, I follow accounts I can learn something from.

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HitxLerr•2 months ago•1

I feel this. I used to burn entire days just resizing assets and tweaking decks, and none of it was even creative work.

What changed everything was getting serious about my workflow. Instead of doing everything manually, I streamlined the process so each step has a clear role. I use Claude to get fast first drafts of copy, Runable to turn those into clean carousels and decks without design friction, and Buffer to handle distribution.

That shift alone took something that used to take 5 to 6 hours and cut it down to around 90 minutes.

The bigger point is that if you keep doing repetitive work manually, it eventually drains you. The volume catches up fast. Once you automate the boring parts, you get your time and energy back for the stuff that actually matters.

J-Clash•2 months ago•1

I'm from before social media AND before internet times!

We still had books and TV and board games and video games and phone calls and music and so on. You could try deleting those apps and seeing how your day goes - live in the present and take in the world around you.

Vegetable-Refuse2273•2 months ago•1

Former social strategist trynna recover from being so damn online for years.

The way social hijacks your dopamine system is real and works even if you’re very aware of it. The key for me was to find pleasure and dopamine hits away from my phone and the internet in general. Reading is super helpful, so is casual conversations with strangers, sitting in a movie theater, crossword puzzles, for some reason I find playing gen 1-3 pokemon to be a great alternative. We’ve been conditioned into thinking that boredom and lacking attention is bad but being more intentional with time and being ok with temporary moments of boredom (although sometimes it’s really hard) makes me feel the grips of online life less.

Once I started to think of social media as a real space that I spent my time, I was reminded of how awful it would be if I were physically there. If IG, TT, or Twitter was a mall, I would hate spending time and money there… hope that helps. Fuck overstimulation

Nazvil86•2 months ago•1

Yeah, if you’re at the point where you can’t remember who you were before social media, it might be time to delete the apps and literally touch grass.

I work in social media marketing, I’m constantly keeping up with the updates and changes, changing my content for clients to fit in line with changes, it’s literally my job to constantly be on. But the second I “clock out”, I’m basically tossing my phone away and unless it’s a close friend texting me or family, I could care less what’s happening being posted.

It’s definitely not healthy to be so dependent on things like this (anything really). And while I’m sure you didn’t intend for this post to “be that deep”, not taking a break can have some pretty horrible effects on yourself. Even though I work in this field, every now and then I pray it just all comes crashing down somehow lmao.

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