What I Learned from My 7 Day Internet Consumption Reset

For the past seven days, I’ve been abstaining from internet consumption like specific news websites and social media.

I have successfully completed the challenge without any issues. However, it’s only after the challenge ends and life begins where the real challenge lies.

In the announcement post, I wrote the following:

Recently, I’ve noticed that whenever I have five minutes of free time or feel bored for just a moment, I always default to a behavior that isn’t what I wish for. Most of the time, I end up grabbing my phone and start consuming either Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, or news websites. It’s quite awful, and I usually get no value out of it. In fact, most of the time, I feel even worse than before the activity started.

I can say that this seven-day-long challenge really helped me reset some of my defaults. I’m not saying that my habits shifted completely, but I’m more aware of some of my actions.

I’m planning to slowly, if ever, introduce those “banned” mediums back into my life. I think that I will keep most of those websites blocked. I will allow myself some news consumption using the Artifact app, which isn’t perfect, especially due to the infinite scroll mechanism, however, I’m a fan of the design of the interface. I will also keep using Reddit, YouTube, and Twitter frontend alternatives like Teddit, Invidious, and Nitter to consume some of the more useful content on those mediums.

Sometimes Reddit is just the best place to find certain information. A lot of people I like tweet about their projects or post new YouTube videos. I think that YouTube is one of the best education resources, however, we don’t use it as such.

We use infinite scroll apps when we want to numb ourselves from the realities of the world. Most of the time, it’s because reality and living in the moment is just too painful.

This challenge allowed me to reset some of my endless consumption and showed me that life doesn’t end if you stop yourself from always consuming content. I’m grateful that I took on this challenge.

Next step is to figure out how to reintroduce some of these technologies to further improve my life.