In this article, I present a simple program to reduce social media usage and protect yourself from it.
Excerpt:
Most people are in an abusive relationship with social media and the intensity is only getting stronger despite what we used to predict in the past.
The brutal truth is that social media usage has never been higher.
Of course, some will point out that Facebook’s user base is shrinking and that is probably correct.
But the overall time dedication to those sites has never been larger in the history of the world. Yes, a decent chunk of younger people have switched to Instagram (which is still part of FB, technically), but their parents and grandparents are on Facebook.
Wasted Hours = The Most Important Metric
The most important metric past a certain point is not the number of users, but the number of hours spent on the platforms.
Social media know that unless there’s a massive expansion of the Internet infrastructure around the world, they won’t be able to get more users.
In other words, the overall number of users as a percentage of the people who have an Internet connection is already so high that the only way to boost it is to recruit users from poorer regions with absent or subpar Internet infrastructure.
Of course, social media companies don’t want to do that because those new users would have low-paying power and wouldn’t represent valuable customers to advertisers.
Format: PDF
Length: 2606 words
Delivery: Instant download
Payment method: Card or Paypal
Price: USD 0.99
VAT: USD 0.2 (only for the EU)
Buy Now (USD 0.99)
Some advices for Youtube.
Don’t watch YT shorts ever and limit youtube use to 30 minutes a day.
Love all the new content
Thank you.
Purchased and read the whole PDF and it contains some of the best and most down-to-earth advice on the topic you can find. I like how, unlike many content creators (especially “red-pill” and “self-improvement” ones), you don’t promote extreme and often ineffective things such as dopamine fasting/monk mode. They are not necessarily bad when practiced once in a while, but they are overkill for people who are not full addicts, and for true digital junkies it would backfire fast. A gradual approach makes more sense and, eventually, can help people find other and more fulfilling activities outside screens.
Unless you live and work in the countryside, in this age is almost inevitable to be exposed to social media or digital entertainment one way or another, but you can learn to use them responsibly and productively.
BTW, not gonna lie, I’ve some mixed feelings about this “paywall” you are introducing for content like this. I’m under the impression that from now on you will only offer strictly bodybuilding/training posts for free and the rest of more off-topic posts will be premium.
In any case, I think it is fair for you to expect some compensation for the effort you put in your writing. I prefer to pay you the equivalent of a coffee/snack once in a while than doing the same, for an example, to an online newspaper with biased and manipulative information which gets shady funding anyway.
Thank you for your support since day 1 and the review.
My initial plan was to write A Hater Synthesis 3 which I want to be my last book but realized I don’t have it in me yet. I need a bit more experience and skills to make AHS3 the closer that I want it to be. So, I decided to invest in article writing as a way to generate revenue for the site.
I don’t plan to segregate the two. There will be “premium” bodybuilding articles as well as “free” non-bodybuilding articles – the way it has always been. Also, the frequency of free articles will be as high as before or higher.
Thank you, Jose.
I hope the site continues to be useful for as long as possible.
Good to know. Thank you for the clarification.
Wish you best of luck with AHS 3. I think I might give one of your books a try soon.
It should be noted that prostitutes in HR spend half of their time trolling your account on social networks and recording your activities. In some IT-we-are-all-one-family-companies, you must submit a list of your accounts on social networks along with your CV. At the moment reddit is in the background because there is a lot of bad talk about fake-IT-companies (outsourcing, fronend and similar nonsense). A non-Arabic country in the Middle East may require your email and password to enter.
Of course, the services that protect the criminal-state record all your activities on the Internet.
Instagram will likely block your account if you do martial arts, archery, javelin/discus/hammer throwing, fencing, but they won’t block you if you promote your fan-only account.
The great thing about YouTube is that it doesn’t ask for any activity. You can literally leave it talking while you sleep. I believe it is some form of cheating, as is listening to music while you exercise.
I bought both of your new PDF-articles yesterday. Great content as always and at a very low price. This one was such a great article for me personally. I ditched social media years and years ago. I practically have no social media presence whatsoever. I got fed up with Facebook when it was still the thing, and the rest were coming. I just deleted my account and went on. I’ve even been in a job interview a few years ago where the interviewer told me that I’m practically a ghost, because I couldn’t be found on the internet at all. And she was worried about it. Of course, if that happened now, I would ask her if she knew that she isn’t really supposed or allowed to do that, but at that moment I wasn’t able to say that. Of course, they do it everywhere but still, it would’ve been a funny conversation from that point on.
But still, I do use those things. I use YouTube and I have an account there. And it’s just so easy to get sucked in to that thing. Shorts are the worst; I wasn’t really watching those for a long time but now I’ve been watching those too. It’s madness, I only use one platform and I still manage to lose a lot of time into it. The good thing is that I mainly what YT-stuff in the evening as a brainless activity to wind down. For example, yesterday I was watching an old boxing fight and fell asleep after about 3 rounds. But still, I’m hooked on that shit and some days I’m there a lot during the day too. So yeah, it’s the overall time dedication that fucks things up.
Regardless of all this, I still often feel I would like to set up accounts to the popular platforms just to be there and “fit in”. But what do you guys think? I don’t even know which of those to use 😀 And what would be the benefits and the differences. My wife uses some of them and occasionally shows me some stuff, but I often feel that I’ve seen enough of that from YT already. And I can’t really take it too much. Often, I feel that I’m watching someone reacting to someone else watching someone doing something stupid and then the one who is reacting to the thing goes on about how this is wrong or whatever. And it’s just so fucking boring and annoying.
As a sidenote, Truth, you’ve been so productive that I envy you. Would be great to see an article about how you spend your days getting all this great stuff out. I feel like I must get up at 5 am. just to be able to write a comment 😀 But here we go, I’m already feeling bad because I know that someone is getting so much done in the world, and I’m not even using social media much. Maybe I shouldn’t use it, so that I can avoid those bad feelings.
I can’t thank you enough for the support and comments, Sam.
I’ve also witnessed a situation (many years ago) when the people in the office where I was working were passing each candidate through a social media analysis.
They would laugh at the profile picture of the candidates. And to be honest, some of those pictures were indeed funny. It was at this moment, that I knew I can’t have an account with my real name on it as it will be too easy to find and critic.
Like I said – you never know who is watching.
And even if your account checks all the right boxes, it takes you at level neutral at best. Sometimes you could be disqualified simply because the HR people don’t like a post or a comment that you’ve made.
It may be worth it to have a basic LinkedIn account, but then again, you are giving a lot of information for anyone to see.
I think that if you are already married and don’t need social media to make money or promote something, you are better off having a dummy account in case you need to see something there.
Thanks for the reply! I do have a LinkedIn account which I did to get a grade from a course, but I haven’t really been using it. One of the things on my project list has been to update the account and to make it good. But somehow other things seem to get in the way every time. I have written a couple of work-related articles which I should finish up and publish there. But I haven’t had the balls to do that yet. Maybe some day I will. I often seem to get derailed with these things. In overall, just making the basic account more attractive would pay more dividends for me, but I still yearn to do something else with the platform. I’m a master in doing things ass backwards, especially career wise…maybe I should publish an article about that 😀
Curiously, I’m in a similar situation: I deleted most of my old social media accounts and nowadays I only keep a LinkedIn, Instagram and a YouTube account.
LinkedIn is kind of an online CV for me (it has actually helped me to land my two latest jobs). My Instagram is mainly an album for amateur landscape photographies of my solo travels, but other than that I rarely spend too much time there.
YouTube is the only platform I still use purely for entertainment and it can be indeed a big time waster if you are not careful. I don’t watch shorts (I actually hate them in any form), but still their diabolical algorithm constantly sends recommendations of topics I’m interested in, and some of them are like 20 minutes long or more.
Honestly, I think I’m fine with those three and I don’t see any good reason to go back to the likes of Twitter/X and Facebook. I wasted more time on them than on YouTube on things that I didn’t even find entertaining (such as political and ideological arguments).
I have a LinkedIn account too. Somehow, I didn’t count that 😀 It’s maybe because I created the account about 5 years ago because it was a mandatory thing in an English course when I was studying and since then I’ve haven’t really paid much attention to it…unfortunately. I’ve only updated a couple of certificates there. Then again, this may change in the upcoming future because it seems that I’m going to be without work soon.
I hate shorts too, and I hate myself for finally finding something in them too. When I’m tired and / or bored enough I may watch some of them. But they creep up on me. Suddenly I’m watching more and more and at the same time my attention span is going down to the level of a small child. I also feel like watching them mostly when I already know what there will be beforehand. For comfort or something like that. Scary stuff, like said, people should stay away from them.
The algorithm really makes things fucked for me. There are a few topics I’ve watched a lot of things from YouTube during the years, and although I haven’t watched some of those for a long time, it’s still pushing that stuff to me. And sometimes I watch them which of course extends the cycle. What happens is that I recycle contents that are related to the same things over and over and never take the step out of my comfort zone to figure out some new stuff. I have stepped out of it almost by accident a couple of times and I’ve always found some interesting stuff that makes me look at things differently. Overall it feels like some powers are trying to make me just stay in the same cubicle for eternity.
Otherwise It’s just strange and bothering how lazy I’m with these platforms. It’s like I’m allergic to them. It may have something to do with my job. While working, I need to connect to a lot of people through different platforms and applications. After 8 hours I really feel like doing something else. But still, I think it’s the same thing for most people. I honestly feel I wasn’t supposed to be born to this time.
A good article / mini-book
Another reason why we stick so on the screen is the dissapearing physical media.
Until the smartphone you had a separate device for music and video.
You could play a song with you stereo system, boombox, walkman, discman, dvd player, …
There was no need for a computer or smartphone to play content.
Now everything is streaming from your phone or computer to a smartspeaker or smart tv. Brands do everything to push it in that direction.
This way you need a computer or smartphone to play music / stream video. And then you get distracted too by your browser or apps.
With physical media you didn’t had this distraction. You just listened to the music / watched a movie.
This is very true. The convenience is so high and it’s so easy to use. Even when you’re tired, you can still easily do something with your phone. I saw a Ted talk about focus a little while ago. The journalist or whatever who gave the talk had done experiments with limiting his phone time. He said that of all the gadgets and screens, the phone was the worst when it came to time consumption. Through the time limit, he started to gain back his focus and he started to find more creative spells during the day.
Funny thing about the devices. I’m not much of a gamer. I never was, and probably never will be. Even though I’ve experienced some of the most beautiful stories etc. through games. In the past, I remember my friends having Commodore 64s and Nintendo’s and all that. I didn’t, and I kind of never learned to play in my youth. I did have Amiga but I didn’t really play that much in the end. But this backfired later when I started to play more as an adult.
Nowadays as a middle-aged dude my gaming has been once again very little. But the funny thing is that when I have some time, energy and motivation I just don’t feel like turning on the PlayStation. And if I do, then there are the updates and then I’m not going to play at all. Laziness and lack of focus doesn’t really allow me to use the machine. Funnily enough, my friend introduced me to a Stem Deck or whatever the machine is. He said that as a father of a small kid, he just feels that turning on a console and starting the games etc. takes so much time that by the time he could start playing, he just doesn’t really want to do that anymore. But with Steam Deck, it’s just so much easier to start and stop, that he now gets some playing done. Seems that we really doesn’t have much of focus anymore, and then again, our problems are pretty stupid.
Hello Truth seeker.
If you write ‘Limit the usage to 30 minutes or less’
Do you mean 30 minutes for each platform? Like 30 minutes for Youtube, 30 minutes for instagram, 30 minutes for…
Or:
30 minutes for all social media together?
I read you since I was at university (2013)
And now in 2024, the more I read the more I understand that your site is always stayed with me during my “young” adult life.
Hugs from italy irongangsta
Thank you for the support!