Thank you so much to The Great Courses Plus for sponsoring this video.
Have you, like all other Netflix users who haven't been living under a rock, watched
the new documentary The Social Dilemma? Did you also find yourself put off by the histrionics
and lulled into a false sense of comfort that your internet use is perfectly fine because YOU
have never watched flat earth conspiracy videos or broken a glass safe to get your phone? Well,
stay tuned, because in this video, I am going to cover what the documentary missed, because we all
have problems with our phone, but there's more we can do about it than the movie led us to believe.
One of the things I think makes social media so dangerous is the instant feedback, so
you post an Instagram photo, it instantly starts getting likes, you put something on your Story,
you instantly get views, you upload a video, and it instantly starts getting comments. And, yeah,
the positive stuff is gonna give you a little dose of dopamine, but the negative response,
or even the response that wasn't quite as positive as you thought it would be - it's gonna bring you
right down, and there's just no reason to tie your emotions to such a meaningless and volatile
metric. So something I do is I always make sure to give myself a day after posting something on
Instagram to check how it's doing in terms of likes and comments. It kind of separates me
from it emotionally a little bit, it allows me to move on with whatever else I need to do that day,
and it's also a little bit of delayed gratification, like if I post something that
I'm really excited about and I think it's going to get a good response, I can kind of build up that
excitement if I wait until the next day to see how it performed. And also if you're using Instagram
for business, the results are just going to be more accurate the next day, like, there's no point
looking at incomplete analytics as soon as you post something. I feel like the documentary made
it seem like you just have zero power over what those three evil guys hiding behind your phone
screen choose to show you, but like, generally, your feed consists of the people you follow,
and you do have some power over that, so once in a while, one of my favorite things to do is to just
ruthlessly clean out the list of people that I follow. It is such a satisfying process, and
when you do it, you realize that you weren't even seeing posts from a lot of the people that you're
following because of the algorithm, and so if you didn't notice that you weren't seeing their posts,
you can probably unfollow them. You can also just silence people if you know them personally and
don't want them to get upset. It doesn't mean you don't care about them, it just means that,
for your mental health, you need to not always be seeing the highlight reel of everything that
they're up to. And there are other ways to keep in touch with people that are a lot more active and
personal... like writing telegrams, for example. And the third, possibly the most dangerous,
aspect of social media is the recommendations. So even when you try to curate who you follow,
these apps will still try to suck you in by taking content from all over the internet and
just throwing it at you. Don't let them. So for YouTube, it is ridiculously easy, I found this
extension that you can download that literally just erases your recommended feed. When you open
up YouTube, all you see is the sidebar, the search bar. You can still go to your subscriptions, you
can still search for specific videos or see what's trending, but YouTube does not get to tell you
what it thinks you should watch. For Instagram, it's harder. Personally, for me, it's pretty easy
to just kind of avoid the instagram Explore page, but that's not gonna work for everyone
because social media can be very very enticing and addicting and powerful. I did find this
custom thing that you can download but if you have iOS you have to jailbreak your phone, or finally,
you can just delete the Instagram app and only use Instagram on your computer. So I deleted the
twitter app because it was very distracting for me. Once in a while, I'll go on Safari if I want
to check what BTS is tweeting or what other people are tweeting about BTS... pretty much just tweets
about BTS. But because I do that on Safari and I'm not even logged into my Twitter account, it makes
it much more difficult to access and nowhere near as entertaining. I can't speak for other social
media apps like Tik Tok, because YouTube and Instagram are generally my main dopamine hits,
but I'm sure you'll be able to find some sort of a workaround, and if you're not, you can always
just delete the app, because it's not permanent. If you miss it so so much, you can bring it back,
but it's always a good experiment to try. How would you feel if that app was not on your phone?
You know when you pick up your phone to check the time or the weather and then you get distracted
by something else and you start scrolling and then you forget why you picked up your phone in
the first place? So something similar happens when you go on YouTube to see if your favorite creator
uploaded a video, but then you end up falling down the YouTube rabbit hole into all these other
channels. Or you go to a new site because you want to learn more about some current event but then
you start clicking on clickbaity headlines that really aren't valuable reporting. Well, do I have
a solution for you! RSS feeds! (and i don't know what RDF stands for so don't ask me) Basically,
instead of going to YouTube for videos and New York Times for news, you create an RSS feed that
pulls just the content that you want to see from different sources, and it's kind of like designing
your own magazine. I used to think that RSS feeds were just for old people to follow blogs,
I'm just kidding. But they're actually really really cool, so like, you can make an RSS feed for
a certain Instagram account, for news stories on a certain topic, so like if you live in
Wisconsin and you want to get news on the coronavirus in Wisconsin, you can set up a
filter for stories with those keywords. You can make an RSS feed for a certain YouTube channel.
Using tools like Zapier, or IFTTT (If This Then That), there's a lot of different ways that
you can hack this, so you can have your RSS feed include tweets that mention you, or send your feed
to your email every morning. I included some links to RSS tools in the description, but basically,
instead of allowing the algorithm to tell you what you see, you get to decide what you see.
So there's a rule called the 100 rule that states that "99% is difficult, 100% is easy".
So if you decide to, I don't know, not eat dairy for a month, saying that you're not going to eat
any dairy, like not a single CUBE of cheese, is a lot easier than being like, well, I'll try
not to eat a lot of dairy, but I do love a good slice of cheese on a sandwich. Because leaving
the door just a crack open invites excuses and internal debates like "Should I eat the cheese,
should I not eat the cheese?" that frankly is just a waste of time and energy. So setting
clear rules for yourself can be a really powerful way to curb content consumption. For example with
Netflix you might set a rule that you only watch Netflix if you're watching it with other people.
That way, you get the fun of watching TV but you also get that bonding experience and it
kind of prevents you from using Netflix as an automatic reaction when you're bored or just
need a pacifier. You can also set rules against accessing sites during certain times. For example,
if your mornings are really productive, you might set yourself a rule that you're not going
to check email until 10 am. Of course with all these rules, it's really helpful to have
an accountability buddy or some sort of a tool so that you're not just relying on your willpower,
because you don't want to drain all of your willpower trying to fight the social media beast.
So if you have a friend who's also trying to watch less TV, you can keep each other
accountable and ask each other - did you watch Netflix today? You can use a content
blocker that will block certain websites when you need it to. Basically, just find
tools and methods that make it as difficult as possible to engage in those bad habits.
As you're using social media, pay attention to what makes you go down that content rabbit hole,
or makes you not feel so great about yourself, and try to find workarounds for those specific
pain points. So for example, in Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, there is a story of this girl who
got herself a wristwatch, not a smartwatch, just a regular old stupid watch, because she noticed
that whenever she picked up her phone just to simply look at what the time was, she got sucked
in by other apps. "Okay Google, what time is it? It's time for you to get a watch." If Instagram
is generally okay for you but it's those Instagram Stories that really suck you in, then silence just
the Stories of everyone you follow and then slowly you can start bringing back accounts of people
whose Stories you genuinely are interested in. If there is a Facebook group that you participate in,
like my book club (SORRY THAT'S NOW CLOSED), you can create a bookmark. That's what I did,
because that book club is pretty much the only thing I do on facebook, so that allows me to
bypass my feed and go directly to the book club page. If there's some video that you
keep referring to all the time, instead of going to YouTube and typing in the search bar and then
potentially being distracted by other videos along the way, you can just bookmark that specific
video. And remember that none of these rules or deletions have to be permanent, so like, if you're
studying for an exam and you really really need to focus you might decide to just cut off all social
media cold turkey, and then once you've taken the exam, then you can bring it back into your life.
Not all content is created equal, so you can't say like, oh, social media is bad,
the internet is bad, technology is bad, so you have to constantly be asking yourself,
like, "is this valuable to me?" and valuable doesn't necessarily mean productive, like
entertainment can be valuable too, it could just be a meme account that brightens your day whenever
it pops up into your feed, but it doesn't take you down that rabbit hole and drain hours of your
time. Or it could be something that teaches you something and satisfies your curiosity, so thank
you to The Great Courses Plus for sponsoring this video. It is a subscription-based learning service
where you can listen to lectures and courses from Ivy League professors and experts from places
like National Geographic and the Smith- Smith- SmithSONIAN. I've literally visited those museums,
I should know how to pronounce them. It's been more than a year since I graduated high school
and I honestly kind of miss learning, especially now that my brother's doing online school, like,
I'm low-key jealous of him, but then I remember that, oh, right, I didn't like a lot of my classes
in high school. So learning on The Great Courses Plus is like school, but if school were only the
things you were interested in, and there was no homework and no tests and no schedule... so
basically nothing like school. So one course I'm taking is money management skills, because school
fails spectacularly to teach you actual personal finance and I've been trying to work on that
lately, so like, I recently started my retirement savings account and saving for an emergency safety
net. I also remember I really liked learning about religions in world history class so I'm currently
watching this course on Buddhism as well. And then I just have this gigantic watch list and I don't
know if I'll ever get to all of these, there's just so many different courses that you can do,
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just thegreatcoursesplus.com/theblissbean, and let me know what courses you guys do.
Technology is always trying to make things easier. Better. Faster. Stronger. And I think
that has gotten us to a bad place, because we are now realizing that sometimes we need things to be
terribly inefficient, so like with my budgeting spreadsheet, I have to enter
all of my transactions manually, and I love doing that because I don't want some app doing
all of that, taking care of all my money behind the scenes automatically, especially as these
days we are using less and less cash and buying something often takes just the click of a button,
and so you never really feel the weight of the purchase. So when it comes to phones and social
media, you can also try to make things difficult for yourself. If there are certain social media
apps you rely on as pacifiers for whenever you're bored, delete them from your phone and only go
on them on the computer, because that'll take a lot more effort. You also don't want everything
on your phone to be so easily accessible at your fingertips, so I'll be uploading a new
phone tour this Friday and I'll show you exactly how I set up my phone, but like seriously,
just a couple of simple tricks have made my phone so much less fun to use and I use my phone way way
less. But basically the gist of it is, if an app is distracting, make yourself work to access it.
Put it somewhere where you have to swipe and swipe to reach it and disable it from appearing in the
spotlight search function so that that's not a shortcut you can use to cheat. Hide away apps
in your folder so that you have to have a specific reason for going and looking for that app, rather
than just opening it out of boredom. You can also rearrange your apps frequently so that your brain
doesn't get used to it and that your fingers don't just like mindlessly go to distracting apps. They
say that you shouldn't just try to cut out a bad habit without also replacing it with a better one,
so one trick you can do is put a more helpful app in the place where a distracting app used to be,
so for example, maybe you deleted Netflix from your phone, kudos to you,
now replace it with something like The Great Courses Plus app, so that anytime your brain
wants to see what's new on Netflix, it'll be shocked when it accidentally opens up the
playlist of courses that you're taking. Making the internet browsing experience a little slower and a
little more annoying is also really effective, so there's this extension for your computer
called Pause that makes you wait five seconds before accessing distracting sites, and that
little moment to rethink whether you should really be visiting that website often keeps
you from going there altogether. So there is even more that I wanted to cover in this video, I was
going just a tad bit overboard writing the script. I really wanted in this video to just provide like
the practical hacks, techniques, and tricks to help you use your phone and social media less,
but I also have like a lot of criticisms of the documentary and like philosophical thoughts on
this topic. So to satisfy my desire to talk and talk and have people listen to me talk, I started
my own podcast. It wasn't quite that narcissistic, I've been thinking about starting a podcast
for a while to share more in-depth conversations about the stuff that's been interesting to me
and because today is National Podcast Day, I thought it was the perfect day to finally start.
So my first episode is currently up, it's a more targeted response to the documentary and
specific reasons why I thought that it missed the mark. I also talked about the specific hurdles of
using social media as a content creator, how I exactly use social media, and what accounts
and channels I follow. I also talked about why I don't really watch YouTube anymore,
so you can find out all about that and other interesting things in my first podcast episode,
so the link is in the description to check that out. Please subscribe to the podcast and share
it with your friends, I have like some graphics on my Instagram Stories to make it easier to share,
it really means a lot to me, I hope you enjoy it, and if you have any ideas for topics we should
cover or guests that I should invite, please, by all means, let me know, I need ideas! So thank you
so much for watching this video, please give it a like and subscribe to my channel if you think that
my videos will add value to your life, otherwise, please curate your social media and make the
intentional choice not to subscribe to me. That wasn't even sarcastic, I genuinely don't want to
be a negative, harmful distraction in your life, so yeah, I'll see you next week with a new video,
hopefully, if you do decide to stick around on this channel. Bye! "I'm gonna just like
pick up my phone and like be looking at it okay? "Okay, I've already started the video." "Okay."