It's time to start living again.

It simply is because of that damn phone.

Living in the modern world means keeping up with modern times—social media, responding back to text messages, and living the "picture perfect" life that everyone is supposed to strive for. We use social media to keep up with friends. family, news, trends, and hot topics but, have we ever thought about simply taking a step back?

Photo by Lidia Nikole on Unsplash

Within the past few months I have found myself in a rut—constantly feeling as if I was behind, not "good enough," not living the perfect life that we see when we scroll through our feeds, always being accessible 24/7—and I felt like shit. If I was feeling like shit, I know there were others out there who were feeling even worse.

With the average person spending around 2.25 hours a day on social media (for others, including myself, more time spent on there), it leads me questioning, when it is time to start living again?

Let's do some math—lets just say the average person spend about three hours on social media every single day—that comes out to twenty-one hours a week. Let's take twenty one hours and multiply that by fifty-two weeks—that comes out to 1,092 hours—which is 45.5 full days we spend scrolling on social media. Let's not forget, this is for the average person. Think about someone who spends five to seven hours a day scrolling away on social media. Roughly that would come out to almost 73 days strictly dedicated to scrolling. Let that settle in.

Photo by ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash

Back in 2024, I wrote an article about my toxic relationship with social media—specifically TikTok—and the impacts that it has left on me. Fast forward to a whole year later, I still have a toxic relationship with social media but, I finally broke up with TikTok (see ya, loser). The constant scrolling, over saturation of consumerism, profiting off others insecurities and vulnerabilities, quick doses of dopamine, and selling my time scrolling for large social media platform—I have had enough. The device that I keep in my pocket has more control over me than I do over myself.

Digital overload is what consumes anyone who has access to any digital device. An article titled, "Why can't we read anymore?" demonstrates the digital overload that our brain is always trying to process—in simple term, consistently craving a dopamine rush hence the reason it is hard for him to read. My perspective changed after reading two books—Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. After sitting down, reading and journaling with myself about these books that were written long before the smart phone existed, the correlations between the past and what is happening now are parallel. While both books are surrounded by political topics (another blog post in the future), it is still relevant to how we perceive the world and what consumes us.

Now, there is a shift when it comes to social media and the use of it—are we reverting back to simpler times? In all honesty, I don't think so but, I would like to believe it. A recent trend has appeared on my bookstagram surrounding the concept of hobbies and why 'hot girls have hobbies'—we do have some pretty cool hobbies—or 'ways to spend your days without doom scrolling.' After seeing a couple of these posts and idea that we should find hobbies instead of doom scrolling left me feeling as if that was an obvious answer. With that odd gut feeling, I found a YouTube video speaking about how Gen Z has just discovered what hobbies are. Within the video, there were concepts about how people are no longer having a sense of identity due to social media and the key take away for me was, scrolling is the new hobby *cue the existential dread*. Don't get me wrong, I love social media and I love the community that I have built on it but, when is enough, enough?

While this does feel like a dump session and laying all of my thoughts onto a blog post, there is a message that I am trying to get at here—it is time to start living again. It's time to put our phones down and learn to talk to one another, create communities, experience being bored for once, having niche hobbies that are not being sold to you, to have long sessions of spilling your heart out about your favorite topic, and to simply live without the constant comparison to a false reality that social media has made.

Maybe I am getting old or maybe I am developing but, we as a society have let social media be the center of attention for too long—even my parents are becoming addicted to it.

This idea came from a recent Substack post where I found myself questioning, are we really trying to give advice on how to pay attention again? But, if there is content out here about how gain our attention spans back, I have more hope in humanity then ever before. Don't get me wrong, the article was a great read and I would highly recommend to check it out, but it lead me back this reoccurring thought I keep having—it really is because of that damn phone. We, including me, spend so much time on our phones that we are truly forgetting what it is like to live again—to go on walks, to wear fashion and clothes that represent us and not a whole, to chat with strangers without coming off as 'weird'—and in simple terms, to touch grass. We all become absorbed by an app that is exploiting our time to make a dime.

Needless to say, there is a shift within our society that people are starting to become burned out on social media and the implications that follow with it—including myself. It feels like a breath of fresh air to see others on social media platforms alluding to how toxic and distorting social media is to us. It no longer feels like I am screaming into a void or screaming into a crowd of people who are looking up from their screens and giving me a judgmental side eye. While I am not anti-social media (because that would be beyond hypocritical of me), I am anti-letting-it-dictate-us.

It's time to start living again and it's time to start being a human being.