Glued to Your Phone? Here's How to Rethink Your Relationship with Social Media
I&#x27;m starting to get annoyed with these articles. Most people cannot use things like smartphones and Facebook &quot;responsibly&quot;. To think you can compete with companies that have virtually unlimited financial resources available to highjack your attention and get you hooked is completely naïve. It&#x27;s like telling a heroin addict to &quot;rethink your relationship with heroin and use it more moderately&quot;.<p>The only realistic way to reduce the grip of the these technologies on your mind is to use fewer of them and completely opt out of the worst offenders, like FaceBook, and TickTok.<p>I&#x27;ve deleted most of my social media accounts at this point and gone back to a more basic phone and my life is noticeably better for it. Sure there are some inconveniences and some people think I&#x27;m a weirdo, but it seems like a small price to pay to get my brain back.<p>So much of the power these technologies have over us is not that they&#x27;re so useful or wonderful, but that there&#x27;s a social expectation that we use them, i.e. people sending social invites via FaceBook, stigma against the &quot;green bubble people&quot;, etc. We use them initially because of social pressure and then get hooked. If even a small and stubborn minority opted out of some of these technologies, say 9% of the population, reasonably distributed across ages and demographics, a lot of these expectations would disappear or at least reduce.