the internet and you

not to be confused with scott wozniaks short comedy film "the internet and you."

the internet is probably the most interacted-with piece of technology that people use daily. for someone like me, a generation z'er, i have lived my entire life with the existence of the internet, and yet it still finds its ways to impress me with the sheer power that it has in our lives, and what you can do with it.

however, the unfortunate reality in todays age is that the average consumer doesn't use the internet, but rather the internet uses them. this is shown in the widespread use of social media, shopping, pornography, and more recently, artificial intelligence.

i have noticed more recently that there has been an uptick in people wanting to escape this, and wishing to return to a state of the "analog self," which is really just an excuse for buying useless crap that they don't need. i may talk about this later on in a future blog post.

so how do we actually return back to a state of peace with the way that we use technology? well, we first need to start with the way that we contribute to the web. take a look at your internet activity over the past three days. did you comment on anything? did you make a post? did you interact with any user-generated content? chances are, you might have done something that has led to the uptick in this content being published. hell, it doesn't even matter if you interacted talking about how its garbage or how you don't like it, because on social media, any publicity is good publicity.

because of this, the first, and most important thing that you can do is just simply ignore content that fuels garbage into the world wide web. and more importantly, be intentional about the way that you use the internet. don't just mindlessly scroll instagram, but rather use instagram for the intention to view a photo your friend shared, or to post something to your story. ideally, you wouldn't be using instagram at all, however that can be a lot to ask, especially when people start their first digital detox.

the key is baby steps, but if you find yourself wanting to go back to your old ways constantly, then your best move from this point forward is to increase friction as much as possible.

without friction, failure is inevitable.