Imagine that if you would like to quit all your social media accounts now, how would it be? Do you think that all your wasted time will come back to you? Will your happiness come back to you? Do you think that you can live peacefully from then? I think, yes, maybe for certain days. You can enjoy with your friends, family, talk to your neighbours or co-workers.
We all know how important social media is to us. Then why do we wonder about addiction? Do we not realise how all these things became part of our life? Actually, its because of you. Yes, you brought all this mess into your life and now worry about how to get away from it.
Well, now it’s not the time to decide whose fault it is and bring another headache. Remember when you came to know about these sites, how happy you were? Connecting with your friends around the world, sharing the happiest things of your life with your beloved friends and family? Don’t forget that – those happy moments happened because of the invention of social media. So, do you really want to miss all those happy moments that are going to happen in the future? Well, certainly not, right?
But you will say, “because of social media, my life is a mess. How do I stay happy?”
Actually, there is no way to bring back the lost time and happiness again. But there is a way to change your habits, and the way you use these apps or sites.
Actually, I am also just like you – struggling to get back my lost life from the social media jungle. One day I was on the verge of deactivating my social media accounts. But, I didn’t do it completely. I did uninstall the Facebook app from my smartphone. But I used my browser to open my Facebook. It helped me in two ways. First, I got rid of an app which was not useful and was also wasting the storage capacity of my smartphone. The second thing was the urge to open that app. Remember that it’s easy to open an app but in a browser, I need to sign-in with my credentials into my account to use it – and that was just too much hassle.
But again, after a few days, I came to the same dull, boring and endless feed of content.Now, I thought of something and eventually got an idea to change the content altogether – that is I decided to improve the quality of my content feed. Before this, it was always about funny cat or dog videos, funny memes or tagging my friends in useless posts. But I ensured that this was going to change.
So, what did I do with my feed, that brought happiness and connected me to the world again? It’s very simple and easy. I just kept my friend list as short as possible. Secondly, I unfollowed all the stupid content I didn’t like or didn’t want in the future. Let’s put it like this, “what does not bring any value, knowledge, has no benefits to me.”
For example, I like to spend my free time on posts about cars, bikes, technology and stuff related to that. So, I unfollowed the rest of the pages and made sure to follow only verified accounts. This is important as many authorised accounts don’t post stuff randomly and ask you to share, like, and comment on them.
As I am not a big movie buff, I didn’t feel the need to follow accounts and pages that post movie trivia. God knows how many fan pages there are for our beloved actors and actresses.
Now, my feed is clean and clutter-free. Moreover, I get more of the stuff which is useful for me and increases productivity. The pages I follow give me more information and increase my knowledge about things that are happening around me. So, every time I go on Facebook, I am using that time to know about something which I previously didn’t know.
The next thing is Instagram, which is easier to become addicted to. As I also know about my dear friends and the things they do in real life, I decided not to follow them unless they were worth following. No offence to my friends, but I came to Instagram to share pics of my hobbies. But very soon I had my feed full of actresses from all around the globe, and a few models whose names are very hard to pronounce. I realised that I was not getting anything out of that, apart from their success.
It’s a really great thing to be in good shape, and I really admire them for that and admire how hard it is for them to be like that. But looking at them is not my intention right? I came to this platform to share and find stuff I want to know about, and there are a lot of people like me – and better than me – who click awesome pics. So, guess what I did? Yes, the same formula. Applied it to this platform and voila! It worked like charm.
And finally, I applied this awesome formula to all my social media platforms such as Twitter, Quora, Youtube, etc. The best part is that it worked for them too. Actually, the formula is simple, follow want you really want to see, hear, and listen. The opposite of “Gandhi’s Three principles”. Build an ecosystem of content which really helps you gain knowledge, increase your productivity. Here, is the formula:
Positive content + Dedication = Increase in productivity, value and decrease in time waste
This is my story. I want to be more productive and value my time, which, in return, helps me in gaining some knowledge. And most importantly connecting to the world of like-minded people. Thus, I can say that I am using these platforms to my benefit and to my advantage.
You can also do this same thing by applying it to your social media platforms, rather than complaining about it and committing “Social Media Suicide”. IIf you are interested in fitness, yoga, learn about them. If you are into cooking, then follow the renowned chefs around the world to know the secrets of their recipes. If you’re interested in current affairs, business, and finance, then be part of those communities. Don’t cross your boundaries.
This is to help and educate those people who are unable to leave their social media platforms but don’t know what to do with them.
There are some noteworthy things to remember:
- I don’t open these platforms every alternate five mins.
- Instead, I open them when am free or commuting or have finished most of my work.
- Don’t solely depend on these platforms to learn things, find people around you with similar interests and talk to them.
- This is just an alternative way of using those platforms. Understand the implications and my intentions.