“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
Social media. The time wasting, addictive drugs that let us subliminally express our deepest narcissistic thoughts. At least,
this is the experience of millions of people . Maybe your situation is different. Like any powerful tool, social media can be used for good, as well as bad — and in particular case, it was bad. Let us tell you this, social media is a whole different monster.
Everyone is spending hours every day snapchatting, instagraming, facebooking — and whatever else. If you’re not involved — you’re an outsider. You’re looked at as weird and stupid. A loser. You’ll struggle to get invited to events and people won’t want to be friends with you. Sad, but unfortunately that’s just the way things are. Remember that one kid who was always chosen last to play games? That’s essentially how kids who don’t use social media are looked at.
Do you know how many books you could have read with all that wasted time instead? Let’s do the maths. If you got a phone when you wene 13 years old and you are 17.5 now. You can easily say you’ve spent around 3 hours on social media every day since then, therefore:
17.5–13= 4.5 x 365 = 1642 x 3 = 4927 hours wasted. You don’t even want to get into what you could’ve accomplished in those 4927 hours. A ridiculous amount.
Nevertheless, getting worked up over things like this is pointless. There is a Chinese proverb that goes like this.
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
We think it’s relevant. It’s never too late to start over.
7 things you’ll notice so far
Deleting these ever-so-crucial apps off your phone was far from easy. You’ll figure the best way to do it would be cold turkey.
1. You regularly feel like you did when you were a child — a feeling of overwhelming creativity and not caring what people think. You don’t necessarily know how to explain this feeling, but it’s something You have missed a lot. When You was regularly using social media you would always be paranoid about what people thought of you — should You speak your mind, or say what’s right just to fit in? You’ll be glad You have now figured out the answer to that question. Life now feels a blank canvas, and you are Pablo Picasso about to paint a masterpiece.
2. You’ll have an abundance of free time on my hands. You used to always be struggling to find the time to do what you needed to do. My phone would distract şou and you up your free time. You would be late for work and quite often decide that you didn’t have time for the gym. Now you are incredibly productive and always manage to get everything done.
3. You’ll stop feeling inferior to others. We’re all constantly comparing our ‘behind the scenes’ to others perfectly curated image of themselves. You have to remember scrolling through Facebook thinking, “ah I wish I could have that”, “he’s so lucky”, and other ridiculous thoughts like that. You’ll think like that anymore. There is not a single person you would rather be on this planet, than yourself. You love myself and you are absurdly excited about your future.
4. You are happy, extremely motivated and in the best shape you have ever been in. You were none of those while you were constantly using social media. You were depressed, lazy and in mediocre shape. In three months you’ll have lost almost a fifth of your body weight and you now go to the gym every day. As far as happiness goes, doing and creating makes you happy — so obviously since you’ve been doing those more, your happiness has increased dramatically.
5. Sounds cliché, but you figure out who your “real friends” are. Easy to be friends with someone when it’s convenient, isn’t it? You’ll lost 80 percent of my friends since deleting your social media. These people ignore my texts because you are not ‘relevant’ anymore. It’s been nice to get rid of those people. You only want to be friends with people who you feel are more progressed than you — who you can learn from and look up to. None of your old friends fit into that category. Most of you are probably in the same boat.
6. You’ll have started appreciating the smaller things. You don’t know if it’s because you have slowed down and been able to look at things from a different perspective, but you have become a lot more appreciative of what people do for me. You’ll have quite possibly the best Mother in the whole world, and you never appreciated her as much as she truly deserved to be. Do you know how lucky we are to be able to wake up in a bed, with instant drinkable water and a roof over our heads? Incredibly. Appreciate the little things.
More in touch with the real world. It’s safe to say while you were addicted to social media, you were disconnected from the real world. Not only was you spending most of my spare time on it, but when you were engaging in real life social interactions you weren’t really ‘present’. You more focused on scrolling through your Facebook newsfeed. Ironically, you’ll remember thinking, “If I delete all my social media, won’t I turn into one of those disconnected, weird people who never leave their room?” — which is essentially what you were, while thinking that. Funny.
7. Deleting social media has been the best decision you have ever made. It’ll make you closer to your family, more disciplined towards your studies, eat healthier, work out more and has given you plenty of free time to read as many books as you’d like. Life is great.
Like anything in life, moderation is key. But when you’re taking your last breath on this earth, will you be thankful for all the Snapchats you’ve sent, or all the Facebook articles you’ve read? Or will you remember all the moments of joy spent with family and friends? Or the experiences and thrills the world has the offer?
Get off your phone.
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