Set a screen time limit

Escaping social media is a mission that keeps finding its way back to me. Ever since I read Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism, I have always wanted to keep improving my control of social media.

It comes to mind every time I find myself deep in social feeds, doom-scrolling, wasting my precious youth, I’m running out of, watching videos that offer little help to my life, little value to my existence.

We have become a generation that finds solace in these infinite feeds, letting go of precious social relationships, letting go of skills we could build, not building hobbies that would make us happy, in fact holding onto the infinite feeds that make us rotting engines or rather baits of advertising conglomerates.

I think about all these, and the next time I get bored, I barely resist picking up the phone. Then I think about it, our brains are practically wired into this media consumption by now!

The idea is not to live a life away from social apps; I don’t think it’s practical in today’s day and age. I think the idea is to take control.I keep thinking, as a generation, are we moving towards unhappiness, maybe because we spend our days mostly triggering dopamine with these social feeds, and never find ourselves in control of anything in our lives?

There’s this feeling around a lack of control when it comes to social media feeds. Even though we are made to believe that we control what we see, in reality, it’s not the case. It has become just another tool, a platform to show us more ads so we make more purchase decisions under its influence. I don’t forget the sense of connectivity it creates with our family and loved ones. Staying up to date with them feels closer, wherever you live in the world.

Therefore, social media is not evil. It’s just how we use it. This is why we should advocate for control. Consume the social feeds, but with limits in place. But how can we set these limits? I used to clock 5-6 hours a day on my screen time, kudos to Instagram and TikTok. When I googled one day to see what the global average of screen time was, which was around 4 hours at that time, I realised I am a screen addict.

I’ve set a 30 minute screen time limiter for all social media apps per day. This includes all the apps with a limited time. So it’s up to me now to decide which app I would spend more time. If I spend 20 minutes on Instagram, that means I can only spend 10 minutes on X or Reddit. Even though a technically simple solution, this creates a sense of limitation, a sense of finiteness within the behavior of scrolling. As a result, you try to spend whatever the time you spend on these apps, wisely. Rather than being controlled by the infinite social feeds with adverts, you take control of your time.