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Thoughts on the digital diet.

Sun Feb 21 17:48:57 PST 2021

Last week, I have challenged myself to go through a ``digital diet'' where I would cut off my internet video usage and focus more on either spoken or written content. Now that a week has passed I think it's time for me to think about that exercise.

For the most part, the digital diet was a success. My goal was to eliminate my incessant amount of internet video consumption and to that extent I was able to do it with relative ease. However, it would be disingenuous of me to say that I didn't watch any video during that time. At some points during the digital diet, my partner sent me YouTube videos of things that she thought funny and I watched those. I also opened YouTube once at work to show a video to my professor about something that we were talking about. But aside from those occassional instances, I did not watch any form of internet video.

During this whole exercise, stopping something that I'm so used to doing made me realize how my daily activities form around those habits that I've picked up. Watching videos while eating, shitting and lying in bed. It's pernicious and those are activities that I haven't realized have been caused by these habits that I've picked up. Though I'd argue that it's not wholly true and, to a certain extent, I believe that those wrapped into those activities know that they're being wrapped into it.

Regardless, doing this exercise yanked me off of my habits and made me aware of the dangers of slipping back into it again. Last night, I've watched my first few internet videos again and it didn't feel the same. After finishing all those backlog of videos from the ones that I've been following I've closed my video client and read some gemini pages.

Hopefully that one sticks for the long run.