“In any given moment, we have two options: to step forward into growth, or step back into safety.” — Abraham Maslow
Apparently, I’ve been well off without WhatsApp. The noise in my head has reduced, my brain is much more functional, and my mind seems to be more settled. But, at the same time, I am scared of the unknown—what if Jesus decides to hit me up on WhatsApp?
I meant that literally, as I am not that religious, neither am I an atheist. But a religious person would be really scared if Jesus was coming to take him to heaven using WhatsApp, but could not meet him online.
Right now, I am not online on most of my Web 2 social media, and as much as I would want to keep it a secret and not divulge how it feels to anyone, I also can't afford to slip up. So, this is just a way to remind myself why I started this in the first place.
Firstly, it serves as a way for me to detach myself from all the noise. While I won't even want to say I hate social media, I honestly have started to see it as a problem. Logically, it is not the problem in the sense that it is whatever we make it to be. We either use it to our advantage, or it uses us to our own detriment.
Just like the brain is a good servant and a bad master, social media also becomes toxic to us whenever we can't control its usage and power over us in terms of screentime and content consumption.
My stepmum is one to stare and scroll TikTok all day long. And even though she does it at her shop when she is alone and without customers around to attend, much of her time is still never used to attend to her business because any little time gap between attending to customers, plus other urgent activities, is utilized to scroll through one or two videos.
I wonder if she knows how she could’ve used that time to engage in other forms of activities or not. Not that it has any repercussions for her because she's well off and without anything to strive for, but wouldn't it be a little bit better to spend more time on other things than scrolling social media all day?
At least, this is what I have been doing for some days now, and I have now started reading like I've planned to. I was done with Chapter 1 of No Excuses today, and I can't wait to get through it all and see how much better it is than scrolling down the screen of zero return.