In terms of like, Please For The Love Of God Get Hobbies That Aren’t Scrolling Through An App For Six Hours A Day, I understand and experience completely the argument of like. with the stressors of modern work, you don’t have the energy at the end of the day to do anything but mindlessly watch Netflix and scroll through your phone. but like I would like to gently encourage you to simply force yourself for a time to do something instead of pick up your phone, bc the phone is literally designed to light up your brain with no effort from you whatsoever and it does in fact rot your brain. It makes literally anything but scrolling on your phone seem difficult and joyless. But if you stop scrolling on your phone all the time, and start like, reading or embroidering or gardening or going for walks, you will eventually find the joy in them once more
I understand and it is true that it is hard to have a life outside work and scrolling but there is not a near future where that won’t be the case and you should still live a life. And you won’t create a future where that isn’t the case if you don’t have the confidence and experience and drive to fight for it
the trick is to recognize that there’s nothing intrinsically exhausting about reading a book or painting a picture or doing any of the activities that are meaningful to you. What makes these things seem exhausting is the fact that they’re now competing with cheaper stimulation. In a paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, a group of psychologists suggested that the feeling of effort is a sensation of opportunity costs. When you’re doing something and an alternative activity promises to be easier and more immediately rewarding, the original activity feels effortful.
Therefore, if you want to do the things that matter, you need to make the alternatives less salient. Reading will be hard when Netflix is always an option. Family time will seem boring if your phone is always within arm’s reach. Easier will beat better if it’s always available.
