A year ago, I started reading other people’s blog posts. I like it to gather different quick-written thoughts and expressions, as they are (mostly) easy to understand and extend your perspective on the unnoticed but significant steps. At some point, I understood that it helps me to get away from my mobile phone addiction, and this changed my view on addiction quite a bit.

Craving constant stimulation

A long time, I was suffering from doom-scrolling TikTok syndrome. The first thing I did after waking up was to take my phone and start scrolling. With a screentime of a few hours, I probably wasn’t the worst off, but I really hated my mobile phone addiction. I decided to try to get rid of it once and for all.

The first step was to uninstall TikTok. Steps like these always seem helpful at first, because the change in behaviour is quite apparent in the beginning. But after some time, you realise that the other apps you now use more, achieve a similar level of stimulation, and the situation didn’t even change a bit.

A more extreme example can be seen in selling my Galaxy Z Fold 5 in favour of the Unihertz Jelly Star, a super small 3-inch Android smartphone. I removed all social-media apps and only use them for ‘necessary’ stuff, like messaging, calling and navigating. You cannot deny that it didn’t help at all: It’s really not fun to look at the screen. I nearly completely eradicated my screentime to a daily average of 30 minutes. My mobile phone became my side device, replaced by my desktop.

And this is the problem. I got a new main device. The less screentime I had on my mobile, the more I had on my desktop. So what’s the purpose of all this? How can you effectively work against such an addiction when you always have access to it, never mind all the efforts of removing the access?

This was one of the first times in life when I realised that things are more complicated than they seem at first glance. The simple solution of removing the device in problem does not remove the habit in problem. I need to work on those habits and not just throw everything away that seems like it could be misused by me. This is where I learned that you need to replace habits with different (weaker) ones.

And here comes Hacker News! I mean, this is basically the same as TikTok, right? People create some stuff, you watch it, you (not) happy. But this is why this habit is weaker, and therefore better for my everyday life:

• The amount of new content is very limited in comparison to TikTok, which makes it easier to get a break.
• The length of most blog posts is perfect: they are long enough not to throw you into ‘doom-reading’ hell, and they are short enough to keep you entertained in reading.
• I think the content (or the way the content is delivered) is easier to grasp due to a different target audience. It’s less about polarising, more about personal knowledge extension.

This type of habit shift is exactly what I needed! I don’t feel the need anymore to stimulate myself with short-form videos, because I’m happy with the (much less) time I’m spending on peoples’ blog webpages.

Creating content

A month ago, I started thinking: What are those people who create content? I always felt very distant from these kinds of people, but in a negative way. And it really started itching: I want to create, too! I want to write about my expressions and my thoughts, and I want to share what I know with the world. After some thought about post topics, I gathered a list of things I want to talk about, and now I’m determined to try this out.

With my own blog, I want to achieve:

• appreciating more where I am right now, and being more upfront about it.
• creating the same positive feeling that I get after reading a good blog post for my (for now imaginary) readers.

So this is my first blog post about creating blog posts (yikes, I feel like that was done before).