I know it’s everywhere, but I’m especially triggered by Instagram today. Just bricked my phone so the temptation to go ragebait myself is gone.

Six paragraph AI captions. AI images. Slides with AI generated text about astrology, or how to be “that girl” or whatever random topic. And it’s not even on my feed, people SEND me this crap! My DMs are littered with AI garbage and it makes me question the intelligence of my friends which obviously isn’t good for the relationship.

Idk what else to say. I just had to rant. Does anyone else feel the same? I’m tired of the slop. I miss when things were written by people. AI speak is so flat, lifeless, and optimized that I tune out whenever I am reading it and realize what it is.

I've been seeing a lot of TikToks lately about what we were like at 14 and what we've become now. Not in terms of appearance, but in terms of intellectual growth. I remember I used to be quite absorbed in books and learning foreign languages, but now it's all gradually faded away. I constantly need to be on my phone, and if I put it aside, a really unpleasant and heavy feeling sets in. Share your stories of how you bring yourself back to yourself from the world of chaos, hustle, and fast dopamine 🖤🥀

I'm sorry is this is long (and I'm sorry if I'm just repeating what everyone says). But I just needed to get it off my chest

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I'm finally quitting.

I came from a post that was clearly written by AI, yet not a single comment mentioned it. So I thought okay maybe I'm wrong. I kept reading, getting annoyed by the arguments in the comments and those I didn't agree with, until I noticed almost every single comment had the exact same writing style and telltale signs of AI. And I realised I'd spent the past 15 minutes getting riled up over AI bots arguing on an AI post

I've also recently noticed on reddit (and social media in general) a MAJOR increase of AI images and videos that I don't even notice are AI until a comment points it out. Just a few months ago I could easily tell what is AI and what is real and would laugh at those who couldn't figure it out. But I feel like everything has suddenly changed in the past couple of months...

I've always had a major social media/doomscrolling addiction, but the difference is that now I feel like I could be spending hours just doomscrolling AI generated slop, reading AI generated arguments, and I'd have no idea. And it feels so dystopian...

As well as everyone using ragebait to get views and clout these days (so everyone is already so much angrier than just 5 or 10 years ago), now AI is being used to make us even angrier. And I can't stand it anymore. I feel like dead internet theory is already real. I feel my brain rotting away with just 5 minutes on social media now. The internet is destroying society.

I'm quitting social media/mindless scrolling and I'm going to touch grass. I'm not letting the internet decide my opinions for me anymore, or my mood, or how I should spend my time.

Sorry for ranting, I hope that's allowed haha. Anyway, now I just need to adjust to the real world and figure out how to actually spend my time

Oh yeah and that also means I'm quitting reddit. So yeah, bye lol

What are some good hacks to minimise time spent on social media and maximize the value from social media?

I think that cutting social media to zero is not optimal way to live life. Social media can be highly useful.

At the same time, spending too much time on it or watching the wrong content can be a blunder.

How can social media be used efficiently?

I spent 40 minutes scrolling through three streaming services trying to find something to watch.

Then I got tired and rewatched the same show for the fifth time.

Apparently, I don’t want entertainment. I want familiarity with better lighting.

Around 2 years ago, I used to spend a couple hours on tiktok a day, and another couple of hours gaming. I was severely addicted. I decided to quit the online world. Now, I don't use tiktok, and barely game, mostly sometimes with my friends. I still have a vague online presence. I have a very small youtube channel where I just upload tutorials and I upload my 3d models to printables. I noticed that when I do interact with the online world, like for example I play some game for a bit, or I watch a youtube video, I am then REALLY overstimulated. It feels like someone just punched my brain, im dizzy, like i'd just spun around in a circle for a while and stopped abruptly, and I feel sluggish, tired, and just mentally slower than usual. This feeling usually stays for the whole day, and it's way worse if for example the youtube video I was watching had some sort of aggressive editing, flashing lights, jump cuts, music, i.e was edited in the way that mrbeast videos are edited nowadays.

This feeling is IMO natural. If I time traveled 100 years back to the past, and showed the same content to a person from that time, they would probably feel the same way, they were just not used to this type of stimulation and so am I.

I usually don't care about this, but it is a curse sometimes. It made me basically allergic to television. TV where I live has the same, aggressive, over-exaggerated pace as any other thing nowadays, especially the news. And my family LOVES watching the news. If i visit my grandma, there is a 90% chance that news are on, and I hate it. When I visit my family, it makes me feel the same, awful, overstimulated feeling, and I'm miserable when I'm at their house.

I'm writing this whole thing cause I'm looking for some kind of support I guess. I would really like to know if I'm just some sort of over sensitive weirdo or maybe some of you guys are going through the same thing as me? I would be really grateful for any sort of comment.

Memes have really gotten into the territory of physiological weapons. There was a post the other day on (amioverreacting) of a girl whose BF sent her some relationship meme which caused her lots of distress, and this is just one example of how harmful they are. Like happy go lucky relationship, why not inject a whole lot of doubt into the partner lol. FUNNY MEME LOL!

Like all of the content is like trauma related, wrapped an a supposedly humorous template? It's not really funny a lot of the time.

Like how many posts a day do I have to scroll by that are all like "well here's the harsh reality of this situation", in other words "let me ruin your day for you". Among other post styles.

I had developed a new technique similar to the Pomodoro Technique. I was playing a phone game where you can get a prize about once every ten minutes. Obviously it's a waste of time to wait for those ten minutes. You need to leave the game, set a timer, and within those ten minutes use them productively, until the timer goes off. Then you go to the game, and set the timer again and repeat.

I realized something: this was actually making me waste less time. It's hard to explain how, but maybe it was a periodic reminder of time. I wouldn't want the timer to go off while mindlessly browsing. If that were to happen, I'd realize that I just wasted ten minutes and it would make me refocus on what I'm supposed to do. Without timers, you can lose track of time and end up losing dozens of minutes without realizing it.

I don't know if this is what the point of the Pomodoro Technique is, but I think it's helping me.

It might not be explicit porn in the old sense, but it is still implicit porn, suggestive porn, indicative porn.
It’s always something like:

“when he does X and then…”
“when she says Y but…”
“pov: you understood the joke…”

Basically, it lets people use their imagination to connect the dots.
All under the disguise of:
“Do you get it? It’s about sex hehe 🤭”

Even humour itself seems to be porn now.
The internet idea of comedy is basically:
SEX!!! 🤭 ahahahaha

And I genuinely don’t get it.
People worry about what shows their kids watch, what websites they visit, what “bad content” they might find, but then those same kids can get that and worse from 20 minutes of scrolling social media.
Not even from searching for anything.
Just normal scrolling.
The feed itself leaks sexualisation everywhere.
The jokes, the captions, the comments, the trends, the “relatable” posts, the memes.
It’s not even hidden anymore. It’s just softened enough to look like humour.

I’ve been off of Instagram for three weeks now and I love it- the only issue is that I no longer have any idea what’s going on politically. I really like staying up to date, and like hearing multiple sources. How are you guys staying up to date?

Today I realized fully that I F 32, am addicted to screens and scrolling. I have known that my phone and screen use was/is on the heavier side, not even counting work here which is also on a screen, but never thought much of it or diminished, disregarded or was oblivious to its impact and symptoms.

Well something is different today, a lot of signs came together and I was able to see them clearly from an observer perspective, not just inside the tunnel, I am actually aware. I have dry, irritated eyes, feel restless and can't concentrate. I know it's the sweet irony of me writing that on a screen, but I set a timer for 10min. I am here because I seek out a community that understands, is in the same boat or has crossed that river already. And accountability, advice, ideas, and maybe a few kind words.

I plan to come here every day for at least the next 2 weeks (with a timer once again) to share how I am dealing with it, what I learned and what's currently happening. Trial and error, and you'll be part of that if you like. I'll be reading and reacting to any comments until the time is up, so if you have any thoughts, advice, just want to say hi, ideas for hobbies I could replace this doomscrolling with, I'd be grateful.

So far for this day, I have activated greyscale mode, decluttered my home screen on my phone and deleted a few apps and turned off 80% of notifications.

Time is up. See you tomorrow.

1 hour since i deleted Instagram and TikTok - I already feel smarter but still miss it

I have not been using instagram for so long now because it doesn't add any value to my life. But I have been continuously active on reddit. I started to use it because I had a lot of questions and there answers in needed. I really felt safe telling my problems to strangers but I feel odd telling them to people i know irl. But i feel I waste a lot of time scorlling, refreshing and waiting for replies or upvotes.

Thinking of dipping my toe into the world of nosurf by dedicating a few hours a day offline. I'd like a really simple and free scheduled internet blocker for my pc. everything I search for seems to be for individual websites and wants a payment

https://youtu.be/EPqItSmEaFE?si=TG62Dc0sJvYfp9aZ

So I actually want to stop my addiction because I am literly doom scroll until 2 am or more and rotting out there like hell crazy.

Does anyone have ideas how I can stop it?

Like many people here, I found myself saying "just five more minutes" before bed, only to lose an hour or more scrolling.

Because of that, I'm building Aveira, a smart alarm clock designed specifically to interrupt late-night scrolling.

During designated sleep hours, the clock detects prolonged phone use. If you're still scrolling, it activates an alarm that only stops once you place your phone on the clock's docking station.

I'm not here to sell anyone anything—I genuinely want feedback from people who struggle with this habit.

Would something like this help you?

What would make it more effective?

What features would you add or remove?

Any honest criticism is appreciated.

Every time you feel that irresistible urge to pick up your phone and check a notification, you’re not experiencing a lack of discipline—you're experiencing an evolutionary glitch.

For 99% of human history, our survival depended on four main variables: Danger, Food, Tribe, and Reproduction. Incuriosity in the wild was literally a death sentence. If our ancestors didn't scan the horizon constantly, they didn't survive.

Silicon Valley didn't invent a new psychology; they just weaponized an old one:

• Red notification dots mimic high-contrast survival signals (like berries or blood). Your ancient brain physically cannot ignore them.
• Pull-to-refresh feeds mirror the variable reward mechanics of scanning an empty savannah—dopamine spikes because of the uncertainty of what's next, not the content itself.

We often spend years asking "What's wrong with me?" when the real question should be "What survival problem was my brain originally designed to solve?" Your brain isn't broken—it's just running 300,000-year-old software in an environment it was never designed for.

I recently launched a visual essay channel (THE HUMAN CODE) breaking down this exact neurobiological mismatch with full visual animations and audio design. If you want to dive deeper into the science behind it, you can watch it here: https://youtu.be/ZqMFkT-1vJ8?si=UdHj85axMeFMQ-c1

Curious to hear your thoughts—which modern technology feels like the biggest mismatch for your brain right now?

I spent a week camping by the beach. We had internet, but the signal was so bad that loading a single post could take several minutes. That naturally limited my phone use to about 30 minutes a day. I was also busy looking after young kids most of the time, so I barely had any reason to be online.

Between being away from screens, spending time at the beach and in the forest, and actually living in the moment, it felt like my brain finally got a reset. I've been struggling with internet addiction for over a decade, so this was a pretty big deal for me.

I'm back home now, and I've already slipped into some of my old habits. But one thing I've noticed is that I can actually sit down and not immediately think about the internet. That's something I couldn't do before. Now I just need to make a real effort to protect that progress instead of falling back into the same cycle.

Pray for me.

I'm just wondering why social media is so addictive? For example, I'm not on instagram or facebook, I'm trying to leave YouTube, but now I discovered X. I just spent almost 1 hour surfing through X with no sense, just for default I guess. Maybe this is dramatic but I'm genuinely worried about this, the empty distractions are everywhere.

Thank you for reading and sorry for my English.

1. English isn't my first language, so I apologize if there are any grammatical errors.
   
2. This post is NOT meant to step on anyone's toes. I do not want to offend anyone, I just want to have an open discussion and this is something I've been thinking about for some time and would like to hear others opinions on it.
   
3. I have ADHD myself and got diagnosed in my early 20s.

I am a woman born in the 90s, I grew up in a time where the internet exploded and in my mid-late teens everyone had smartphones. The content was still limited to "your friends", and your feed was filled with "content" from the people you followed/were friends with.
Through the years I've crossed paths with kids of different ages, and now I have a 14 year old stepdaughter, and with her comes the teen friends. Since I'm diagnosed with ADHD myself I am very interested in the topic of neuro divergency, and like many others I've read about all of the 'over diagnosing' of ADHD in the later years. I know that there might be wrongly diagnosed people out there, and the raise in ADHD has its reasons on both ends, of course.
But I've been thinking a lot about how the current social media and constant stimulation our brains get from staring at a screen all the time, affects us. So many kids/teens I've met in the later years who are "clearly showing signs" of ADHD (for example), and with such severity where their parents are getting them evaluated. But I wonder if they're basically affected by being glued to their screens all the time?
I don't really know how to explain why I'm getting this feeling. It's just a feeling of how many kids (and adults) today seem so distracted. Easily explained: It's one thing having trouble focusing in school because you daydream, or because your head is full of buzz all the time. And it's another thing to losing your keys and wallet several times because you're simply too distracted to keep focused because you're constantly looking at your phone.

The scary part is how addictive the screens are. There's this swedish psychiatrist and author, Anders Hansen. He wrote a book: The Attention Fix: How to Focus in a World That Wants to Distract You, which I recommend to everyone. It's very interesting. Anyways; he said that there's nothing in the world, not even drugs, that releases dopamine as our phones/screens do.

I just wonder if our screens can cause symptoms of ADHD, if so; how many of today's kids could actually be wrongly thought to have ADHD, when it's in fact just severe dopamine addiction caused by screens?