Jiwon's Alcove

No Optional Websites: Month 1 Update

A month ago, I expressed a desire to live without optional websites as infinite feeds were making me feel overwhelmed. It's been a month and the experiment was largely a failure.

These addictive websites prey upon my lowest moments. If I am having a great day, then abstaining is easy. On the bad days, doomscrolling is a surefire drug to quell depression and anxiety.

Although most social media websites are a waste of time, my main vices Youtube and Reddit are often valuable sources of information. As such, a flat-out ban hindered my work on the good days, and I still ended up doomscrolling on the bad days.

As such, I chose to block the hompage, r/all, and other subreddits' browse page using the Less Distracting Reddit browser extension while still allowing me to read individual posts. This allows me to use Reddit like Stack Overflow.

Abstaining from r/all, in particular, has drastically improved my mental well-being. The r/all page is a cesspool of the platform's most emotionally charged posts that inevitably makes me mad at the state of the world or the internet's villain of the day. I took the grill pill and ignored it all. I was happier for it.

For other websites, I will throttle internet bandwidth to 1Kbps and block images by default. These changes make web browsing much less appealing. I'm allowed exceptions for work necessities. We'll see how that goes!