What I learned from my 30 day internet fast

(I'm usually pretty concise in these pastebins but this one is turning out pretty ranty/rambly so sorry in advance)

So from February 4th to March 4th I took up a challenge to block all internet media for a month. This included the 5 sites I spend the most time on by far:

Twitter
Youtube
Reddit
Discord
Twitch

I was mainly motivated by a realization that I spent way too much time on youtube and I figured if I was going to block youtube I might as well go all the way and see what happens. So what changed?

To my surprise, not a whole lot. It felt pretty lonely for sure but I didn't find myself wishing I had any of these sites back all too often, and my daily life really didn't change all that much. However, this may have been due to the fact that I hadn't blocked crunchyroll so I ended up watching all of Hunter x Hunter instead of doing the work I wanted to optimize and falling into my same old traps (lol). If I didn't want to do my work I found a way to distract myself from it (whether that be reading a book or listening to music or messaging friends). Many people might see some of these other activities as better things to "waste" time on and I agree to a certain extent, but I can't help but feel disappointed that this fast didn't fundamentally change my procrastinative(?) nature.

Now that I've unblocked these sites, it feels like I'm spending much more time on them then I used to. I'm not sure if that's because I actually am or if it's just the withdrawal but every minute spent on them feels like I'm a damn drug addict relapsing and it's preventing me from enjoying things I used to enjoy. It was already tough enough finding the work-life balance sweet spot at an Ivy-league uni and this latest move has left me feeling honestly the worst I've felt in years.

After my fast, I've been hit with more questions than answers. Is there a critical mass of sites that truly can be blocked in order to ensure that I can't find some way to waste my time online, or will there always be another thing to distract me? Is there merit to becoming the most efficient possible worker if in the process you ruin things you once enjoyed? Is it even possible for me to achieve the level of work efficiency and time management that so many of my peers at university have? or am I doomed to forever be a master-class procrastinator? (even now I'm procrastinating grading assignments by writing this)

I understand that many people that read this may have an opinion that goes something along the lines of:
"No, it's not worth being the best, most efficient worker if you have to sacrifice everything you enjoy"

And I'm not sure if I disagree with that or not.

In buddhist philosophy happiness is defined as a relative thing. It's only when you cast away all of the pleasures of the world that you find true happiness/enlightenment or whatever you want to call it. I honestly believe that to be the absolute truth. I mean once you've shot up Heroin once its the greatest pleasure you'll ever know, there's no way to top it ever. If your lower level brain is hard-wired to look for dopamine it will always ALWAYS default to Heroin. Does that mean you should shoot up Heroin? I think we can all agree that to be a resounding no. However, if you never know how good Heroin is then maybe some dumb online rhythm game can have the same effect and all the way down the line.

The question then boils down to: how much do you have to fast before work becomes the most interesting thing in the world?

I have three roommates who seriously barely do anything other than work, no hobbies no nothing just work constantly and they all seem honestly to be not all that bad off (and they definitely get better grades and better sleep than I do). Elon Musk may be a somewhat bad example, but the guy doesn't really seem SUPER mega depressed (stressed surely but not depressed) and in return he's changing the world.

I felt this even more so when I got addicted to osu back in my freshman year and almost failed out, I've had to seriously struggle constantly with the disparity between what I want to do (honestly just degen and speedrun/play rhythm games all day since the dopamine is unparalleled) and what I want to want to do (become a PhD, start a computational linguistics startup, take the world by storm, speak 100 languages, etc.).

Now it's important to note that the phrasing "want to want to do" is maybe a bit misleading. It's probably better to say that a "higher-level" me wants to do these things and a "lower-level" me just wants to degen, who knows. I've always achieved the best success when I've found a way to align those two (whether it be getting top #1500 in osu in only 6 months, learning Japanese to business fluency in 1.5 years, or getting 56 in sonic) but alas aligning those two this time is proving very tough.

The fact of the matter is this: doing what I want to do, while it makes me happy in the moment, invites the scorn of my peers and my own sub-conscious (<- that's really the killer in my case lmao). On the other hand, trying to force myself to do what I want to want to do requires an incredible amount of diligence (diligence I do not yet have apparently) and ends up putting the two versions of me against each other in an endless internal struggle. Either way the best option seems to be to strike a balance, but my addictive personality won't let me balance my time doing the things I love (I literally can't control how long I play osu and it scares me, the only reason I switched to playing osu mania instead is that my hands give out eventually and it forces me to stop after about 2.5hrs).

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This semester is looking to be tough and it will definitely be exacerbated with all of these existential questions I've got rattling around. I am trying to publish academic papers based on projects in both my Machine Learning and Comp Ling classes to maybe have a shot at PhD applications while also having to juggle long weekly HW assignments, an overly ambitious senior design project, two other classes, figuring out housing for this summer, planning Japan trip with friends, figuring out financial aid for my next year of school, editing together videos of the trips my friends and I have already taken, staying in shape (running/lifting), eating right, and upholding my TA responsibilities. I'm not even going to get into the whole decision process for whether or not to get a PhD (lord knows that one is still ongoing).

I have a lot of decisions to make and huge tasks ahead (it's not uncommon to work 80+ hour weeks back to back during final project season) and while I'm not saying I'm the busiest person in the world, my lack of time management and efficiency usually requires me to spend about 2-3x as much time as everyone else to get the same shit done.

On that somewhat somber note I think I'll leave you guys for a bit longer this time. I wish I had more concrete answers to these questions but I don't. I also don't think I will get the answers from just continuing to do what I've always done so as per usual I'm going drastic.

This time I'm going to fast until the end of the semester. That means basically 2 months of no
Youtube
Reddit
Discord
Twitter
Twitch

and for good measure I'll tentatively add in
Crunchyroll
Facebook
as well as some other sites and of course
osu and Stepmania/Etterna

Even if I come out of this even more depressed, I hope that at least I will have done well enough in my classes to snag that "magna cum laude" in time for graduation at the end of spring and maybe even learn a thing or two about work-life balance. It's important for me to experiment with this while I'm still in the bubble of college. I believe once I go to work in silicon valley, I may be overcome with the "hustle porn" mentality there if I don't have a very clear identity of exactly how much work is too much.

Regardless, thanks for reading and thanks to everyone for always being there to support me. Having such a nice and amazing group of people cheering me on from twitter is something I am very blessed to have and I very much do not take it for granted.

tl;dr I've learned nothing, so I'm leaving again lol