Why I Dropped Reddit and Joined Medium
Reddit was an unhealthy habit for me. Medium is a great substitute.
In a world that is so full of suffering and strife, it’s easy to feel depressed. It’s even easier to go about your life without feeling anything at all. But if you want to make the most out of this one chance we all have for happiness, here are some ideas:
There are many ways to make yourself happy. One way is to be around people who make you feel good, and another is to do things that give you a sense of accomplishment.
Watching TV is not the most effective way to spend your time. In fact, it can be a distraction from more important things that you may need to do.
If you ask yourself, ‘What is the most effective way to spend my time?’ and then make a plan for how you’re going to use your time, it can be more beneficial than watching TV.
You may even find that by planning ahead in this manner, you have more free time than before.
The first step in making your life better is to get rid of the things that are holding you back. If there are people who make you feel bad about yourself, it may be time to cut ties with them.
If you have a job that makes you feel bad about yourself, it may be time to look for something better. There are many jobs out there, and if one doesn’t make you happy, then find another.
There is a fundamental flaw in the way human beings conceive of happiness. Happiness means different things to different people, and there are many ways of achieving it, but most people have only one or two methods they stick with over the years. People do not know how to find happiness by thinking about what makes them happy and then doing those things.
They instead look outside themselves for some sort of external guidance on what will make them happy.
The first thing that many people look to is their parents or other adults. They might be told by their parents to do something, and the child won’t know whether the parent’s advice will make them happy or not. But they follow it anyway because they assume that their parents are smarter than them in some way.
And so they are stuck in a rut, doing what their parents told them to do. This is the way we humans are conditioned to believe that we should be happy. This is not wrong per se but it isn’t very useful either because, at some point, you need to get away from your parents and try things on your own.
The most obvious way to find happiness is through pleasure. There are many different kinds of pleasures, but they all share one thing in common: the more you do them, the less pleasurable they become over time.
Pleasure is the first thing most people try to achieve happiness. Why do humans feel pleasure? It’s because they have a biological need for it, and so when that need is met, the brain releases chemicals which give you a sense of satisfaction. This happens with eating food but also other things like sex or exercise.
The problem with pleasure is that because it is something the brain needs, we get hooked on it. Maybe you enjoy going to the movies, and so you go every weekend for a month or two. Then after those months are over, what happens? You don’t really like going to the movies anymore; in fact, you find that it’s boring! And yet because your brain has grown accustomed to getting this particular kind of pleasure from watching movies, there becomes an emptiness inside you if watching movies isn’t happening.
The same thing happened with me and Reddit.
Every day, many moments a day, I would open my smartphone, unlock the screen, and click the internet browser.
The browser would pop open and reddit/r/all would be first page.
Of course, I would refresh the page and scroll down the posts. A few seconds later I would realize that nothing changed on the website since I last visited it, 5 minutes ago.
Many hours of my life lifelessly scrolling down miles and miles of Reddit posts filling my head with meaningless echoes.
Many times posts on Reddit like rage-inducing videos, fights, drama, are specifically designed to create a disturbance and an echo in the user’s psyche. I believe this happens because this kind of mental echo tends to cause a reaction from the user, and reaction means engagement.
Moving On to Medium
So I decided something had to change. I had to change.
After this previous realization, a good friend approached me. He talked to me about Medium. I had heard of Medium before, but just now I seriously considered engaging more with this community.
I quickly created an account and easily got partnered up with Medium.
From day one I started reading from many of the talented writers on Medium and I was amazed.
I thought that the pay for reads system could create mechanization of writers resulting in a poor pile of shit in form of articles. But it was not what I found. I mean, we all have our bad days, but still, the Medium writer is systematically developing their abilities to express themselves in a logical comprehensive way and also growing their inner voices while getting paid a cup of coffee for a few hours of writing.
I discovered that people became more efficient and fluent in communicating ideas. The massive volume of subjects that I feel compelled to write about here on Medium stimulates my mind to go further into the present at any moment of my life.
Implementing Medium in my life was amazing.
Now I can easily talk and express myself about the most mundane things with ease, and English is not even my first language!
I want to thank the Medium community, and please let’s keep the individual spirit of each writer alive.
Don’ Get Me Wrong
I love Reddit and I’ll keep using it. I just can’t have it being part of my routine.
Reddit is NOT a healthy habit. For me. This is how Reddit affected my own perspective and if you wish to share a different perspective, please don’t hesitate to join the conversation!
