Convenient Inconvenience

Last year, while talking to a great friend of mine about addictions, he mentioned that making things inconvenient for oneself is a good way to stop doing them. I started off by DNS blocking YouTube domains on all my devices, the reason was that I was addicted to watching speedruns and letting YouTube lull me into a state of mindless video consumption. I could still access YouTube if I wanted to through alternative frontends like Invidious or Piped, but let's be frank, the UX of those slightly sucks. Surprisingly though their bad UX is a good thing. As expected I stopped frequenting YouTube and began doing other things, like watching TV shows, programming, actually playing the games I was watching people play online. In the end this experiment turned out to be a great success.

Next I wanted to tackle Discord. Current alternative Discord clients focus on making the Discord experience better, but I weirdly wanted a worse one. So I looked at terminal clients briefly, but those are hard to use, don't display images and don't really work well on mobile. By that point I've already setup Matrix and have been planning to use it to bridge services like Slack and Facebook Messenger that I don't like the UX of anyway.

So I bridged Discord through Matrix and joined only a select few Discord servers on a completely new Discord account. As expected the time spent on Discord went down a lot, I stopped idly chatting with people and looking at memes. My overall life quality went up and then later I expanded my new life style even more by limiting online communication in general.

What I wanted to get across using this post is, that making things inconvenient for oneself works great if one wishes to control how often they do said things. This applies to gaming, YouTube, social media and many more things I personally cannot vouch for. It does of course require sacrifices and a rather large amount of time depending on what technical solutions one decides to adopt.

I would also like to warn that it might lead to a slight disconnect from current events and from your friends. An overwhelming majority of people frequent Discord and other social media, especially younger folk, which means that if one disconnects from such platforms they loose out on a significant portion of socializing their peers do.

A good way to combat feelings of loneliness that may arise from radical changes in ones life is to realize how people lived in the past and to cherish real world interactions much more. Each conversation with a friend is a gift and it is imperative that it is taken seriously and thoroughly enjoyed.