I finally found a way to break from the social media addiction.
I am 24, when I was 19 my screen time was horrible. (To be fair, it was during covid.) I would spend 4 hours a day just on Instagram.
It might be a cliché solution, but what helped me was basically a mix of forceful restriction + finding something better to replace your freed up time with.
Instagram was the easiest to give up because I was finding no value. Twitter, Telegram and YouTube were the toughest.
On my MacBook, I launched an AI agent to tinker with my DNS configs and block YouTube traffic completely. I asked it to use a complicated solution that would not take me 5 minutes to solve. Although I still could tinker around and figure out how and get myself to YouTube again, it is too much of a hassle.
So how do I watch videos? I use Invidious, it is a YouTube mirror. I've setup a new Brave profile and bookmarked all the channels I love to watch, so that whenever I want to watch something, I watch just that and the algorithm does not control my decisions!
I have two phones, one of them is stripped out of all social media and is only there to serve me as a camera, browser, and a phone to call people if that's still a thing. On the second one I have Reddit, Twitter, Telegram.
For two of my phones, I asked different relatives to set up the screen time password. It blocks me from accessing all the bad time consuming websites, but it allows to use Twitter and Reddit for 30 mins a day after 6pm. Imagine how embarrassing it will be if I will have to call the relatives and ask for the code. No thank you!
You can see that I deliberately try to make it painful to access it. This is because I spent most of my life in front of a computer and opening a YouTube tab would probably take less than 2 seconds. And that's what I would do when I was in college. Imagine how unproductive that is.
Now also just putting pain on yourself is no fun! Technology is great and we need to learn to use it. That's why I stuck with Invidious and I still often watch stuff — but on my terms! And I do not feel bad about it.
One benefit that I got from all this is — I enjoy long form YouTube videos again, and I do not need to watch them at 2-3x speed. There was a time where watching a video at a normal speed was just painful, I am happy that now that is gone.