An Introduction & Topic Announcements

Hey everyone, since this is my first post I’ll go ahead and just introduce myself a little bit so you have a better understanding of who I am. My name is Arya, and I’m currently an undergraduate student in college! Now, outside of this blog’s scope, I enjoy weightlifting, playing keyboard (piano), reading, and spending time with friends. Okay, no more high school ice breakers, sorry about that! You basically know everything about me already.

I study Computer Science, so I am constantly looking at a screen, and after some time I really realized that this isn’t something I should be doing. My posture is messed up, my brain relies on dopamine from popular apps, and I now instinctively check my phone every few minutes without a second thought. If this sounds like you, don’t worry, this happens to be a large majority of people nowadays. Luckily, I’m here to (hopefully) revert some of the damage we’ve done.

Now, I’d like to clarify in this first post that I’m not some guru, I don’t have a degree in anything relevant to psychology, but as someone whose job is to stare at a computer and code all day, I think I have some valuable anecdotal and science-backed information to help you (I’ve done lots and lots of research). Everything I tell you about is something I’ve tried and lived through.

I decided to start doing this since it seems to be a great outlet to express some thoughts and discuss the relevance of different strategies in terms of reducing screen time and really just living in the moment. Technology is awesome, it’s changed the world in so many ways, but I think it’s caused some very deep-rooted issues in the average person (mainly Gen Z) that should be addressed. For example, “doom scrolling”. This is the act of scrolling through short-form videos mindlessly. It’s become the norm, which in my opinion is a terrible thing. It’s good to enjoy things you like, but short-form videos are a different beast.

Short-form videos program your brain to only really enjoy and deal with short content. You slowly lose your ability to handle longer videos, and you’ll find yourself clicking away from anything longer than 5-10 minutes. This was me too, even for videos teaching me tips and tricks to be better, I found myself skipping to timestamps to just see the tips and nothing else. I’m still guilty of this, but I’m a lot more mindful and have found myself to be more tolerant of normal content.

Sorry for the lesson there, but there are numerous other downsides of the Internet and it’s growing industries (primarily entertainment), but we’ll take it one step at a time.

My newsletter will be focused around the following topics: technological well-being, mental health, balancing life inside and outside the digital world, setting boundaries, and improving your life and reducing the reliance of digital content. If these sound interesting to you, stick around, you may learn a thing or two. These days, I find these topics to be relevant to almost everyone I know.

My goal is to turn you into a person of balance. Your screen time and reality time are perfectly balanced, meaning you get the best of both worlds, while maintaining your mental health. Let’s fix your brain and your lifestyle together, and even if you’re all good, maybe you’ll still pick up a thing or two from me!

I hope to see you again soon.

See you soon, team!