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practical_romantic  3yr ago (text post)   4435 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 23, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I'll be honest with you here. Sometimes I read your comments and get frustrated.

The class of problems you struggle with can be bunched into the "young guy trying to gain social status" category of problems. And guys will do everything from lifting, to careermaxxing to not using social media to go on a "dopamine detox", etc.

The issue with this is that change along this is made in the span of years/decade not days or months. So reading yet another post of yours where you have yet another problem is irritating because you know it won't be the last one for a long time.

The best thing you can do is to go offline, and come back after you have made significant progress to your life.

ColdTurkey or some equivalent could be useful here. You can program it multiple ways to block something, either based on URL or even by window name

But I'll warn that it's only as good as you are: your Other Self will constantly try to find ways to bypass (and will likely succeed). And the obligation would be on you to block those new roads too. You can't just maintain a static list.

You're probably lucky: I'm using it for porn and...well, there's always more so you're always updating block lists. Instagram probably has limited mirrors for your friends' pictures.

(You might also need something else for your phone, I know I'm still trying to deal with that avenue of temptation).

Depends on how you use the internet, but you can block domains in Screen Time on iOS, and password protect Screen Time. Use same suggestion as elsewhere in the replies — use a long, randomized password you keep written down, somewhere, that you won’t remember and would have to go retrieve.

Change your Instagram password to something random you cannot remember. Remove the Instagram app if you have it installed on your phone. If you use Instagram on a laptop, change the zoom to be maximized and use your addblocker (you use an addblocker, right?) to block everything on the site.

Edit: You say you use third-party browser apps to access their accounts. Remove those apps now! Use your addblocker to block everything on their page in the appstore. Set zoom on those pages to 500 %. Basically same as above.

All of this can be reversed/circumvented if you really want to, the goal is to make to make it too many clicks to be worth the effort, and to give you time to reconsider.

Do 30 pushups every time you find yourself on insta.

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