"turning your brain off": my new blog post

[rnottelovesowls]

in my latest blog post here, i go over my opinions on a certain principle that people who spend too much time on the internet have been following since 2020: "turning your brain off". don't think, just consume. and why i feel that's not a good thing, and what you can do to break from it

here's an excerpt from it:

i mean, i get why. i get why you'd want to scroll through tik tok 2 hours a day. i get why you'd want to indulge on junk food. i get why you'd want to go on temu and buy a haul of stuff you don't need. i get why you'd want to watch an anime about an average joe in a JRPG-esque fantasy world getting super OP skills and a bunch of hot girls who all want to [REDACTED] him. life is frustrating, and sometimes you just want to melt your brain and numb yourself to it all. i get that, i really do.

if anything, that just makes me hate it even more.

[lakes]

I think it's a good blog post. I like how you balance out your critique with empathy here. It's a thing a lot of people who rant about consumerism have trouble doing. It's very easy for people to just blame the consumer as if they alone created the conditions which cause mindless consumption.
I remember the argument that sometimes after a long day of work, you just want something on as background noise while you do your chores. As someone who's had trouble focusing on things even when I enjoy them especially if I'm too tired, I kinda understand it. There's also the fact some people feel as if they don't have the time to sit and focus on it.
But I do hope this changes. Not to go on a tangent, but there's also something to be said about how modern media turns dissatisfaction with itself into culture war talking points. I HATE how people have co-opted the critique of most movies being nostalgia bait remakes & franchise films to be racist on twitter or youtube or whatever. It's all just so people don't blame CEOs and stuff. I'm not saying everything has to be an original work. After all I watch anime and most of that are adaptations & there are franchises and remakes I like. Hell, the 80s classic horror movie, The Thing, that's a remake. But it's hard to deny that the market is saturated with this stuff lately which is why I mostly try to avoid remakes/sequels unless it sounds of interest to me.

[Memory]

I definitely understand your thoughts here. I've actually been unchaining myself from a lot of social media and general internet activities recently (and if I DO need to keep up with something on social media: i'll just add it to my rss reader. then it's a curated, specific access point to something), and I do feel a bit better about it (I've been at least one and a half months gone from twitter, and oh my goddddd I don't feel as miserable as I did for a while lol). I might do that week-long suggestion in the latter half of the post, but with more than just social media. Curious to see how I'd feel.