Curating your Consumption

When you think of your life currently, how much of it is real? I, like many other young women, use the app "Pinterest". It's lovely. Consider when you make a Pinterest board. You find beautiful images and group them to perfection. Come New Year's Day, you make it a goal to emulate the board. Live the "dream life" you see online. But you can't.

It doesn't exist.

Throughout human history, we have made it our goal to live comfortably. Doing this and that so that each generation of children can have a "better life".  There is no arguing that the standard of living has gone up in the past decades. Our predecessors have lead our generation "good times". Most of the people who will read this blog likely have experienced these good times. We rarely worry about where our next meal is coming from. We rarely worry if we will have a warm place to sleep tomorrow night. There are clearly still issues in the first world, but in general, the audience of this blog hasn't had to fight much to survive. So, without having to allocate time to basic living, we go to the next best thing.

Entertainment.

The average Gen Z member spends over 6 hours a day on their phone. But, since we aren't spending our time fighting to hunt and gather and fight polio or whatever, we must be much happier, right? Not even a little bit.

The World Happiness Report published findings that proved phone activities correlated greatly with unhappiness.

I know, I know. "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have b-". Not telling everyone to throw their phone and live in a cabin.

So, my goal with this blog is not to demonize our phones. I could show a chart, similar to the one above, regarding food consumption. There is clearly nuance to this. Two people could eat an identical 1500 calories a day, but if one person is eating all Oreos and the other is eating a balanced diet, their health outcomes will be very different. I will be focusing far more on type of consumption rather than consumption as a broad topic. Frankly, I get frustrated with "blank=bad" analogies.

When the internet was first made, it presented endless opportunities. It still does! We have endless knowledge right at our fingertips. I think it's hard for our generation to realize the implications of this, but it has never been easier to learn. People would've killed for this ability to be educated.

But most of us don't use it for education. We use it for mindless consumption. At least with television, when you put on a show, you knew what you were consuming. With social media, you scroll with little care of what you put in your body. If a stranger offered you a pill to swallow with undisclosed ingredients, you would be a fool to swallow it. Why do we regard media consumption so differently than we regard food consumption?

So, maybe you will still consume 1500 calories of screen time per day. But, I implore you, as I will focus on again and again in the coming blog posts- be mindful of what you consume. Treat your brain as you treat your body.

You are in control of you. Developers did not design social media with your best interest at heart. And just as a last, somewhat ominous reminder-

If you did not pay for something- you are the product.

Ahh ladies- I am beyond excited to get my ideas out there to the world:) This blog will be focused on a whole bunch of things that I love; hopefully I am able to write everything in a way that is not only interesting, but applicable to lives of young women everywhere.

Have a lovely lovely day:)

-Maria