Social media sees endless amount of content with regard to ‘utilizing quarantine time’ to ‘make ourselves better’ every single day. With pretty much the entire world locked down, the internet is taken so much for granted that every second we have a load of new content providing suggestions to make the best use of this time. And while a lot of people around us online seem to be doing one new thing or another every single day, there is a much greater need for an important online skill today – to distinguish between quality content and pretentious nonsense.
Quoting from a personal experience that most people might agree with, most of the activities that have been trending online during quarantine are fancy and popular but despicably shallow. The accomplishment of making dalgona coffee sure makes us look sophisticated but I’d never know how long the gratification lasted or what result it yielded. Every other person we follow is developing a new hobby of either photography, cooking, playing music or sketching.
Let me make it clear that I do not have anything against people taking time for things that make them happy, even for a short time or showcasing their simple accomplishments online. These are hard times, and everyone has their own way of dealing with it; online gratifications can be one such way. But what happens when we consume such content, all day long, every day for months together?
The time that we have received during this peril where thousands of doctors, nurses, policemen and sanitation workers are working thrice as hard is no short of priceless. Given that we make good use of it, we can in fact put ourselves years ahead of our competition or emerge with strategies that we never had the time to think about. What we do instead is make a video of a new hobby we developed or click a picture of a minutely recognizable sketch and show it off online. Our loved ones giving us gratifying feedback is all the accomplishment we aim at.
How far is your newly acquired sketching hobby taking you in your career? How accomplishing will the dalgona coffee seem when a colleague returns to work with his/her next moves sorted out and you’re just where you left? How impressive is that home made burger look when an associate has incorporated into his/her life the benefits of advanced yoga?
The internet is feeding us all sorts of things. Some go as far as saying that the motivation to utilize this time well is leading to anxiety in a lot of people who just want to relax. Perhaps they’re right, it’s just that no ambitious person can ever belong to that category.
Be careful of the contents on social media that you consume, especially during this time. Maybe make that dalgona coffee if it tempts you so much but also ensure that fancy trends on social media aren’t the centre of your universe. Don’t just read or watch content that recommend web series or movies that you can binge upon to ‘kill time during quarantine’. If you are healthy and at home with food and with access to internet during this time, you are luckier than perhaps half the population of the world. Don’t spend it consuming and creating mediocre, momentary gratification based content online.
Featured image taken via Google
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