Addiction, Ambition, Depression

I’ve seen many people around my age get addicted to the spontaneous flow of information-driven by social media, mobile phones, & the internet. There’s always a need to recheck what new unnecessary message they’ve received within the last minute, and if there’s none, what their favourite influencer posted?

This addiction has benefits but has left a lot of people misguided — from spending about 70% of their awake time unproductively to believing that life should be enjoyed and that the path to success is a straight line. This conviction has made a lot of people overly ambitious.

Having ambitions is not a bad thing, don’t get me wrong, but nobody teaches these lots that they need to put in work to achieve whatever they want to. Multiple times, I have seen people watch their role models living their dream lives, travelling from city to city, riding expensive cars and, and I hear them scream “We must make this money” while laying on the couch all day doing nothing and this is where addiction becomes a bad thing.

With the thought in mind, that things work out after the first trial and that life is supposed to be as smooth as a straight line graph, people expect success to drop on their heads when they wake up in the morning, watch Netflix all day and scroll through social media the next. When this doesn’t happen, they feel like they have bad luck, wonder why their own is not working out like their social media age mates and pick a drug to get them high so they can forget all their problems, responsibilities and reasoning.

Asides from having ambitions without any plans on how to execute them, we also have cases of people living their lives off what someone else believes, taking advice from someone popular — a celebrity or role model even, when they are not in the right position to give such. by right position, I mean by knowledge gained from reading or experience. The end product of these is a generation of illogical people in masses claiming “woke”.

To fight these, I think people must pay keen attention to how much time they spend on screen, what and who they are paying attention and finally, understand that if wishes were horses, beggars would fly.

In the end, I’d say be inspired, not influenced.