ฝึกพูดภาษาอังกฤษด้วยเทคนิค Shadowing จากวิดีโอ: it really was the damn phone: i stopped scrolling and remembered who i was

A few days ago I checked my screen time and did the math.

At four hours a day by the end of this year

I'll have spent the equivalent of 61 full days looking at a screen.

Over the next 10 years that becomes almost a year

and eight months and if I'm lucky enough to live until around 85

and nothing changes I could spend almost 10 years of my remaining life this way.

Years.

Whole pieces of my life that I'll never get back disappearing so gradually that most days I don't even notice they're gone.

But somehow that still isn't the part that scares me most because time isn't the only thing we're giving away.

What scares me is what's filling it.

Every day I absorb hundreds of other people's faces, thoughts, opinions, desires, homes, relationships, bodies, fears, tastes.

Before I have time to wonder what I think, there's already something else to think about.

Before I know what I want, I've been shown a thousand things I could want.

And somewhere inside all of that noise, I think something very quiet happens.

You can stop noticing what came from you, what you actually like, what you would have thought about if nobody interrupted the thought,

what you might have made if you hadn't spent the evening watching other people make things, and who you are when all of that noise finally goes quiet.

We talk a lot about social media stealing our attention, but I'm starting to wonder if it's taking something much harder to get back, the space in which we become ourselves.

Chapter one, who are you without the noise?

There's a genre of social media content that makes me irrationally annoyed.

It's the, I heard we're not wearing this anymore.

This aesthetic is over.

This is what we're wearing now.

Or like my personal favorite recently, I heard we're dressing like our Venus signs.

Obviously, trends have always existed.

People have always influenced each other.

Before TikTok, there were magazines and television.

And before any of that, there were simply the people around you.

None of us develops our taste in complete isolation.

But I think what's changed is the magnitude of the influence

and how little space now exists between one influence and the next.

You used to close the magazine.

The program ended, you walked home from school, you stared out the car window, you laid in bed.

There were gaps and inside those gaps eventually there was you.

Now there really doesn't have to be.

Every empty second can be filled by another person's opinion, another recommendation, another version of what a beautiful or successful or interesting life is supposed to look like.

Before you even get the chance to decide what you like, you can be told what everyone else likes.

Not just what clothes are fashionable but What kind of home is beautiful?

What kind of relationship is healthy?

What kind of person you should become?

Sometimes I wonder what I'd actually choose if nobody had shown me any of it.

Like what would I wear?

What would I find beautiful?

What would I care about?

What would I want?

And maybe one of the more uncomfortable questions, at what point does the algorithm stop predicting our taste and start creating it?

There's a difference between being influenced by the world and never having enough silence to actually hear your own response to it.

I think we've become incredibly good at collecting references for who we might want to be

and increasingly bad at sitting quietly enough to discover who we already are.

Chapter 2.

A lifespan watching other people live.

There's another contradiction that's been bothering me.

Never before have we had access to this many ideas or this many possible ways of living.

Before breakfast, I can watch someone move abroad, paint a picture, start a business, renovate a house, or completely begin their life again.

And somehow, instead of making us endlessly creative, I think sometimes it does the opposite.

There's a strange way that watching something can begin to feel like doing something.

You save the recipe instead of cooking it.

You watch someone paint instead of taking out your own paints.

You collect ideas for the life you want until the collection itself starts to feel like progress.

You consume the feeling of possibility, and for a moment, it almost feels like you participated in it.

Meanwhile, if you pull the camera far enough, you've just been laying in bed for the past three hours.

Your thumb moved, your life didn't.

And obviously I don't say that from some superior position because I do it too.

I've watched people create things while ignoring my own urge to create something.

I've watched people read books instead of actually reading a book.

I felt inspired by watching someone else's life and then somehow been too overwhelmed to do anything with that inspiration.

And that might actually be one of the strangest costs of all.

We've never seen so much life, but seeing life and living it is not the same thing.

There's a particular kind of sadness in having the urge to paint and deciding that painting sounds like too much effort.

Painting asks something of you.

You have to get everything out, make a mess, possibly be bad at it, and stay there when you don't immediately know what to do next.

Scrolling asks almost nothing.

And once your brain gets used to receiving something new every few seconds, ordinary life starts asking for an uncomfortable amount of patience.

A book takes time before it becomes interesting, a hobby takes time before you become good at it, and creating something means spending long stretches of time with nothing but your own thoughts.

Maybe that's why it's possible to feel endlessly inspired and somehow create very little.

Chapter 3.

Everything becomes noise.

Even advice annoys me these days, which is odd because I used to love that side of the internet.

I built a career talking about ideas that helped me and things I've learned about life.

But I think something happens when every meaningful thought exists in exactly the same stream as everything else.

Someone tells you about the most important thing they've learned after losing someone they loved.

Second later, you're watching a man fall over, then somebody's crying, then an ad, then something horrific happening somewhere in the world, and then an outfit you might want to buy.

The content is completely different, but the experience of receiving it is exactly the same.

Watch, react, move on.

There's barely enough time for anything to land before it's replaced.

A thought doesn't have time to become another thought.

Sadness doesn't have time to become reflection.

Inspiration doesn't have time to become action.

And after a while, I think some part of you starts protecting itself by caring less.

I've caught myself thinking I've seen it all.

Not literally, of course.

The world is enormous.

There are people I haven't met, books I haven't read, places I haven't stood in, and parts of myself I haven't discovered.

But sometimes the internet creates this strange feeling that nothing is really new anymore.

You've seen so many beautiful things that one more beautiful thing barely registers.

So many transformations that another before and after means almost nothing.

So many supposedly life-changing ideas that even something genuinely profound can begin to sound like content.

And I don't want to become so accustomed to seeing everything that nothing really reaches me anymore.

Chapter 4.

What happened to boredom?

100

Somewhere along the way, boredom became an emergency.

101

Waiting for coffee, standing in a queue, arriving somewhere 5 minutes early.

102

Those moments now seem to require something to fill them.

103

We've created a way to escape almost every moment in which absolutely nothing is happening.

104

and for a long time I thought that was convenient.

105

But now I'm starting to wonder if those moments were actually incredibly necessary.

106

Because when there's nothing to consume, your mind starts wandering.

107

A memory resurfaces, one thought connects to another, you realize why something has been bothering you,

108

you get an idea that seems pointless at first and then 10 minutes later becomes something you want to make.

109

Maybe boredom was never empty.

110

Maybe it was simply space.

111

Space for an inner life to stretch out.

112

space for creativity, space for thoughts that weren't immediately interrupted by somebody else's.

113

Maybe boredom was one of the places where we met ourselves and we filled it.

114

This is what worries me more than losing the hours themselves.

115

We're also losing the little unclaimed moments that used to belong entirely to our own minds.

116

A quiet breakfast, a train ride, a walk home.

117

Those moments seem insignificant, but when you remove enough of them, where exactly are you supposed to hear yourself think?

118

Chapter 5.

119

The disappearance of the private self.

120

There's another change happening that's even harder to notice.

121

We're becoming very accustomed to seeing ourselves from the outside.

122

There can be this imaginary audience hovering in the background of your life even when you have no intention of posting anything.

123

You notice whether an outfit feels current, whether your home fits the aesthetic you thought you wanted, whether an experience would make a good photo,

124

or whether your life looks like the life of someone who has it together.

125

And I think humans need parts of themselves that nobody's watching.

126

You need things you're bad at and never turn into anything, interests that make no sense with the rest of your personality, mornings nobody photographs or beautiful days that produce no evidence.

127

You need privacy to become someone.

128

Because if you constantly experience yourself through the imagined eyes of other people, eventually you can start curating yourself before you even know what you actually feel.

129

I don't want my whole life to become a performance of myself.

130

I want there to be a version of me that only I know.

131

Chapter six, but I need it for work.

132

This is usually the point where I start bargaining with myself.

133

I need social media for work and I genuinely do.

134

It helps me to stay connected to people.

135

It gives me ideas.

136

It makes me laugh.

137

Sometimes it even teaches me something that genuinely changes the way I think.

138

I don't believe any of those things are fake excuses.

139

I think the problem is that something can be useful but still take more from you than you intended to give it.

140

I tell myself that I use social media to stay connected

141

but there are friends whose lives I've watched through Instagram for months without actually calling them.

142

I tell myself that I use it for inspiration

143

but at some point I have to ask how much inspiration I need before I make something

144

and it's for work is especially convenient when something begins as work

145

and ends 45 minutes later with me knowing way too much about a morning routine of a woman I've never met.

146

There's also a difference between consciously deciding I want to spend the next hour doing this

147

because it's fun and looking up after an hour realizing it disappeared.

148

I don't think the answer is pretending social media has no value.

149

I have a life because of the internet that I could have never imagined.

150

I've met people through it, learned from it, and built things because of it.

151

I don't want to throw all of that away, but I don't want the thing that connects me to the world to disconnect me from myself.

152

Chapter 7.

153

What's all this replacing?

154

That's the question I keep coming back to.

155

Not just how much time am I spending here, but what is it replacing?

156

Because time is never just time.

157

An hour spent scrolling is also an hour in which something else didn't happen.

158

And maybe I wouldn't have done anything extraordinary with it.

159

Maybe I wouldn't have written a novel or done anything productive at all.

160

Maybe I would have read while it rained outside, made tea and actually tasted it, sat in the grass with someone I love,

161

walked slowly enough to notice someone playing music on the street.

162

Maybe I would have done absolutely nothing.

163

I think that matters too.

164

Because a life is mostly made of things that sound insignificant when you describe them afterwards.

165

making coffee, choosing what to wear, walking somewhere, eating dinner, looking out a window, talking to someone you love.

166

The major events become the landmarks when we tell the story of our lives, but most of the actual living happens between them.

167

And if we're not careful, we can become so obsessed with being entertained during the in-between that eventually we lose the in-between itself.

168

Then one day the years have passed and I wonder what remains.

169

If I live until 85 and spend years of that life looking at a screen, what exactly am I going to remember from those years?

170

Probably not the reel that made me laugh on a Tuesday

171

or the stranger whose life I watched religiously and then completely forgot existed.

172

And yet those things will have taken real hours from a very finite life.

173

That's the part that scares me.

174

Not because every second needs to be meaningful or productive.

175

In fact, I want the opposite.

176

I want lazy mornings and stupid conversations and afternoons where absolutely nothing happened.

177

I just want to actually be there for them.

178

Chapter 8.

179

Coming home to yourself.

180

There's a million solutions now.

181

You can delete apps, you can set time limits, you can buy something that physically blocks you from opening them

182

and I think all of those things can help but they can only stop you from reaching for something.

183

They can't tell you what to return to and I think that part actually matters a lot more.

184

So maybe the goal isn't simply to spend less time online.

185

Maybe the goal is to actually remember what it feels like to be you

186

when no one is telling you who to be.

187

What do you naturally move towards when no one's watching?

188

What do you like before you know whether other people think it's tasteful?

189

Who makes you forget that your phone exists?

190

And most importantly, when do you feel most like yourself?

191

For me, coming back to myself looks incredibly ordinary.

192

It's reading on a rainy afternoon, getting completely lost in something I'm creating, writing until some loose thought I've been carrying around finally makes sense,

193

making tea without needing to fill the two minutes while it steeps, talking to the stranger beside me, hearing music somewhere and actually stopping to listen.

194

It's less about constructing a better life and more about being present for the one that's already happening.

195

And that's what gives me hope about all of this.

196

Because as frightening as it can feel to realize how much of ourselves we can lose in the noise, coming back is actually incredibly simple.

197

You don't need to reinvent yourself.

198

You don't need to discover some hidden perfectly authentic version of

199

you buried underneath the algorithm You just need to create enough

200

room to hear yourself again Enough room to follow a thought

201

before somebody else's interrupts it To become curious about something before

202

you know whether anyone else finds it interesting To make something

203

without immediately wondering whether it's good to sit in an ordinary moment long enough for it to become your life

204

Because maybe we haven't lost ourselves.

205

Maybe we've just stopped being alone with ourselves long enough to remember who is there.

206

And I don't want to reach the end of my life and realize that I spent it watching everyone else live theirs.

207

I want to know what it feels like to live mine.

208

I want to keep coming back to myself, and I never want to forget her.

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ฝึกพูดภาษาอังกฤษด้วยเทคนิค Shadowing จากวิดีโอ: it really was the damn phone: i stopped scrolling and remembered who i was

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