Arsh Shah

It’s no secret that being isolated from the rest of the world and all of our friends can make us lonely. I’ve tweeted a lot about how social media creates pseudo-connectedness (making us think that we’re really connecting with people). How we use social media normally (outside of isolation) is different than how we use it today (in isolation).

Platforms have brought us and our loved ones closer, but we can't get carried away with addictive behaviors (and how such platforms command our attention). I'm not advocating for the complete eradication of social media from a point of utility during isolation, but that we should be more intentional in how we use it. The opportunity cost of deleting social media (our most convenient means of being connected) and the perception of privacy-breaches as not harmful have kept us in line.

In a time of dreadful statistics, how is isolation transforming the way we interact the world? The use of apps that don’t support end-to-end encryption like Zoom put our privacy at risk every single day.

Our reliance on technology has never been greater. 

Isolation exacerbates the threats our society faces: recently another 5.2 million Americans having recently filed for unemployment, and the United States became the epicenter of the coronavirus.

Companies all over the internet like Dropbox and Netflix have had to expand their operations and scale quickly, pushing us all toward a massive digital transformation.

How this affects us

Cyberattacks and phishing attacks have peaked, and most people are illiterate in these areas, unsure of how to deal with them. By being extra cautious of what we read online, and the services we use, we can effectively eliminate these threats.

A huge issue I see is misinformation, be it on a WhatsApp group, or just on Google. To combat this, here are a few steps that anyone can implement to ensure they get quality news.

1. Fact check everything. See a story from a friend that seems a little out there? Google it. Use Snopes to double-check what you’re reading.

2. Focus on the positives. Films like Nightcrawler (highly recommend it!) have shown us: If it bleeds, it leads. 90% of what you see on the news is negative. We look at the news as our primary source for information, and this phenomenon has damaged our happiness.

How we can change this to protect ourselves

1. Be more privacy-conscious and increase intentionality. Many people make the argument: Who cares, I have nothing to hide! – Yes, you have nothing to hide, but think about how companies use your data that’s in the public domain. For example, our social media providers share our data with data brokers, who are third party intermediaries in the collection, use, and sharing of our information. Our social media providers exploit our personal information (sometimes even with our consent, unbeknownst to us!) to the highest bidder, which feeds into targeted ads, political scandals like Cambridge Analytica, and even subtler manipulations through surveillance capitalism.

By allowing companies to effectively monetize our behavior and attention, we’ve maximized potential revenue for advertisers, who can apply widespread advertising (applying an ad to a class or group of people) to particular individualized customers.

A large-scale study of the top 1 million websites found that websites send data to at least 34 third parties on average.

2. Appeal to a higher power. When you sign up to a social media platform, you effectively transfer the ownership of your data to them. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram only have certain measures to reclaim your data and save offline information. The U.S. doesn't have the convenience of E.U. level GDPR legislative frameworks for data ownership, so we need to appeal to our government officials and legislators to go up against how these platforms are regulated. Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation advocate for these issues. By doing your part to contribute to platform regulation, you can effectively make things better for a lot of people.

3. Be introspective instead. Negativity in the media isn’t good for your mental health! Pick up a habit like meditation (check out this talk) to help calm your worried mind. I currently practice TM twice a day, and it really calms me down! Reading books or listening to podcasts like this are also super helpful.

If you have any further questions or comments on this piece, or more ideas for what I should write about, reach out to me on Twitter!

#Technology #Privacy #Minimalism

This post is a follow up to my last post, Into the Void. I realized something else that we all encounter, whether exacerbated through social media or not – is status anxiety. I recently completed Alain De Botton’s book and found it enlightening.

He defines it as “A universal anxiety that rarely gets mentioned directly: an anxiety about what others think of us; about whether we’re judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser”.

Today, we’re so driven by status, and even if we don’t have a need to prove things to others, we often have to prove them to ourselves. Am I good enough? Will everyone think I’m accomplished enough? Smart enough? Competent enough? These questions, rooted in self-doubt, diminish our confidence in our abilities and ultimately make us less creative (more on this later).

Does your existence matter? Why?

De Botton points this out:

The quest for status might actually be about respect, and even love – not romantic love, but a feeling that your existence matters to someone. 

So why is love from others so important, and lovelessness so destructive? Well, most of us are unsure of our own value, and our identities are very much based on the perceptions of others. If you tell a joke and everyone laughs, your own confidence in the idea that you’re a funny person will grow. On the other hand, if people avert their eyes when you walk into a room, it won’t be long before you start feeling worthless and anxious.

Our self-esteem is so fragile. Think of it a balloon – this self-esteem balloon constantly needs to be refilled with the “helium” of external love so as not to deflate completely. Meanwhile, other actions – even small ones, like not being greeted enthusiastically enough or having our calls repeatedly unanswered – can suck more air out of the balloon.

So, it’s not surprising that we’re anxious about our place in the world. In our current society, our status determines how much love and respect we’ll receive from others and, as a result, whether we can confidently be able to love ourselves.

As our goals expand, our potential for humiliation expands too.

But, this quote’s accuracy is dependent on how you see it. A much more important question is this: is what you want what you actually need? Are your fears about the outcome of your actions justified? Do you want to be perceived as successful? How important as that to you If you hide something from someone at the fear of being judged, and they find out, should you be afraid?

Such a subtle reframing can be really helpful: All you have to do is recognize that the majority’s views are still full of confusion and error, and come to your own conclusions about what is or is not.

1. Question traditions that haven’t been rigorously examined, and determine whether other people’s behavior is backed up by sound logic.
2. Ask yourself if you truly respect the minds of those whose judgement seems so significant to you right now. You might find that their opinions aren’t worth getting worked up about.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (yes, the actor!) gave a pretty great TED Talk that I watched this morning as to how creativity can be killed by our need for attention. He also makes some points in the same respect as to why I quit using certain social media.

I highly recommend watching it if you like, but if you don’t have the time – here are his main points:

1. Our constant need for attention forces us to compete with people that are wholly irrelevant to our goals. By focusing on how we receive attention, and if we receive enough, we change our motivation for our work.

2. If we are creative and only create with the intention of receiving attention as a result of our work and what we push out into the world, we abandon true creative freedom.

Here’s what we should be doing instead:

1. Look at potential competitors as your collaborators, and understand that you’re working alongside them, not against them. There won’t be nearly as much pressure to perform well and you’ll be able to express your freedom more creatively.

2. Realize that you’re just as capable as you are right now. Work on what you enjoy, not on what you think what others will. Don’t think about what everyone else will think. If someone happens to find value in what you create, that’s an added benefit.

That’s all for today! Get out there and make the most of the time you have. If you have suggestions for topics, posts, or articles that you’d like me to write on, let me know @arshkshah on Twitter!

#MentalHealth #Creativity #April2020

Fun fact: Most people born between 1995 and 2012 spend an average of 9 hours per day on their devices.

Today, I finally left Facebook and Instagram. I realized what a detrimental effect these social media platforms have had on my life and saw that I was seeking the unnecessary approval of others, placing my happiness in their hands instead of my own. If you followed me before on either of these services, please know that the only one I have kept alive is @arshkshah on Twitter.

Are you addicted to your phone? Take this test: The Smartphone Compulsion Test

This decision allows me to push content and things out to you that I find valuable about the world, while limiting my own contributions to the damaging culture that I now believe social media perpetuates. While my family and friends might be displeased with this decision, I think it will allow me to grow much closer to the right people. In the past, I wasn’t entirely sold on doing this and thought it was a massive undertaking – so why did I do this now?

Framing the Issue

Social media addiction sounds like a way to put away real life problems, like being bored and facing the emptiness that goes with it. I'll go on a limb and say that in general, education and social behavior in China, for example, does not prepare people well to face boredom and that “stress of the emptiness”. The same can be said for people in the United States. The notion of hobbies and pushing yourself to hone a skill outside of your work doesn’t seem very developed.

By using social media, you're comparing your everyday life to people's highlight reels. A problematic habit is using our phone before bed and after waking up in the morning. However, scrolling in bed exposes our eyes to blue light, tricking our brains into thinking its daytime, and this loss of sleep can lead to chronic fatigue, which can lead to even more serious cardiovascular disease.

Phone addiction and social media overuse can lead to Novel Information Addiction, which is defined as the obsessive craving to seek novel information whenever bored or uncomfortable. A few examples are: checking new Instagram posts every 5 minutes, browsing Wikipedia for trivial information, or reading innumerable blog posts about self-improvement (without actually doing any work to implement them, I might add), refreshing your news app, etc.

Steve Jobs once pitched the iPhone as “the best iPod ever”, and it revolutionized how we could interact with personal electronic devices. But today, these devices are used for a totally different purpose than for what they were originally intended. Social media’s rise as an addictive force is just one facet of a larger issue.

How is social media harming us?

In 2016, Andrew Sullivan wrote an article on how social media finally broke him. Social media usage today is built on adaptive algorithms, selling products that are being designed to be as addictive as possible – to keep our attention. So, when Facebook introduced the thumbs up button in 2009 to promote social interaction, it slowly redefined our need for acceptance and attention in social settings. That need made us invisible as people, and so many of us today are defined by whether others like us or not based on what we post online. I am guilty of this and truly had to accept that this is what had I had become. I’ll set out exactly how I overcame this mindset below.

Overcoming it all

A really simple question to ask yourself is this: Does this app, website, or service really support what I value in a way that nothing else can?

If the answer is yes, ask yourself, is this the best way to support this value? For example, I decided against social media use as it does a really good job at creating psuedo relationships. You can view people's lives from afar without ever truly being involved. A quick like here, a small comment there... it takes all the effort of maintaining real, meaningful relationships away.

If you still feel the need to use a platform for a professional purpose (although I still don’t believe its necessary, even for business, more on this in a later article), be sure to set purposeful rules to use the platform, optimize your use to maximize its value while minimizing cost to your time and energy. What are your time and attention costs?

A Silicon Valley executive had a brilliant idea: to make a standing appointment at a certain day and time to discuss anything with anyone. If you set this as “open office hours” for yourself, this will encourage people you might not normally cross paths with to get in touch with you, without fear of judgment.

A 7 day plan to remove toxic social media

I wanted to share a 7 day plan to help you cut non-essential technologies from your lives. This is not a detox method, which implies that you’ll pick it up again later, consider this a time-tested route to form new habits. Other methods, like simply deleting social media apps, are often not set up for sustainable change – its too easy to say the fix didn’t stick because you lacked the self-control.

1-2: Apple ScreenTime monitoring to increase your awareness.

3-4: Notice your feelings before, during, and after using your phone. Also pay attention to how much you interrupt an activity to check your phone.

5,6,7: Delete all social media apps, do something else you like, and enjoy your free time.

For those of you very heavily affected by smartphone addiction who want to take a more drastic approach over the course of a month (highly recommend it!):

8,9: Disable all notifications except anything essential/emergency, delete non-essential apps (you can always redownload them later). This means, no social media, gaming, dating apps.

10: Put your charging station outside your bedroom. Nothing in your room. Put your phone in the bathroom if you’re in a studio apartment.

10,11,12: Find other meaningful activities that don’t involve your phone. These could be things like reading, writing, or exercising.

13,14: Make your phone-free zones in your house, maybe your kitchen table? Or even time periods? (i.e. no phones after 6pm)

15,16: Practice basic mindfulness – when you reach for your phone: stop, breathe, and just be.

17,18: Use concentration exercises to reclaim your attention (can be something as simple as repeating multiplication tables).

19,20, 21: TURN OFF YOUR PHONE. Keep a notebook handy for things to look up later. If you need a phone for emergency purposes – transfer your SIM card to a flip phone, or delete all non-essential apps.

22,23: Reflect on not using your phone for the past few days.

24,25,26: Minimize digital annoyances like email, and any unnecessary apps.

27,28,29,30: Monitor phone use, rinse, and repeat.

REMEMBER: – Don’t confuse convenience for necessity. – What are your interests? Use them to fill the void. Less social media = a better social life. Scrolling is the new smoking.

A Quick Tip Buy an actual alarm clock that buzzes and beeps instead.

Final points

It’s no secret that leaving social media may make us seem disconnected from close friends and family, but with this change, you have the ability to pick up the phone and call or form genuine, personable relationships with the people who actually matter in your life, not some random friend you made in college that you haven’t seen or spoken to in years.

Stop mindlessly clicking and scrolling and instead schedule texting and calling times for yourself. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that online interactions are a viable substitute for meaningful human interaction, and save them for real life instead..

When you find activities to replace your new found free time, find activities that provide a sense of inward joy, as these will lead to a high quality life.

Any hobbies requiring strenuous effort are often the most rewarding – will likely feel energized as a result.

I hope this could help reframe how you connect to others and give you more free time amidst the isolation and quarantine from COVID-19 that we’re all facing, when it’s so easy to stay in bed and be home on your phone all day long. I’ll be making a later post on why I believe you don’t need social media for your business to succeed! In the mean time, be safe, stay home, and flatten the curve!