Post #2780973

How Social Media Shortens Your Life https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/how-social-media-shortens-your-life QUOTE I’d found myself on YouTube, without a clear memory of how I’d got there. I realised I’d been on autopilot, my hands hijacked by habit. And so, to wrest back control, I decided to rebel against myself: Instead of searching for what I wanted to watch, such as “cute baby donkey”, I searched for “terminal cancer patients.” And before I could concoct a reason not to click on the first result, I clicked. The video featured a man called Ollie who’d just been told that he has three months to live. He broke down in tears as he mourned his future, where, like most of us, he’d stored the majority of his life. From the comments, I discovered he was already dead. I wanted to remember him. The surprise and emotional impact of his video made him memorable enough, but to carve him deeper in my brain, I decided to learn his story. I watched his uploads in their default, reverse-chronological order, so that he gradually grew healthier and naiver, until he was just a bright-eyed hobbyist sharing his passion for his airsoft hobby, oblivious to his fate. For the next few weeks, whenever I found myself on YouTube, I only allowed myself the company of terminal cancer patients. They often spoke of how abruptly they fell ill. They regretted how little they’d appreciated their time while they still had it. They lamented that the future they’d been sacrificing the present for had turned out to be a mirage.