Nine Thousand Hours Of Practice You Skipped

I have a pretty hot take on the current state of relationships in the world,

There is a large discrepancy between what people want to be occurring and the level of maturity and emotional maturity that they receive in partners in both dating, but also friendships and relationships in general.

I believe this is actually partially a consequence of the amount of time that young millennials and Gen Zers and now everyone beneath them has spent on social media and doom scrolling in general and not in the way that most people think of

“oh, they have so much more to compare themselves against with social media…”

Yes, that’s part of it,

But something else is going on that I think is really fucking gnarly,

Which is that the more time a person spends effectively pausing their life by scrolling, watching shit that doesn’t matter, YouTube videos, Instagram, TikTok, the more they pause their lives.

I read some research recently that said on average people are spending around two and a half hours per day scrolling, which is approximately 900 hours per year.

For many (this might be you if you’re honest with yourself), that number is actually dramatically higher.

It happens out of nowhere from all the little moments that accumulate throughout your day.

Now, what happens when a person over the course of 10 years pauses their life for 900 hours of each year?

They lose 9,000 hours of their fucking life, which is crazy, as I write that down.

And what happens because of this?

They lose out on 9,000 hours of their life that could have been spent living…

and some amount of those would’ve been spent interacting with other people.

So what happens is that because so many people spend so much of their time paused by scrolling and not engaging…

They miss out on 9,000 hours of real human experience.

It makes me sad to be honest.

So we have a bunch of 20, 25, 30, probably 35 year olds with less genuine life experience because so much of it was fucking paused than people in earlier generations.

It’s no wonder so many people are unsatisfied with their partners now adays,

They don’t themselves even know how to appropriately behave with other humans in real life.

I mean, genuinely, it’s not surprising that so many people in this world aren’t able to genuinely see others as fallible human beings and instead feel like they deserve perfection in a partner where perfection is unattainable.

They literally just haven’t had enough experience to understand that there are no perfect human beings and that that isn’t just okay, it’s a beautiful thing.

I want to be cautious with my words here, though.

I’m not saying people who have spent this much time paused are worse human beings.

I’m saying they are less capable.

That’s just the brutal truth.

It’s accepted in this world that in order to get good at something you must practice.

There are outliers, but generally speaking, practice is what makes people good at things.

And when the vast majority of human society has stopped practicing, (literally just by living life), not actually “practicing”

They don’t get as good at being social, communicative, empathetic, emotional creatures.

So one of the reasons why in dating and relationships so many people are struggling is because both they and the people they are talking to are actually less mature than their age dictates they should be.

They’re less capable at communicating and interacting and forming genuine relationships because they have spent so much of their time paused.

If this resonated for you, all I want to say is that it’s not a prophecy.

At any moment you can change your direction.

Your life doesn’t have to be characterized by scrolling youtube and instagram and can instead be filled with genuinely fulfilling relationships, hobbies, work, and dreams.

I have seen it first hand.

If you want help with this, just let me know by responding to this email “destroy doomscrolling” and I’ll get you access to a free 60 minute workshop created specifically with you in mind.