My carefully curated taste that I often boast about might be the reason for my stagnant growth.
Recently I learnt something that we as humans were not supposed to consume so much within seconds. Ironically, I learnt this from reels itself. I pondered this for a few minutes and I couldn't agree more. I consume such nice, creative content and then there is this underlying guilt that I might not ever be capable of creating and giving back so much that too at a professional. I wake up and consume a piece of content that might have taken the creator years to learn. I start comparing myself to them and my caliber to theirs. I end up setting unrealistic expectations for myself to create things in multiple fields with the similar level of perfection. I refuse to acknowledge the years of hard work which the original creator might have put in the first place.
Every dream, every thought and every potential hobby is a byproduct of a super niche reel that I come across. Not to mention the 100 other similar reels which will be suggested after I like the first one. You don't magically end up on this side of instagram, it takes years of doomscrolling and mindless consumption to build this niche feed which I took immense pride in previously.
In your mid teens you usually face this situation where you either plan on compromising with other skills, social life and fully commit to your academics choosing a career path requiring immense grit and focus or take a career path inclining towards art and literature where you can integrate your hobbies with your academics. I certainly believe outliers do exist, I mean I have seen them around, the ones who balance best of both worlds. I have immense respect for them and a little unserious jealousy too haha...
Me being me I chose the worst path one should at my age, which was to fail or at best stay average academically and neither have a thriving social life. My life became stagnant since the time Covid hit. I couldn't recall a single new skill that I had learnt in these years. Every hobby became a distant memory. Upon reflecting back on my teens it felt that I had lost 6 years of my life to Silicon Valley's infamous algorithmic trap.
Having an academic downfall was painful but it was not a unique occurrence. Numerous people of my age faced similar issues post covid and age was a factor here too. What hurt me the most was missing out on generic teen stuff. I was so chronically online with 8 plus hours of screen time and still hadn't watched a single spiderman movie as of last month. How could someone grow up around people from Harry Potter fanclub and still miss on reading and watching it completely. Where did I lose 6 years of my life?.
Every passing day my consumption to creation gap kept increasing, it became wider and wider to the extent that overcoming it felt impossible. Unlike on having an academic downfall, I couldn't resonate to anybody around me on this one. I lost my focus, my writing and reading abilities faced massive downfall and yet missing on generic teenage stuff was what started hurting me the most. I wasn't even rambling about my non existent teen romance and social life.
I turned 19 and started dreading about everything I had missed on. With time I realised that I am infact facing a similar path again. I could either keep dreading about what could have been, my prospect potential and all that or I could just start reliving and doing everything I had missed on. I realised that instead of rambling about it I can make it happen in real time. Timelines can be different for different people and it's totally okay to not have a generic teenage life. I can make this happen for myself and take the charge of my own life. Watching Spiderman for the first time at the age of 19 isn't a punishable offence. It's not important for my timeline to look like everyone else's. I can catch up now that I have overcome a much bigger hurdle and that is STARTING.