I deleted Tik Tok a few months ago as a means to prevent myself from doomscrolling for hours and hours on end and I ended up just slowly becoming more and more addicted to Instagram reels. I realized I had a problem when summer break started so I promised myself I would stop rotting my brain to mold. Then my phone somehow read my mind and started giving me self-help reels on what to do instead of doomscrolling and I started saving a lot of those to a folder. I now have over four hundred videos, that are unwatched, telling how to stop doomscrolling as I continue to compile more, while doomscrolling. The irony is embarrassing me, and I've even put a screentime restriction on Instagram for an hour a day, and yes, I dismiss it each time. I am trying, I swear. I've now started looking for stimulation on Spotify instead of Instagram and I'll do this thing where I'll just go through my playlists and listen to the ten second song previews for, I'm not kidding, about one or two hours and pretend I'm in an edit. Having a boyfriend with no social media, aside from Pinterest, also does not help the embarrassment because he makes sure to let me know whenever I'm acting "too brain rotten" for the average person to understand, like when I called my APUSH teacher an opp to his face for seating me next to a kid he knew I didn't like because he thought it would be funny, and he asked me what an opp was and just walked away laughing. Also, that I constantly refer to just my boyfriend as "guys" when I'm talking to just him. I would for sure consider myself an extremely Gen-Z person.