Watching entertaining videos on YouTube or scrolling through Instagram feeds tagged with trending keywords, time just flies by. You end up lying in bed with your phone or spending hours in the spa in the ‘ice’ pose, consuming content mindlessly as if your brain has shut down. Most modern people are probably caught in this media addiction. I hate to admit it, but I’m a media addict too. I turn on YouTube the moment I open my eyes, refresh my Instagram feed whenever I have a spare moment, listen to audiobooks while driving, and post book reviews on WordPress. Add checking and replying to work emails, video conferences, and countless KakaoTalk messages, and it means I spend most of my day in the online world.

I too experienced the toll this addiction took on my life and realized the precious values I was missing in my daily routine. Since then, I’ve been striving for a more balanced media lifestyle. While drastically cutting media consumption time and increasing direct meetings or gatherings with people is certainly a good approach, the most effective method was adopting the **‘mindset of a content creator’**. Instead of passively watching YouTube lectures, I try live streaming myself. When scrolling through Instagram feeds, I analyze “How did they increase their views?” Furthermore, I process knowledge gained from audiobooks by quickly summarizing them into book reviews, making the information truly my own.

In fact, even to write this short blog post, I went through the process of deleting and rewriting several drafts. While it might not quite qualify as ‘the agony of creation’ given the depth of the writing or knowledge, I firmly believe that leaving behind such records is far more beneficial than wasting time consuming content created by others.