I have a good news for myself. Just 5 minutes ago I banned YouTube on my laptop.

I have been thinking of doing this for a very long time. I was aware of the complicated ways of doing this but today I found a very simple way. If you are a Mac or Linux user you can block any website on your computer by doing the following.

Open the file as root user in your favorite text editor. I used Vim.

sudo vim /etc/hosts

Append

127.0.0.1 www.youtube.com
127.0.0.1 youtube.com

to this file. Save it and exit. I didn’t know how to flush the cache using command line so I just restarted my computer. That’s it. Now I can’t access YouTube on my computer unless I delete those lines from that file.

But why?

Because I am addicted. Also because I am trying to stop using social media. I know, YouTube is not a social media site but in my opinion it serves the same purpose – follow people and see what they are doing.

I just don’t want to be aware of what’s happening in other people’s lives, and I have unsuccessfully tried to do this many times in the past six months. I want to build something like a bubble for myself. There’s a phrase that goes like, “He is living in a bubble.” The meaning of this phrase is negative. Just google it if you don’t know what it means. You might find different meanings associated with this phrase but the following is what I mean. According to me “Living in a bubble” means that the person has his/her own set of beliefs/knowledge and he/she doesn’t know about or listen to anything else that’s happening in the outside world.

So why do I want to do something that’s sounds so bad?

Basically, I am running away from other people’s influence. I have had enough of it and I don’t want it anymore. Now a days, there seems to be a rule for everything. We are supposed to do everything in a certain way. The way that has been approved by our peers. The cool way. People don’t like it if we divert from this one way of doing that particular thing. This has created a monochromatic world. Everyone is supposed to be like everyone else. Everyone is supposed to follow some random rule book.

This monocromatic world is very harmful for our individualities and for everything we do. At the end of the day, we are left with stuff that everybody is doing and also in the same exact way. That’s terrible.

I want to tune out of this monocromatic world and have my own thoughts about stuff. I want to get out of the habit of seeking validation for my actions on social media. I want to do things in my own way. My way of doing things might be wrong at first, but atleast I will be putting some thoughts into it instead of asking people if something would work, only to hear their biased comments.

I am not saying that asking for help/advice is bad. All I want to say is that living with the advisor is bad. We all go to the doctors but we don’t visit them everyday. We’ll become maniac if we start visiting them too often. We’ll always be afraid of dying. We won’t enjoy our life. That’s what I mean by saying that I want to tune out. It’s just that I don’t want to be concerned about what might go wrong. I just want to explore on my own.

I’ll see how it goes but I am optimistic. I think that creating this bubble is going to be good in the long run. I am just not sure if I can keep this up for that long. I’ll try.