Note: This post originally used to be on a different project website and therefore mentions that project.

I was watching a YouTuber explaining The French Dispatch which is a movie by Wes Anderson and how it shows the differences between Liberty and Imprisonment. We understand prisons today as rows of rooms, giant facilities where we put criminals for the crimes they have committed. But perhaps this understanding is a little too basic. I think we don't understand how we are more often made prisoners in the soft prisons of society. The prisons that strip us of our true liberties.

Today, our minds are controlled by social media. Most of us are addicted and we don't even know it. It is perhaps the most important influence we have today. And yet, we don't understand the extent of its influence on us. I am currently trying to break a very strong addiction to social media developed over the last 10 years. I have previously quit smoking, vaping, and many other habits, but social media and the addiction to the internet is something else. At no point during any of my previous recovery attempts have I felt like this. I feel like I am literally imprisoned by my phone. I am imprisoned by my thoughts. I am imprisoned by my mind.

Perhaps this is the strongest form of brainwashing there is—the best business sales strategy: a place inside a user's mind. And yet, I have chosen one of the worst times and worst professions to stop my addiction to social media. I am an app developer. By choice, I am never far from my phone. Can you imagine? I carry my prison around with me, I charge it, I pay for it, and if it falls, I worry I might have broken it. This is simply the worst. The solution? Replace this addiction with something else. But what? What can be more addictive than the entire internet? The only redeeming thought is that Suneha, the app I am working on, will try to reduce this addiction for people. Perhaps for the better. I'll end with a story.

It is said that the only things the Nazis could not strip away from the people in the concentration camps were their minds, their thoughts, and their sense of true liberty. The prisoners knew they were free in their minds, and their captors could not imprison their minds. Today, they can.