You must approach Lemmy from the mindset of a 4channer:

1. No one cares about what you say beyond the thread

2. Shitposting is life

3. There is no karma

Only then will you achieve zen with Lemmy or social media. You will find that the act of posting itself is fun, not the message or outcome. Be free. Shitpost often.

Good luck.

In addition, I want to test myself how long I will stay away from social networks. I want to understand why community-based social media like Lemmy is addictive, what are the benefits and drawbacks of it, and re-learn how to use the Internet.

I think a big part of it is accessibility. If you are using your phone for social media then you have something alleviate boredom at a moments notice. It's good to think about how you use those awkward amounts of time in your life and if using a social media service like Lemmy starts exceed those time periods and eat away at your day to day life.

I feel like Lemmy is at a point where you can browse by all and find a sizeable chunk of content you can interact with and we haven't reach the point where people can go back and tell you something has already or is regularly posted in a community.

It's nice but I don't think I've felt any FOMO yet. I feel like Lemmy will continue to grow and feel this way for a while yet and I don't think I need to really push to add content in the hopes it stays viable and relevant

certainly social media can be addictive, for myself i've almost always been able to take on tasks as they come up and not procrastinate but that's just due to a hate of the feeling of having a task looming. that being said i know there's times i've mindlessly watched tiktok for hours instead of engaging in more productive, meaningful forms of entertainment.

Enjoy your time off!

Not me lol. In the last 48h between the way comments are nested, and general downtime on lemmy.world - it's reminding me to take a break. There's nothing that amazing happening here.

You could say I've been taking a break from Lemmy too. From being on basically all the time, last week I only check in once in a couple hours to check RSS of my comms, reports and maybe the homepage for the biggest news.

I don't see social networks as anything inherently bad, addictive or a waste of time. It may or may not be. There were times when I was a teen when I'd sit all day in front of a TV if I had nothing better to do. And when I did, I did something else. It's the same with everything. Unless you actually start sweating and shaking, it's not an addiction and you can just do other things whenever you want.

While you're off, if you like classic literature, I can recommend Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" to get more in touch with yourself, nature, and the world around you.