How the internet can impact your life positively

The internet—YouTube in particular—can expand your horizon of reality. That fosters your personal growth. The internet provides you with optionality. It is a portal through an abundant reality you may have never imagined if you hadn’t exposed yourself to the wealth of information on the internet. If used mindfully and with high self-awareness, it can save you. If used to reinforce your current beliefs, it is the recipe for an intellectually poor life.

Your environment matters. The people you spend the most time with matter because you’re inevitably influenced by them (and you impact them in some way). That is human. While until two decades ago, you could only surround yourself with people in real life (constrained by the location where you lived), today you can expand your network of influence through the internet.

Through the internet you can gain clarity into the abundance of life possibilities. Especially when you are young and doubtful about your future and life choices, this is a powerful tool because you can expose yourself to content about jobs and life paths you couldn’t have even imagined without the internet. For example, you may discover that one can build a business through YouTube by watching Ali Abdaal’s videos. Or that you can be a Ph.D. student, Math professor, and model at the same time without caring about the stereotypical labels of such a mix.

You could expand your knowledge of Eastern philosophy by watching and listening to content about it even though you don’t want to study philosophy at university full time. You can augment your mindset by seeing that entrepreneurship is one option in life—and that the energy you put in corresponds almost equally to what you get out of it—most of the time.

Through the mindful use of the internet, you can fundamentally expand your circle of influence. Not with more people that think the same as you and come from the same town as you. But with individuals with completely different cultural contexts. You can absorb the world through their lens and enrich your world thanks to that. Then you are empowered to make much less narrow-focused and much more growth-oriented decisions. This can save you.

It can save you because now you are not constrained to the potentially restricting environment where you were born, but you create options in your life. Then you can decide more freely where to live, the kind of people to spend time with, and the core principles to espouse in order to live your version of an examined life. And you don’t have the alibi of saying “I’m stuck where I am because of my circumstances”. You gain the freedom to explore your potential in its purest form and act on it.

Ultimately, the type of people and beliefs you expose yourself to dictate your default state of mind and life choices. Through the internet, you can pick whom you would like to be influenced by, carefully and unapologetically, and take full responsibility for your choices.

Spacious