You become the things that you do

A lot of people know what I mean by that (I mean the title), but maybe not enough of them actually think about it enough.

I consume a lot of content every day, and I do a lot of things on my computer every day. I watch a bunch of YouTube videos, I watch movies and TV shows, I create art whenever I feel like it, I write whenever I have something to write about, and I code once in a while. I also do a lot of learning.

The idea that you become what you do every single day is more complex than it seems, and it's important that we look at it and we adopt it in order to become better people in general, or to gain a skill, or just become better at something specific.

I have seen this happen to me many times, but I never paid enough attention to it. It's really interesting to notice how you slowly become the thing that you do, especially if you're not completely aware of it.

For example, when I first started writing back in 2017 I was really invested into this activity. I had a goal, and I wanted to get enough money to accomplish it, and to do that, I had to work quite a lot, and I began writing and publishing up to two articles a day, sometimes even more.

What I noticed back then was that the more I was writing, the more interested in writing I became. I started watching movies about writers, I started watching videos on YouTube about how to become a better writer, I started reading tutorials about how to write better, and so on.

I got to a point where I was thinking about writing almost all the time. And it happened with other things as well, such as Photoshop. When I started working as a graphic designer in 2015 - 2016 and I was trying my best to upload around one design package on Graphic River a day, I was thinking about very little except graphic design.

Just as with writing, I was consuming a lot of content about the activity I was doing. I was watching movies and videos about design, I was reading a lot of articles, watching a lot of tutorials, and paying attention to every visual thing in my life that could give me an idea for another package to create.

Other activities such as coding or gaming gave the same result. The more I spent doing something, the more my life revolved around that particular activity, alongside my thoughts and feelings.

But while that's a fairly known fact, a lot of people ignore the other side of this idea - you also become the things you consume. You become the movies you watch, the videos you watch, the music you listen to, and so on.

I've seen this happen with a lot of people in the past, and even with myself up to a certain point. The best example was when I found a YouTube channel (not gonna mention its name) that was supposedly talking about (mainly) "gaming news". I enjoyed the channel and watched it quite a lot.

In time however, I saw myself changing and becoming more and more interested in scandals, in things that were going on in the world that involved some sort of drama, and I couldn't figure out why. I was always against the idiotic drama that goes around online, and I always disliked people who promoted it.

Soon after that I realized what the source of that change was - the very YouTube channel that I was watching. Despite the fact that the entire channel was "promoting" the idea that it was covering "gaming news", it was actually focusing almost primarily on the scandals and drama surrounding games.

Topics such as toxic feminists ruining video games, toxic racism ruining the gaming industry, sexism being the cause for someone's downfall, accompanied by news about how Brie Larson said something about white males (I don't know, I didn't pay too much attention to that crap) were quite common.

For some reason I didn't pay attention to what the channel was actually doing - focusing on drama, using gaming and movies as a gateway towards toxicity. I think I realized that after being literally spammed with several "The Last of Us 2" videos and how Anita... something, again, another toxic feminist, was ruining it. When I say "several" videos about that topic I mean more than 20 in quite a short period of time.

The very act of watching so much drama content led to me becoming, unconsciously, more and more inclined towards more drama. Once I stopped following the channel, I slowly stopped being interested in that particular topic.

I can give more examples, but I think that's enough for now. The main idea is this - as much as we'd like to think that we're unique and impossible to influence, it's not the case. We are, to a certain degree, unique, but we're almost constantly influenced by the world around us, by the content we watch, the music we listen to, the books we read, and so on.

We're like sponges that constantly absorb new things and the more of something we absorb, the more we become like that thing. If we watch drama, no matter how fun it might be, we'll gravitate more towards drama in general. If we consume more content about fitness and being in shape, we'll slowly gravitate towards those topics, and we might become interested in exercising and eating healthier. And the same thing applies to the activities that we do on a daily basis.

In conclusion, we should all try to be more aware of the type of content we consume and the influence that it might have on us, regardless of whether we're aware of it or not.