Helping people help themselves is a difficult task

Technology has allowed humans to prosper, but it has also given us more ways to destroy ourselves.

Gamble on your phone and blow all of your money within minutes. Order that new shiny toy in 2 clicks and have it to your doorstep tomorrow, or maybe even later this evening… Go to check your notes? Read a book? Use your flashlight? Research a topic – Nope! TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are all calling you for a quick scroll sesh. It’s painful. We have this tiny device that can do so much but all it ever seems to do is take away our focus from what we actually want.

What’s so great about mindlessly consuming? Turns out… not that much really, at all. What’s the alternative? Help people follow their curiosity, and find new outlets to be mindless about. More worthwhile endeavors like the acquisition of skills, and knowledge through interested, curious research. 

This is the problem I’m up against, this is what we are up against. This is what I’m trying to help people help themselves with. It’s a painful endeavor to be someone who has no focus on what they actually want, who is constantly distracted from their ideal life by trivial things like Kim Kardashian’s new drama.

If you are going to solve a universal painful problem it is going to be rather difficult. This should have been obvious to me from the get go, but I’m glad I underestimated how hard this would be, it means I’m probably still underestimating it; this is probably the only way I’ll keep trying too, as if I really knew how hard this is going to be I’de probably have given up by now.

What have I done so far to help?

A little over three months ago I had the idea to make a landing page for an application that aims to “get you off the scroll, and get you on a roll” – an application that ‘destroys your TikTok scrolling addiction’. Curiosity Quench I named it @ https://www.curiosityquench.com/  I knew at first it would not be easy but I set out to start building my first application version anyways.

It took me 2 months but I finally was ready to ship out my minimum viable product to the world. As of writing this it has 310 users and I’ve logged its development daily for 1.5 months now. A ton of people have commented telling me how much they need the app, and need the help, hundreds by now, maybe even near a thousand people! I got a ton of feedback telling me to keep building, people telling me such kind things and encouraging me to keep going. 

On that note, I’m shutting down the MVP today (December 7th 2023) into stealth mode. You can still use it and signup at https://curiosity-quench.flutterflow.app/  but the website landing page won't point you to it anymore. It’s not helpful enough currently I don't think: I need to learn a lot more than no code tools to get it to where it needs to be to help people too. So that’s where ‘what I’m doing now’ comes in.

What am I doing now?

My main mission at the moment is to learn a lot more programming and up my skills in this area so I can do all the things I want to do for the current and future users of curiosity quench. In order to help people help themselves I need to be able to put together something snappy and completely functional. The MVP is laggy and I don't have the ability to add all the things I want.

Special functionality and actions, knowledge hub, mini lessons on focus and curiosity: as well as many other things I don’t even know of yet.

Every day for the last 3 months I’ve been building for hours, now I will mix in learning to code as well every day so I can help people as soon as possible. For now I’ve written a book this year to start helping people @ https://frikit.net/book , if you want the book for free I'd be happy to gift it to you.

I’m also writing another book with my findings on research for helping people to quit their consumption addictions and retake control of their focus: this will be out in 2024 likely.

Mainly though I’m trying to build a web application now so I can figure out how to best help people help themselves with this evolving painful problem of distractions and addiction to our greatest technologies.

To help people follow their curiosity, create cool things, and live the life they actually want to live.

This is my writing block for today, after this I will be going into build mode for 1-2 hours, after that I then document my progress, learnings and more on the apps I seek to take users off of: so they can know I'm trying to help them, and maybe that alone will put a seed in their mind that their addiction to scrolling is not all that great really, it just isn’t.