Tag: distraction

STOP WASTING TIME SCROLLING

STOP WASTING TIME SCROLLING

You aren’t spending very much time on blogs or reading anymore, are you? You are perhaps in some of the most dreadful moments of your life. You’re not finding your own life. You’re like an automated machine sucked into LONG PERIODS OF SCROLLING. There are so many platforms that encourage just another quick glance and so on and so forth. This is not a happy place for the mind.

The mind wants to peace and rest. It wants reflection. It doesn’t want incessant interruption from short bites of information. It wants your own thoughts to bubble up from the subconscious caverns of the brain and form deep and complex relationships and understandings. With other people CONSTANTLY IN YOUR FACE and importing their own thoughts into the shrine of your own mind–think reels, short videos, memes, or any extremely sliced and diced ultra refined content (as I like to think of it) — there’s very little reserved time and space for self-reflection.

Even worse, it’s tough to discover your own passion for creativity and your zest for life because so much of your time is invested in other people’s interests and pursuits--namely, their hobbies or career of making short reels that have to do WITH THEM and THEIR LIVES and THEIR HOBBIES or even, THEIR SENSE OF HUMOR. What about YOU? You’re just the mindless spectator helping them achieve their goals.

Much of our diet is ultra processed refined food. At some point factories and companies realized that we tend to prefer anything easy, quickly tasty and satisfying. In the same way, our digital diet for our minds is becoming plagued by ultra processed, short-form media like reels and memes or even facebook or Instagram stories. These short form pieces of content almost always make us think “Wow, I wasted my time on that?”. Very rarely are we thinking, “Wow, that was super insightful, and I’ll be using that technique today!”

Make no mistake, the reason why people make these pieces of content are for increased viewership and gaining more followers. The more massive one’s audience, the more money they can make with online content. The bigger they get, the more marketer’s will see them and make them affiliates with their company. Ultimately, they can push out products for big companies and generate revenue from this strategy. THEY ABSOLUTELY NEED YOUR CONTINUED VIEWERSHIP AND ATTENTION. Without you, without the masses doing this, these creators would have very little incentive to keep making such inane (often thoughtless) barely funny content.

Yes, sometimes we accumulate novel ideas from reels and stories. We gain fleeting moments away from boredom. But…. we lose way too much time compared to the insights that we gain.

I know this is old, but my suggestion is, why not adopt a DIGITAL FAST of sorts? Spend some time being alone with your own thoughts–without the internet or a screen. Try to force yourself to read even part of a book. Write 2 paragraphs about something you’re thinking about. Meditate alone and quietly. Make some tea and commit to being mindful throughout the entire process. Don’t ride on someone else’s thinking. Ride on your own thinking. And again, if you must ride on someone else’s thinking, make it come from a LONG FORM SOURCE or a written source. Books are great for this.

If you have to spend time on social media platforms spend it on YOUTUBE: LISTENING TO INTERVIEW PODCASTS that are LONG and that probe into the nature of thought and reality or that dedicate time for self-help and health, think Alex O’Connor, Tom Bilyeu, Lex Fridman, Ed Mylett, Rich Roll, Sam Harris, Stephen Bartlett–Diary of a CEO, Dan Koe, Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal, Lewis Howes, Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, Andrew Huberman, Andre Duqum, Chris Williamson–just to name a few. I love listening to discussions between two different minds and I love how the above podcasters are willing to pose hard, thought-provoking questions that get my brain engaged. It’s amazing how much better I feel when/after listening to these individuals. I have more stamina for harder, more ambiguous, difficult content and I can listen while I’m doing housework or driving.

These are just some ideas. I will not demonize modern society and technology. As with everything, there are tradeoffs. There are goods and bads that come with all of this ultra processed media. I tend to see more bads than goods because as we know, time is the most valuable resource.

ATTENTION AND SHORT FORM SOCIAL MEDIA THOUGHTS

ATTENTION AND SHORT FORM SOCIAL MEDIA THOUGHTS

I get so much joy and mental balance from avoiding social media. 20 years ago I loved how I would explore with my mind, how much longer I could endure being absorbed and immersed in a single activity. My mental faculties could withstand long hours reading or listening to the ideas of, say, Patricia Churchland vs. David Chalmers and their philosophical underpinnings. Now, reality seems to be diminished to short, very simplistic videos that we all happen to scroll by, very, very quickly as if to inhale as many of these in the shortest few seconds as possible.

Look around at any bus stop, coffee shop, check-out line or even a family sitting together at a restaurant. Are they reading blogs? Are they scouring long sections of text or lengthy news articles? NO. They are most-often in a mindless bout of scrolling. But it doesn’t stop there. Does it? It just keeps going and going. It doesn’t ever stop. Sometimes when they’re driving, they’ll take a moment or two to look at the road or their surroundings, but back to their phone they go. And humans keep clicking into their social media account throughout the day to imbibe more and more of these little useless trinkets of someone’s life. And there’s part of you that’s thinking either: Dang I’m wasting my life looking at your dull snippets of media, or, I wish I could be the one making engaging content and generating $$$ on it too!

Decades ago, so many of us would spend hours on Wikipedia or listening to long, dense lectures. While I still do this when I have the time, the incentive structure of modern society has changed. The hyper focused way of using the internet has passed…or maybe we’ve entered a new era.

Now, with the constant access of our phones and the onslaught of short-form social media content platforms, we are MENTALLY SCATTERED. We are all spending WAY TOO MUCH TIME on short-form internet content. This is the issue I want to address and keep on addressing here on my blog and even just to myself because I think that it’s going to be the Black Swan of our time. We may not realize it now but at some point, we will look back and see the stark changes to humanity and to the evolution of humanity itself.

If I were to sum up what’s happening it would be like this: We are all constantly “CHECKING”. It’s become an automatic behavior like breathing. There are so many possible options to scroll by and it’s like our brain doesn’t want to “get behind” or be “out of the loop”. So, we keep doing it. Or perhaps our brain just gets bored more easily. Every-day non-screen activities have become such drudgery to the mind. It’s not that we are afraid of being alone but that we need to be stimulated from the boredom. Our brain, like our body, wants escape and relaxation–not challenge, struggle or exercise. It’s wants any easy click and an easy find. We discover ourselves scrolling through short-form media content like videos or memes or very inane short posts.

As for me, I want to get back to attention–to being ABLE TO ATTEND. I want to pay attention for a long period of time. I want to be able to zoom into focus immediately on a long article and allow the complexity to pique my brain while I envision fresh perspectives that instigate action. I want to LISTEN TO (not watch) lengthy videos with novel discussion or interviews regarding the universe, AI, human intelligence, physics, philosophy, health and longevity, anti-aging, creativity, productivity, time management and anything to do with self-help. I am fascinated by all of these topics and want to keep exploring them and writing about them. I establish deeper learning and memory retrieval after writing what I read, research or delve into. In a way, humans are a lot like AI. The more we explore new data sets the more we develop a basic intuitive grasp of things. Then, we keep iterating until we kind of figure it out.

I still want to be online. But…. I want to utilize the internet and recent cutting edge AI technologies so that my own creativity can emerge. Creativity is just a novel assortment of various pieces or ideas that already exist. There is really so much potential out there! New technologies will have most prominence in the hands of those who use them to blend with their own creative outputs.