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.