Your attention span is being stripped for parts and sold for scrap metal. From content whiplash before we’ve gotten out of bed to feeling like we’re in a daze when it’s bedtime. The glass screen in our pocket has put us in a self-induced psychosis. I’ve spent the summer unraveling this mess.
Newsfeeds and content feeds are designed for one thing: warping your sense of time. When I take the train to work in the morning I notice how almost everyone is flicking up on Instagram Reels or TikTok. This is because the act of doing something mundane like traveling between point A to point B on public transport is dampened by these apps. It’s time dilation in play.
We never need to know peace or boredom. This is a betrayal to ourselves. The quiet gaps in our day which might’ve resulted in an original thought are now filled with the consumption of mental junk food. Charles Darwin would work for two 90 min periods and then go on two separate 60 min walks. No AirPods, no productivity podcasts, no Newsfeeds. Just his own thoughts and a groundedness in the present moment.
I don’t blame us. It’s a bit like handing a cigarette to a 15 year old and never mentioning the downsides. The biggest problem is that the content on these apps is endless. The days of early Facebook where our timelines were filled with people we know is long behind us.
Netflix’s biggest competition is sleep. - Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.
This isn’t where I recap my summer of living with a dumb phone and deleting all social media profiles. Becoming a Luddite is unrealistic. I have no affinity for a cold Cabin life in Lincoln, Montana. Instead this summer I focused on narrowing the amount of available content. I used ad-block extensions to “delete” parts of the web apps that felt endless. My YouTube homepage is a black page, the subscriptions and YouTube shorts tabs are all deleted. If I want to watch a video I need to seek it out by searching for it rather than being nudged by the Algorithm Overlords.
By killing my infinite feeds, I quickly run out of content to consume. I’m forced to fill the gaps of time in other ways. There are 8 or so creators I truly care for and I have post notifications on for them. This feels like the old internet when RSS readers would push you content you actually wanted.
By spending less time in the digital realm, I feel more present in the physical one. I’m discovering the dwindling art of talking to strangers, reading more books, and spending more time slowly shuffling through unorganized bins of vinyl records. I’ve made a trade. I’m less online but have more vibrant days.
How much of the furniture in your home just randomly appeared one day? Probably none. Almost all of it was curated by you over time. We wouldn’t clutter our homes with random furniture so why are we allowing BigCrops to clutter our minds?