Here I am again, scrolling social media when my brain is tired, or perhaps to procrastinate. You too?
Here is what attention-grabbers do:
- Digital distractions are the attention economy. All social sites want to capture your attention as often AND as long as possible. These are corporate goals, and AGAINST us thriving as humans.
- Social sites have gotten really good at this: first showing us posts by friends, then posts with photos and videos and now TikTok-ified short entertaining nothings that keep you/me scrolling just a little longer.
- Rarely, some sites, like GroupMe or BeReal allow us to curate a smaller community and stay in touch, without the pollution of advertising, click-bait and video snippets. They also encourage us to STOP scrolling after a few minutes, without an endless ongoing stream. Thank you to these companies, for injecting some opportunities for human connection and self-control.
Here is how we are sucked in:
- When we have a few minutes, to avoid being bored, we pick up the phone
- We launch a social site and quickly turn off our working brains and mindlessly consume a finely tuned stream just-for-me.
- Hours later, I wake from my haze and realize I’ve missed something, or I have not been present with friends or family.
- Corporations want your attention, and care not for your well-being.
Until such time as the better angels of our nature come to rescue us (perhaps never), we must craft our own space, hack our own stations, take back our lives.
Here is how I’m fighting back:
- Deleted facebook and linkedin apps from my phone. I will instead go to a desktop to browse these sites if I really want to. Just like snapping a rubber band on your wrist 10 times when you get a craving for a cigarette outlasts the craving, this small effort will stop my instant-gratification cravings.
- Deleted my favorite games from my phone. We’ll see how long that lasts.
- I’m reading more paper books. Dungeon Crawler Carl, anyone?
- Turned my phone to grayscale display. For iOS: settings, accessibility, color filters, grayscale. Wow, my phone is much less like eye-candy. For me, this setting can last a few weeks before I relapse.
- Revived my pomodoro habit (see my blog post). Setting a 25 minute timer improves my focus. Write out a small number of concrete goals, estimate how many 25-minute segments are needed to accomplish that goal, and let the ticking timer remind you to stay on task.
- Turned off all notifications on my phone. Be ruthless. Leave urgent secure chat, or a precious few apps, on. Literally everything else must go: alerts, badges, lock screen notifications: go into settings, notifications, and turn them off, app by app if you’re a control freak, like me. OR, go to settings, FOCUS, and choose what locations, what day/times you should not be bothered, which apps and which people can break through, and notice the buzzing and pinging clear from the air.
And then, treat yourself
Find time for Forest Bathing. Get outside, find trees nearby. This is a photo of Muir Woods, a national park with soaring Redwoods that are thousands of years old. Astounding nature. Recharge your humanity.
Go to a museum. See beautiful stuff. These from the current exhibit at the de Young museum, SF.
The Golden Gate Park Botanical Gardens is spectacular. We were there during intermittent rainstorms and sun. Gorgeous.
And why, not? A karate kata (Taka no ishi no bo dai) at the base of the Japanese pagoda, with a teapot of Sencha to follow. If only that guy would put the phone down…
Have you found other ways? Comment and share them here! We all deserve some quiet, some time to think. Our human brains, our trillions of neurons are not doing well in the battle against the corporate attention-grab.
Fight back!
