Epistemic Status: thinking out loud
I recently read Introspect by visakan in where he lays out tools to tackle the probably hardest problem each one of us faces, the task of managing ones own psychology. His perspectives are really valuable and touch on many different things, but even he acknowledges that he left out one very important aspect: that of your attention.
Your attention is the most valuable thing that you have. It’s what constitutes your consciousness and experience. It defines what you learn, it defines who you are. It’s also what seemingly everyone and everything out there is after, to capture it and turn it into money by showing you advertisements thrown into your endless addicting content. They are out to get you. It takes the form of advertisement all over the city, you unable to walk 20 meters without a company trying to get you to buy their product by using some catchy phrase or image (and by showing you some scene about friends having fun together and then tying that feeling to the cigarettes they are smoking all the while) . It takes the form of news, gradient descented into being news about stuff that stirs up emotions and conflicts, because it turns out that is what gets engagement. It takes the form of whole teams of psychologists figuring out and finetuning algorithms for all of your social media that exploit all your ancient programming and make you doomscroll for hours on end without the ability to stop, really, where did the last hour go? Let me focus on that last one for now, as this seems the most prevalent way to screw up your attention these days.
Before talking about a solution, we first have to see the problem. I’m not sure if people who excessively use social media are aware what’s happening and are just unable to change something. Or maybe these attacks are invisible to some or most, where the attention is so thoroughly captured that there is no moment present in which some reflection and stepping back could happen that let’s you realize the state your attention is in. There is a war going on for your mind, and most often, you can’t even see it.
As someone who quit social media a long time ago (or didn’t even get into it), this outside view seems obvious. But is it the same if you are caught in it? What are the areas where I am getting my attention stolen, without noticing? What is invisible to me? (If you have any pointers, please share them with me)
Our attention is rather easy to hack, it seems. Just “quickly checking [insert any platform here]” turns into scrolling for half of eternity. How can we defend ourselves against this? Like a computer that gets infinitely harder to hack if you disconnect it from the internet, we ourselves can reclaim a lot of our agency over our attention by disconnecting from the internet. Not the whole internet of course, there exist stuff that is net-positive and isn’t trying to capture your attention.¹ But cutting out the social media seems like a no brainer. If you see control over your attention as one of your highest priorities, that is. As it is, not using social media is a tradeoff, even if it is one that probably benefits you. It might make it harder to stay in touch with friends or to stay informed about events happening around you, and so on. But there are ways to get that without using social media, it just means a little extra effort.
Changing one’s environment, deleting social media, paying attention to what you consume and what you pay attention to seems like the most effective way to keep control over your attention. But is it necessary to go all the way and opt out? Ideally, one would like to have the willpower to be immune to attacks on attention. Be able to do exactly as you wish and only use the apps for the use cases you want, to not get sucked in.
Maybe it is possible, maybe there is a way to have constant control over your attention, to always be mindful about what you are paying attention to and how it ties in to what you want and value. Maybe as an expert meditator. For me at least it seems rather impossible to do this consistently and without fail. Not only is it easy to slip and forget that you exist outside of your endlessly scrolling feed. It also seems like “what I want” gets slowly (or not so slowly) rewritten by constant usage of social media. My dopamine system gets used to constant bombardement and expects it, which surfaces to conscious mind as wanting or even craving something. Differentiating genuine wants that reflect your values versus manufactured ones is not an easy introspective task, especially with all the constant distraction available to us. You could try going that route, but it seemy especially risky and not worth the tradeoff.
So yes, for all practical purposes, it is necessary to go all the way and opt out. It seems that after all, the only winning move IS not to play. Do yourself a favor and get rid of your social media. Throw away your television.
¹ Citation needed. I was going to say something like Wikipedia, but that for sure can capture your attention for hours, even if it isn’t explicitily designed to keep your attention. Me and my rabbit holes can attest.