How Smartphones Steal Your Thoughts
Picture this. You wake up relaxed, the world is still in silence and your thoughts are your own.
You have a list of things you need to do and in your mind, it’s all fresh for a moment. Then your first stretch isn’t to release tension in your joints or to take a moment to verbalize gratitude for life, it’s for your phone. One can think “I’ll just scroll a few minutes to ease my mind before I start the day” and before you know it, you’ve scrolled through, lets see; if we watch a reel/tt for about 10 seconds, because our attention span doesn’t really allow us to become engaged for longer than that, unless we are really very interested in the subject; so if we watch about 6 different types of content through video per minute for about 15 minutes we’ve watched roughly 90 different topics and ingested its content into our psyche. Maybe somewhere along the way we find some content we like and we watch a specific video that is longer than a couple of minutes; one can guesstimate that in the span of 20 minutes one can absorb anywhere between 60 to 100 different kinds of video content into the subconscious. Audio, video, context,subtext and effect. Now multiply that by however much time you actually spend on the phone…
Mhhm; crazy!
By the time you’re ready to integrate with the palpable world you feel unreasonably tired, your ideas somehow vanished and you’re holding on to dear life to remember to do the basic things that you’re supposed to. There’s also the ever looming feeling of depression and a weird and unexplainable urge to log back online and consume more content, maybe even create it. By the time you’ve reached your lunch time all your original thoughts have been sacrificed to the ether. Your inner most primal mind wants you to hold on to those thoughts as they hold the power to create new realities. We know this in our innermost self. We realize we have this innate calling towards creativity. It will try again once you submit your subconscious to the realm of sleep.
I’ve come to find, in my own experience, many people who are very unhappy and wish they “were somewhere else” in their life. They have many great ideas at times backed by the talent to execute them yet they claim to not have the time but their presence online and screen time log say otherwise. It’s this draining exchange between a person and social media that I believe lead many to feel somehow unfulfilled.
My thoughts: Return to analog practices or become a master of digital technology.
