Take a moment to think through these questions:
How soon after waking up do you check your phone? Does not checking your phone for an hour or more make you anxious or restless? Do you check your phone in places you know you shouldn't? Do you ever lose hours to your phone, "by accident"?
Ironically, these are the same kinds of questions used to evaluate if someone has a nicotine (cigarette) addiction.
If you're like most people, when your mind is clouded and you're mentally exhausted from life and realities, you tend to chase dopamine like a drug; social media. Lots of instagram reels, youtube shorts, whatsapp statuses, and so on. Almost like that's the brain's way of coping under stress and distracting itself from the realities.
The often unnoticed impact is, all that dopamine rush starts to mar your productivity, you work even less, feel lazier in general, and those realities don't go away, because they need an active mind to think and work through them.
For a long time, I had the ability to just turn off the noise, delete the social media apps on my phone, a ritual I practiced often. My brain unsurprisingly always found ways to adjust and fill in the extra time.
This ability, along with deep concentration, I realized I'd completely lost. I couldn't spend a day off whatsapp, and even when I tried, I fall back to youtube. It just seems like every turn we make today, there's a convenient avenue for mindless scrolling.
The rise of the Interest Media
In the beginning, these platforms launched as tools to "socialize"; hence the name social media. Today however, it appears socializing is no longer the priority, you can see proof with the advent of short-form content in literally every mainstream platform.
The algorithm is neutral, it only cares about one thing; will you keep scrolling? How you feel afterwards is not it's concern. Unfortunately, it is natural for us to stare at negative content much longer than we will at positive or calm content.
But I learn a lot from my feed, it's curated to my career and interests...
I used to think this, and it's true, it is actually curated to our interests, and that's the problem. You don't actually learn anything from short-form content, we forget all that stuff within a week at best.
A study published on ResearchGate found that watching short-form videos significantly degraded users' ability to remember intentions.
Other research indicates that short-form content can negatively impact attentional and working memory, boosts anxiety, stress, depressive symptoms, sleep disruption, and more...
The point of this text is to create some awareness concerning this concentration crisis, because I found that a lot of people are yet to come to the realization of how much danger we're in.