Throughout my teenage years, I spent a bulk of my time playing musical instruments, started with the piano/keyboard and then switched to the guitar. I'd often spend an inordinate amount of time practicing tunes I loved.
Approaching my mid 20s I began to chase other ambitions that eventually led to spending less and less time actively playing music.
Over the last 4 months however, I tried to get back into playing; got a new guitar and started practicing again, and I noticed something quite strange.
In addition to the depletion in my skills (no surprise there), there was a significant reduction in my ability to just...concentrate; an ability I didn't realize I lost, or even needed that much of, in fact.
If you're like most people, when your mind is clouded and you're mentally exhausted from the many thoughts, 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 sometimes 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, plan and pray 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 often practiced. Unsurprisingly, my brain always found ways to adjust and fill in the extra time.
This ability, like concentrating, I realized I'd lost as well. 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.
But I learn a lot from my feed, it's curated to my career....
I used to think this, and we're so wrong. 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.
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.