48
votes
This life gives you nothing - Your attention is all you have. Wasting it is annihilating
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- Title
- This life gives you nothing
- Authors
- Blackbird Spyplane
- Word count
- 2169 words
I liked this piece. It echoes thoughts I've had for a long time, and have tried to conciously embrace since ~2018. It's somewhat arbitrary, but the unveiling of the Cambridge Analytica scandal was the straw that I decided had broken me. I had already spent the previous year or two becoming more and more consciously aware of my behaviors around social media. I wasn't even that deep really, I mostly stuck to Facebook and Reddit. Even with just that small size though, I would frequently find myself scrolling through posts and realize I wasn't looking for anything. I wasn't trying to find more stories or information about a particular topic, I wasn't interested in reading more about a particular friend, I just wanted that constant dopamine hit of anticipating something exciting just below the current post.
I deleted FB entirely, quit reddit, and entirely avoided IG, Twitter, TikTok, and everything else. Tildes is the last thing resembling social media. It's taken some adjustments (I have to be very proactive about keeping in contact with people. But when I do, people often remark how much the appreciate me doing so).
We all have a limited number of seconds in this world. Once they are used, we can never get them back. My attention is the most valuable thing I have, and I have come to resent and resist all attempts to steal it without consulting me (ads).
My mind has been absolutely torched by Reddit posts, and I have been trying to read more for the past couple years. Its going okay.
Mostly my issue is that I tend to read physical books, but I'm super active in this online game where I'm in a position that other people rely on me to be active, so I end up choosing the pc over the physical book.
I know there's a ton of really easy ways to just read that same book on the pc, but for me, I wanted to read the book to get away from the pc.
So I'm kinda stuck, between spending my attention on the online game which requires it or else the community I've built will fall apart, or doing a solid for my mind and my attention and reading a physical book away from the pc. I haven't found a good in between. Maybe I should just try reading books on the pc and see where that gets me.
Honestly you kind of just have to force it. It is like going to the gym where it takes a while to build the habit but once you do you’ll find it easier to make the time. And if the game is crowding out stuff in your life you want to do you need to make the choice on what’s more important to you.
I do really regularly check with myself if its still worth it.
Like you gotta understand, this guild, these people, they’re here for me when all my irl friends have decided they’d rather stay home and read books than hang out with me.
Nothing against those friends, we have jobs and families and they’re too tired to be social I get it, but I need friends, and so this is my way of maintaining a social life post covid.
I did this back in 2021 when I first joined here, and this place helped because I would read all the long form articles and all the long posts. And forced myself to read longer and longer stuff and watch stuff the required more patience.
That’s unraveled in the past year unfortunately, but it’s going to take longer to rebuild than most people realize
I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels like the good internet habits I worked to build over the past 6-8 years have degraded significantly. I’m on Discord, Instagram, and BlueSky now instead of Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter but the general degradation in focus has definitely happened.
It’s definitely an election thing. I started “using” again after the first presidential debate. I didn’t even watch it! But I needed reassurance and hoped being aware would help me get it. Obviously it wouldn’t but it’s just a habit now.
My heroin is TikTok. Vine existed when I was in high school but it wasn’t anything near what TikTok is today.
I started using it in like early 2023 after years of avoiding it like the plague. I think I did a decent job of not having it affect my attention span until about late 2024. Around the same time you went back to that during the presidential debates. Although I made a conscious decision to take a break while all that was happening which saved me some neurosis.
I can definitely feel the way it’s transformed my brain though. Not only the attention span but the content affecting the way I view things, affecting my sense of humor. Exasperating certain things of my psyche, stuff like blackpill content sucking me into a deeper hole of stuff even though I already knew so much about that to begin with.
Unsolicited advice : do you have people in that community that can help? If not, it might be time to find some, before you totally burn out on it. If you're struggling to balance personal needs over caring for others, that's a warning flag.
Yeah its a whole situation. I stepped in cause the other leaders had life stuff come up, and I keep trying to get members to help but no one else can reliably step in.
Its been just me and my buddy all year and thankfully the guild is smallish but like we have weekly events that need to be managed and its just been rough tryna hold it together on our own.
If you haven't tried an ereader yet, I'd highly recommend it! I hate reading books on my phone and computer, but e-readers (with an E-Ink display) run a really happy medium for me. I scooped a cheap used kindle to try it a few years ago and it was exactly what I needed to start learning to fun read again. Paired with a local library card you can get ebook loans for free really easily! Usually the use the libby app which is a pain, but again, it's free.
Might be a great way to dip your toes in. I also like that I can juggle a few books depending on what sounds interesting, and it takes the pain away if I don't like a book and want to put it down. It's harder to me with a physical book because it feels like I've wasted time running to library to pick it up or because I paid money for it.
Good luck!
I just bought the cheapest e-reader on market last week and I can confirm this. Also piracy, obviously. Kindle fights it, most other brands don't.
It's simple and comfortable, even the 6" screens are just a tad smaller than small paperbacks, and while it's not entirely like a real book in terms of feeling distanced from technology, it's much closer to that than to reading on PC or a phone because it's a single purpose device with low interactivity, and it's also a bit more comfortable, especially if you tend to read while eating breakfast for example.
Honestly the backlight turned out to be a big thing for me. And the reason I upgraded to a nicer device after a year. I wanted a dark mode and warm back lighting for when I stay up reading while my wife is falling asleep. I find the adjustable backlighting super useful depending on the environment and like that I can get it just right for comfortable reading. I still mix in the occasional book, but it's a bit of a hassle since I read a lot before bed. Part of the charm I guess.
Yeah, those are really nice as well. Standard even in my cheapest PocketBook these days, in case anybody reading this is considering one. And what's also great is that the backlight can go much lower than on any phone I used - on a phone I always add special darkening apps on top of the hardware setting, whereas with the e-reader I don't even set the backlight to the minimum setting in complete darkness.
Something they lightly touched on that I have come to learn deeply is the idea that the sequence of activities is so important for our brain chemistry and focus. The author talks about not reading their phone before reading a book because it messes with the experience. I find that to be true in so many ways.
One example I experience a lot is the decision to play intense videogames early on a free Saturday. I play dota 2 often which is a very competitive type of game that totally swallows your attention and takes everything you can give it. If I play that first thing on a Saturday, then everything afterwards feels like a drag and the only thing my brain craves is more videogames. By putting gaming off, I preserve my tolerance of slow gratification activities and get the added benefit of anticipating the fun later in the day.
Writing this out makes me realize I should do the same for social media/reddit. Well being honest I should just be completely off of reddit for all the reasons we've shared across tildes.
Thanks for the link.
It's trite now of course to say that screens can have a negative effect on us, but I found the directions in which the author takes the subject to be interesting.
To take just one point, back when I used social media, I definitely experienced a similar "Tetris effect" where my brain reflexively sought to frame all new stimulus in terms of how it could be shared and, perhaps a little shamefully, how it would be received by random strangers on the internet. Suffice it to say that this kind of thinking only leads to a kind of constant low-key misery and dissatisfaction with life.
I have been social media free for a number of years now and thankfully, my brain has unlearned this behavior. What the article raises for me, though, is whether I'm still unconsciously framing and "redirecting" experiences in other ways (similar to the camera experience described by the author) - work, TV, gaming and so on could all still be having that effect on me.
Not to say that I'm going to throw all of that away and live in the woods, but it's given me some food for thought as to:
I think we all do, and I think that it's not inherently good or bad. We all view the world through our own lens, shaped by our experiences. It's like learning a new hobby and noticing all the materials that have always been around you that you now know of new ways of using. Like getting a new car and suddenly noticing how many of that make model and color there are in your grocery store parking lot.
Without social media, I still find myself thinking about how to photograph events or rephrase work anecdotes in ways I can share with any one of a dozen group chats I am in. We are social creatures by nature, wanting to share our experiences with others is natural and healthy.
Even before the era of the algorithm there were people who craved external attention and approval so much that it produced toxic and self destructive behavior. The internet and smart phones have just made it more accessible to the rest of us.