I’m ashamed to admit how much time I’ve spent doom-scrolling. I’m ashamed to admit that picking up my phone is not a decision I make anymore. I have reached a point of anger lately, when I’m scrolling through stories. I just realize I don’t fucking care about any of it but I spend so much time looking at it. In a fit of brief rage, I have deleted Instagram again, and Reddit which are both of my biggest time sinks. I like Instagram, I actually love Instagram and I felt I was able to have a good relationship with it. But Reels and the algorithm do such a good job of gripping my attention that I don’t even realize I’m using it until I’m facedown in a puddle of drool three hours later. (Or at least that’s how it feels.) I feel like there is a war waged for my attention. I’ve spent so much time trying to cultivate it into something functional but I lose every time. My attention is like Osama, and Reels is like Seal Team Six.

What is attention? The technical definition is the concentration of awareness on some phenomena to the exclusion of other stimuli. Whether attention is subjective or objective is still hotly debated. But loosely, it seems that our attention operates multiple trains of thought at once. I prefer a secondary definition of attention as the allocation of limited cognitive processing resources. Attention is the result of an attentional bottleneck in terms of the amount of data that our brains can process per second. To me, this means attention is sort of like a flashlight in a dark room and can be pointed around at will to illuminate hidden objects (like dogs eating grapes) or sensations, (like the sound of a dog eating a grape) but the light has a limit to what it can illuminate (like dogs eating grapes.) However, the lens can change shape and size, but the photons it produces are limited.

Understanding the phenomenon of attention is I think the first step in understanding how valuable it is. When you remove all of your physical stimuli, all you are left with is the ability to point your flashlight around the dark interior of your mind. I know this because one time I took a lot of mushrooms and forgot who I was and how to breathe. So I’m an expert I promise. Our attention is not very good, naturally. It is more like a floodlight than a flashlight, and I believe this is due to our biology; someone who was more broadly attentive was more likely to not be a grape that is eaten by a dog. However, it’s not great for the demands of everyday life to just be broadly attentive: work demands focus, writing demands focus, drawing sonic rule 34 demands focus (especially when trying to get the details of the throbbing, etc.) I believe the solution to lack of focus, is nicotine. Eat my dick Buddha, and get a juul. Everyone should smoke cigarettes, all the time. A baby holding a cigarette would be badass. Although nicotine’s benefit towards attention unfortunately quickly becomes a law of diminishing returns. As you use it more, your tolerance builds very quickly until you just use it to become your stupid in-attentive self again. Eventually, without it, you are just dumber and uncool like the rest of us. So what can be done?

I used Sam Harris’ Waking Up app for a full year. I practiced “Mindfulness” regularly for the duration of that use and was earnestly impressed by the insight it provided. Admittedly, I downloaded the app purely out of existential curiosity. In my morning caffeine euphoria, I would anxiously rattle over the fears of life and death and general existentialism. Somehow, I thought that meditation would bring me closer to the answer. It did and I have achieved Nirvana. (Eat my dick, Buddha.) But it also taught me a lot about attention and how little control I truly exhibit over it daily. The introductory lessons begin as explanations of the practice of mindfulness and meditation; you are to begin by focusing minutely on your breathing and as other thoughts and stimuli interject, you are to observe them and return to the breath. It sounds tremendously easy and very boring and that is because it is. It is so fucking boring. I would much rather play Halo, I promise nobody would have thought of this boring shit if Halo existed in ancient India. Imagine fewer monks and more Faze clans. However, I found out pretty immediately that because I thought it was boring and didn’t like it very much that probably meant that I had very little control over my attention and impulse. So I doubled down. Over time I noticed I was able to handle much longer sessions, and was able to find mindfulness in observing stimuli outside of just the breath. My favorite of which being the visual field: Observing the full range of my sight as a flattened 2D painting that my brain conjures up just based on what it thinks the light that bounces into my eyes means. I also like the emotion-related practices, where we conjure images that invoke feeling and try to observe them as acutely as we can, and the way those feelings cause a change in our chemical physiology.

Did meditating really do anything for me? It’s hard to quantify how it has helped me and in what ways. But it did provide me some answers that I was looking for, indirectly. I now know that man is descended from sexy space dolphins and one day they will return to guide us into the stars. I am their chosen Messiah and will hurdle through the Milky Way laden with jewels on the back of their most desirable and sexy dolphin. But also that mindfulness is like a muscle that I tune-up every once in a while. I don’t have to do a whole lot of maintenance to reap its benefits. I think there’s a more intimate understanding of how my attention functions locked somewhere inside the folds of my peanut brain (likely tucked behind the entire script of Forgetting Sarah Marshall.) I think it allows me to handle pressure and emotion from a more objective and rational place than I did before. Especially in regards to my knee-jerk reactions and patience for others. I think also it has taught me that boring is sometimes good. I should seek to be bored because that’s usually when I do my best work.

Social media and attention go together like meth and more meth. The Zuck has done a great job at capturing my attention pretty much my whole childhood. I spent a lot of time on Facebook in my teens. There were button-collecting games that allowed me to display all my strange and often esoteric memes (not much has changed) to my friends via digital corkboard. My Happy Aquarium allowed me to care for the digital fish tank of my dreams. Farmville let me send invites to everyone I know, endlessly until they caved and realized the game was so fucking boring (sort of like mindfulness.) Then I discovered posting strange videos of myself to illicit reactions from my classmates and it sculpted me into the emotionally needy scarecrow I am today. I didn’t use Instagram until around 2017 as I never had the desire to keep up with a lot of different apps. I felt that Snapchat was a perfectly fine platform to share my happenings on. I especially liked that Snapchat was fleeting, I liked that my silly and carefully crafted stories would self-destruct and I would only hear if someone thought they were funny if I saw them the next day. Instagram was fine, but then it added stories and everyone I know has it. I was able to post little stories of things I found funny, beautiful, or thoughtful. Occasionally embarrassing poetry or something on brand with my sense of humor. I lived in harmony with Instagram for a long time until the arrival of reels.

I had already sworn off TikTok after shortly bearing witness to how great it was at monopolizing my attention. It had learned what I found funny and showed me nothing but that. I was never bored on TikTok and I began to miss being bored. So I decided Tiktok and I just cannot coexist. I was able to avoid reels for a little while. But Instagram sensed this and began to integrate them more heavily into their UI. I fell into the trap and as soon as you let the algorithm take hold it works quickly. I began to tick off minutes to hours to at its worst, full mornings into afternoons of scrolling nothing meaningful. Oftentimes it was just an exercise of capturing my imagination, my brain would dance with visions of what I wanted to create, how I wanted to live, or how I wanted to look.

It is hard to say I won’t keep social media in my life in some capacity, as I think I do a great job of keeping up with others in my life much more intimately because of it. I am very chatty. If I am drunk I will comment on everyone’s story. I also truly love making videos of stuff that I think is funny and showing those to people I love. I don’t like making these things in “The Age of Content,” however. I think the commodification and rebranding of art as “content” whether it be silly or informative or nothing at all is an injustice. Because content is synonymous with filling a space. It is tissue paper and it is easter eggs and it is the gift inside the basket. It excuses and rewards the constant posting of derivative and repetitive trendy bullshit because at least it keeps attention. It rarely rewards things made with heart and that are carefully crafted because “content” is all weighted the same. It fills the space. I cannot continue to allow my hours and days to dwindle away behind a screen. I truly wish I could have both, an Instagram account and the discipline to not use it. But I am a weak reptile and will lose the battle time and time again. I speak directly to you Zuck when I say that your creations are good at what they do, but sometimes you shouldn’t do things just because you can. (Like people who post handstands on Instagram. Admittedly I am that person.)

I think that in 10 years, social media will be like cigarettes. People will ask you not to use it in front of their kids. But babies will look really badass drooling over an iPhone. I understand it is on the consumer to navigate the world as desired but I think that far too many people have fallen in deeper than they’ve noticed. They are unable to crawl out of the hole. The only way to get out of the hole we are in now is to abandon it and hope for something better (or the French Reign of Terror-style guillotine beheadings. I am okay with either.) I fear there will come a day, (alongside the rise and growth of language models and sophisticated algorithms) when the medium of video becomes a form of visual heroine. A time when the numbers have become so good at tricking us that it’s no longer a choice to negotiate with them. Our eyes are currently the most valuable resource on the planet and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Until the space dolphins arrive to cut them out, and I as their leader will scatter them as stars throughout the cosmos.