I want to skip the part where I tell you that phones are bad and social media is ruining attention spans. you already know that. you’ve read it, heard it, felt it. what I want to do instead is follow the actual chain, that starts with something as ordinary as picking up your phone in the morning and ends somewhere much further away.
Most conversations about overconsumption stop at focus. saying: too much content fragments your attention. and that’s true, but it’s also the least interesting consequence in my opinion. the more serious one happens later, mostly slowly, over months.
you pick up your phone. you watch short videos. the platform is designed to pull you back, that is its one real function, so returning becomes a a kind of second nature. your attention, trained now on content that switches every fifteen seconds, starts to resist anything that doesn’t move at that pace.
Before we move forward, I want you to stop for just a single second.Look back at the last 24 to 48 hours. Think about the dozens—maybe hundreds—of short videos, Reels, and TikToks you scrolled through. Now, try to remember them. What did you actually gain from watching that massive mountain of content, given that you can barely remember a single video right now?
sitting with a hard, boring, slow-moving task becomes uncomfortable in a way it wasn’t before. so you avoid it, just a little. you check the phone instead of opening the document. you watch one more video instead of starting the thing. and because you keep avoiding those tasks, the skills don’t build and the projects don’t finish. months pass. you look up and you are not where you expected to be. the distance between where you are and where you intended to go produces a feeling that is hard to name, a low hum of purposelessness.
That feeling is what I want to point at. not the distraction itself. the destination it takes you to.
there are periods where I look back and I genuinely cannot account for the time. I was present for it. I was busy during it. but nothing was built. nothing moved. and the honest answer, when I trace it back, is almost always the same: my attention was not mine. it was borrowed, hourly, by video games or any other. and borrowed attention cannot build anything that lasts.
it is different from ordinary laziness or procrastination. you’re not choosing to avoid your goals. you’re just choosing, many times a day, to pick up the phone. each individual choice is trivial. but the accumulation is not.
What this does to your relationship with difficult work is significant. deep work — the kind that produces real output — requires sustained discomfort. you have to sit with not knowing. with slow progress. with the possibility that the thing won’t come together. that tolerance for productive discomfort is a capacity, and like most capacities, it erodes when unused.