Psychology
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.
I discovered that wren was lost. he was living in his head. he carried fears and doubts that no one knew about. one of these fears was that he did not know how to look at god. not out of lack of faith, but because the way we learned religion did not include space for what a man can endure from the inside. the emphasis on this is either completely absent or very shallow. because of that, he struggled to understand what he was going through. is it good. is it punishment. the men of religion did not emphasize this enough.
I followed up with him again after that. this time, he told me the latest diagnosis. high red blood cell count. elevated sugar levels, though not urgent, at least for now. he said he was not planning to tell his family. they worry too much.
He sounded exhausted. too tired to sleep. he kept repeating something that stayed with me. that what he was suffering from was not the illness itself, but what his head was telling him. the collapse was not only physical, but mental too.
I do not remember exactly whereIfirst learned the sentence “worry about it later”. but over time, it revealed itself as something deeper than advice. it describes a mental mechanism that works almost automatically in my mind. a form of being selectively ignorant about certain things, not because they do not matter, but because they do not matter now.
In the five unplanned hours I’ve spent on calls with Awab, he mentioned once that he had started a course kind of on self discovery, presented by the author of The Surrender Experiment. as I remember they were nine chapters, online. Awab said he moved through the first few quickly, impatiently, because the material was already familiar to him. and then he reached the end of chapter six, where the instructor said: in the next lecture, we’ll be talking about x. and Awab paused. he told me he knew, instinctively, that what came next was something he wasn’t ready to hear. so he stopped. and he stayed stopped.
Either at work or in daily life, car horns for no reason. someone dragging their feet without lifting them. cutting a public service queue. leaving clothes in the gym changing room instead of the locker. a bank agent typing five words per minute. an uber driver talking on the phone. someone playing a video on the metro without headphones.