Fast Food Feeds

Much of my social media and news/video feed consumption has felt like eating fast food lately.

Being able to quickly open and refresh a news feed or pull up a short clip at the swipe or tap of one finger provides an immediate sense of reward that, thanks to the efforts of thousands of engineers, is remarkably difficult to resist. It’s like being able to access my favorite burger from McDonalds at the snap of my fingers.

Yet, no matter how initially rewarding this behavior is it consistently fails to deliver any lasting sense of fulfillment that, though was never promised, I was perhaps hoping for.

Authors like Cal Newport (Deep Work), Nicholas Carr (The Shallows), and Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy) have all made compelling cases that we’re in an epidemic where technology meant to serve us is instead seizing our attention.

I don’t think there’s a magic pill to cure this predicament many of us find ourselves in, rather our best bet is to make deliberate choices daily to reclaim our attention.

You may not be able to get rid of your phone, but you can make it harder to reach.

When’s the last time you took a walk without periodically pulling out your phone? Resolving to go for a short walk without checking your messages or reading an article is another great start.

As I mentioned earlier, attention is arguably more valuable than time because what is good is the time allotted to us if it is spent being lost in distraction?

It would be a tragedy to wake up in an 80-year-old body, trying in earnest to reflect on the good bits of life only to realize how few we can recall because we spent most of our time sleep walking, tethered to a feed, instead of investing attention into our relationships and meaningful experiences.