Distractions Will Kill Your Dreams

Be more than a metric in someone's dashboard

When you lay in bed at night, tossing and turning because your life isn’t the way you want it to be (weird how these thoughts always come at night), your goals seem crystal clear.

You know exactly what type of person you want to be and you’re painfully aware of how you’re currently falling short.

But then the sun rises, erasing the literal/metaphorical darkness, and what’s the first thing you do?

Turn on music. Check text messages. Scroll social media (multiple apps). Fire up a podcast. Find out the latest political ragebait so you can see what you’re supposed to be mad at today and forget about tomorrow.

The dull haze of modern life doesn’t just distract you from your goals. It makes them seem somehow unimportant. You COULD do [insert concrete step in the right direction here], but damn a new Joe Rogan Experience episode just dropped. The guest seems interesting, this one is going to be a banger. I’ll do [important task that actually matters] later.

Then it’s ‘ok, I’m going to give myself 10 minutes to scroll X. I need to find out what everyone’s saying about the Current Thing and THEN I’ll get to work.”

*10 minutes passes*

“Ok, just 10 more minutes and THEN I’ll start. This Current Thing is more important than the previous Current Things (weird how you can’t remember any of them even though they seemed so important at the time) and I just HAVE to see if anyone replies to the post I made about it”.

Then 3.5 hours later you’re still scrolling X. The JRE episode is blaring in the background but you haven’t actually listened to a single word. You have 12 tabs open to ‘research’ things you see people/bots referencing on your social feeds. You can actively feel your brain getting dumber in real time. You have the not-so-vague feeling that you’re not in control of your own actions, like the screen you’re staring at is its own life form, part of a vast technological web (I’m trying to avoid saying Matrix) that has somehow hijacked your brain and turned you from a Complete Human Being into an Insignificant Human Node who exists only to give it the power it needs to sustain itself by feeding off your (fragmented) attention.

The idea of snapping out of this mental state and doing anything remotely meaningful feels like a pipe dream. You’re so distracted that you actually have distractions to distract your from your distractions (multiple videos, multiple screens).

At some point you notice that your surroundings are getting dark. The sun has set on another wasted day. You collapse into bed after eating a DoorDashed meal, headphones on to delay the inevitable mental confrontation with whatever remnants of ambition still exist at the core of your psyche.

Finally, with trepidation, you remove your headphones and set your phone down on your nightstand (after one last social media doomscroll). You toss and turn, unable to sleep. The ambitious part of your psyche, the what-the-fuck-are-you-doing-with-your-life part of your personality that comes to the forefront every night, is back. And your goals once again become clear.

Then the sun rises and you repeat the cycle anew.

Your own personal civil war

I’m sure you can relate to this. Maybe not the specifics, but everyone in 2020’s society has to grapple with the epic Distraction vs. Ambition internal civil war every single day.

Maybe sometimes the ambitious side wins. On those days, you think, “why can’t I be like this every day?” You swear you’re never going to listen to another podcast again. You decide to post-and-ghost on social media instead of getting sucked into the feed. This is the beginning of the New You.

Then the next day something grabs you. Maybe you hear people talking about a news story. Maybe a YouTube thumbnail stands out like no YouTube thumbnail has before. You think “OK, I’m just going to watch this one thing then I’ll get back on track.” This is the technological borg version of ‘come on babe, I’m just going to put in the tip, I swear’.

Once you click, it’s game over. You’re back in.

How do you get out of it?

You stop being addicted to technological distractions the same way you break any addiction.

You have to hit rock bottom and decide that you’re sick of it and want to change.

This usually manifests in waking up one day and realizing that your life is exactly the same - or worse - than it was five years ago. Just like an alcoholic or a crackhead, you decide you want more out of life and get mad at the thing that’s robbing you of your potential.

If you want to succeed and - like Nietzsche says - ‘become who you are’, you need to give up the digital crack.

It doesn’t benefit you.

You’re not becoming an informed citizen or whatever it is you tell yourself you’re doing. You’re just wasting your potential.

Digital crack is created by people who have an agenda. Your role in the whole thing is to be pawn. Scratch that. Your role is to be less than a pawn. You’re not even part of the game to begin with. You’re just another number on a YouTube dashboard. A metric.

Is that really all you want to be?