#23: i think about it all the time

and they're exactly the same, but they're different now

I think often about the dangers of over-consumption, how mainlining everything can mean you’re not really engaging in anything. Constantly bombarding the senses never feels good, but lately I’ve begun to feel as though none of it is sticking, that so few things seem to elicit any kind of emotional response much less any “enjoyment.”

relatable.

I have felt my attention degrade significantly in the last twelve months, in part caused by outside factors (the horrors of life), but also because of my tendency to micro-dose content in 1-minute long capsules, endless scrolling feeding my brain with loud content which I recently discovered I could watch at double-speed. I am not proud of any of this by the way; if anything, I’m deeply embarrassed that I- a proud bibliophile whose job revolves around reading- have only managed to finish twelve books this year, or that (beyond ‘BRAT’), I have essentially stopped investing in new music because it seems much harder to find, and retreating to old favourites (the KoRn discography) feels like the easy, safe option. Even films, the one artform to consistently keep me afloat, have become difficult to negotiate; not because everything is awful, but because watching too many back to back seems to scramble my brain in a way I’ve not encountered before. I now have to create space by watching total drivel in between, giving myself the chance to turn my attention off, even though it feels like an ineffective use of time.

It’s not an original idea in the slightest, but I’m just not convinced that we as humans are designed to absorb as much information as screens everywhere would like us to. I am a full victim of my millennial age, and it seems provincial now to remember how going on the internet used to be an experience limited to one-hour increments, two if your parents didn’t need to make any phone calls. Don’t get me wrong, I love the abundance of Wi-Fi everywhere and the knowledge that I am able to search for anything and everything at the drop of a hat, but I do think that staying constantly abreast of what is happening politically, socially, culturally, via a device I pick up on average 215 times a day (!) probably isn’t doing wonders for me physically and mentally. Even with all the notifications turned off, the innate thirst for knowledge I have developed over time as a result of being online 24/7 means that any attempt to tune-out seems futile, a fear that I could be missing some breaking-news development, or that I won’t know what my friends are up to when we’re not together (or even when we’re in the same room). 

I don’t know what grand point I’m trying to make here other than feeling your dopamine receptors atrophy in real time is a phenomenally modern experience I wish more people would talk about. The internet is bad now, not just because platforms feel insidiously riddled with bigotry and images of death and destruction, but because good websites just don’t seem to exist. I am circumstantially still a desktop girly, but I seem to just click between the same three pages over the course of a working day. I subscribe to 10-20 newsletters because that is where the best writing seems to live, and yet I have an inbox full of unread items I can’t quite find the time to sit with because I can’t focus for more than five seconds. 

At times I wonder if maybe it’s age, that a need to devour and find everything as fulfilling as possible is a young person’s game, but I don’t think that’s it. Is this what life is going to be like from this point onwards? Will things ever feel fun again?

is this thing still on? hi. it’s been three and a half years. thanks for not unsubscribing- who knows, maybe this’ll be the piece to get the words rolling again. tell me how you find it- A.