JANUARY 7 — “The culture of distraction isn’t even experienced as distraction because it’s just how we live.” — Sherry Turkle
There is no question that online distraction is a new sort of epidemic today.
From staring at celebrity videos for five hours to watching 20 straight movie trailers on YouTube to infinitely scrolling Instagram influencer photos, many people today spend their entire days hooked on things which really don’t matter i.e. we’re just into 24/7 distractions.
The concept of distraction matters because it represents a subtle evolution of the social media addictions we’re already battling in society.
In the past, many people also spent many hours on media, but these normally involved focusing on topics which they considered important (eg. politics or their jobs or their health or their families and so on) i.e. these are areas of some consequence to our lives.
I mean, even people who doom-scroll usually do so because they’re concerned about a certain socio-political issue, right?
But today we’re inundated with trivial matters or mere entertainment which have the power to hook us in from dawn to dusk.
Nobody can seriously justify watching shop-lifting or accident vids for half a day as time well-spent, can they?
I used to find it mind-blowing that an uncle in the kopitiam can spend eight hours monitoring the share market on three devices. But I understand that’s his “job” so he sort of has no choice.
However, nowadays it’s more like this same uncle will be using up half the day staring at TikTok videos of Chengdu apartments which rise to the clouds or some new submarine the US Navy developed which can reach the Mariana Trench or 10,000 monkeys fighting Godzilla or Pattaya trans-women trashing up a customer who refuses to pay them or yet another AI video of Donald Trump break-dancing or what-not.
TLDR: In the past, entertainment, the trivial, the inconsequential, etc. didn’t have the power to consume our entire waking life. Today, media life appears to revolve around nothing but self-amusement.
Such media keeps us logged on from morning till night. People will watch videos of things which have absolutely nothing to do with their lives for hours and hours… and nothing else. For hours.
As an educator I see first-hand the effect this has on students who spend all their time on campus and classrooms scrolling through sheer trivia.
Their sleeping time renders them quasi-vampires, they can’t pay attention to anything beyond short-form vids, their social skills diminish to zombie levels and of course one inevitable result is the aggravation of our national mental health crisis.
In short, many of our young people are literally being distracted to death.
In even worst cases, it’s obvious that certain forms of entertainment and online sub-cultures are a menace to society, wrecking the lives of innocent people.
Anti-distraction tactics
What follows are some ideas (some simple, some hard, all beneficial in their own ways) to help us reclaim our time from what are essentially meaningless and pointless media distractions.
I suspect if we can save even ONE hour per day of our time from watching nonsensical material that could add up to quite substantial advantages.
So here goes:
First, find a role model. Perhaps learn from people like Telegram founder Pavel Durov who spends many hours a day working out and who actively refuses to own (let alone use) a phone.
Even Elon Musk generally spends most of his waking hours working and he only scrolls his X feeds during his toilet time (!).
Secondly, be cognisant of going into a trance-like state online. Watch yourself, “stand back” and be aware of those times when you’re being sucked into watching moon-dancing or parkour videos for longer than you know you should.
Three, plan out your day to be as productively healthy as possible, and do it before you log on to Insta or X or whatever. Eg. schedule the first two to three hours of your day working on assignments or deliverables, then maybe look at your favourite influencer for only 15 minutes during lunch.
Then spend two hours after lunch studying something, followed by dinner then, okay, perhaps 30 minutes scrolling X. Or something like that.
Fourth, since it’s the new year, find a new hobby to be passionate about. It could be anything from swimming to MMA to dancing to reading Dan Brown novels to creating videos on Canva, etc.
Anything that focuses your mind and channels your energy so you don’t waste four days a week sitting on the couch staring at woman-eating-a-2kg-steak video.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
