There was a time when the smallest moments felt like art. The way sunlight rested on a desk at 4 pm, the rustling leaves during autumn, and the silence that echoed during winter nights. These details felt enough and carried a sense of reality, a slow reminder that life doesn’t have to be loud to be meaningful.
Somewhere, between notifications, trends, deadlines, and the endless chase of “what’s next”, we stopped noticing. Now, our days are punctuated less by the details around us and more by the glow of a screen. Our mornings start with alarms and easily transition into diving through a sea of messages, notifications, accompanied by endless scrolling. Our nights don’t differ a lot. The world didn’t suddenly stop being beautiful; we just simply stopped looking out long enough to admire it.
The Dopamine Trap.
It’s no brainer to blame it on the phones, but the truth runs even deeper. Our brains were never designed to receive or even handle such an abundance of constant stimulation. Every notification, every video, every scroll is a hit of dopamine. It feels harmless, almost like the new norm.
Like any system, our brain adapts. When dopamine spikes become so frequent and readily available, ordinary moments, the ones that used to feel grounding or bring a sense of calm, start to feel dull. A slow morning feels “boring”. A walk without scrolling or music feels “dull”. Watching and observing feels unrewarding, and slowly, without even noticing, we forget how to enjoy stillness.
What we lose.
When we start living in the world that exists in our screens rather than the one outside them, we lose something way more intimate than time.
We lose presence.
We lose the versions of ourselves that felt grounded through simple, slower routines. The artist who felt inspired by the smallest details of nature. The poet who overheard a phrase. The musician who found rhythm in the sound of the footsteps in the hallway. We lose creative souls to the endless sulking of a dopamine hit.
This constant need to feel stimulated doesn’t just affect our attention span; it affects how deeply we experience the world at all. Noticing requires stillness, and stillness requires the ability to be present somewhere without a screen pulling all your senses towards it.
The illusion of being everywhere, while being nowhere.
We like to trick ourselves into the idea that just because we’re connecting to everything online, we’re more aware, more informed, and present than ever. The truth, on the other hand, is way different.
We’re everywhere but nowhere at the same time.
We scroll through hundreds of videos, but cannot remember what the birds sounded like when we woke up. We text multiple people a day but get awkward and dissociated in real conversations. We keep up with global trends but don’t know the pattern of arrangements in our own room.
It’s not like the digital world is bad; it’s just loud. And when everything is loud, the quiet and calm no longer stand a chance.
Relearning the art of noticing.
The good news is that we can still unlearn our unhealthy patterns of being sucked into a digital space.
It can start small.
You look up from your phone on your walk to class.
You sit for two minutes without music.
You observe details in your usual surroundings that you never paid attention to.
You make a cup of coffee without filling the silence with a screen.
These moments won’t reward you with the instant dopamine hit that your phone does, but that’s the point. They rebuild slower neural pathways you’ve neglected. They strengthen your attention and creativity. The more you practice noticing, the more you realise the world didn’t lose its magic — you did.
It reminds you that even your own life, once seen up close instead of through a filter, becomes richer.
Noticing isn’t poetic just for the sake of aesthetics; it’s practical. When you slow down, you make better decisions and choose a healthier, richer life. You form deeper connections. You feel grounded instead of overstimulated. You regain the ability to be bored and not feel the urge to escape it.
Most importantly, you begin to feel present again.
The real answer is way simpler than we think.
When did we stop noticing the art in little things?
The exact day doesn’t matter.
What matters is that we can choose to start again. Wonder doesn’t disappear; it simply waits for our attention.
All we have to do is look up and look away.
For more articles that remind you of what it means to be human, visit Her Campus at MUJ. And for a tour in my corner, visit Shreeya Srivastava at HCMUJ.