I’ll be honest: I had no idea what to write about until thirty seconds ago. I got overwhelmed thinking through the long list of half-baked observations floating around my mind, which seems to describe what my entire life has been feeling like, especially recently.
With whatever I want to do, even the simple acts of listening to music or watching a movie, I feel so inundated with easy-to-access options that it becomes increasingly difficult to commit to anything.
If there’s any one object that perfectly represents this, it’s my phone. It has infinite apps, infinite buttons, infinite different tabs and screens, as well as infinite content to be discovered.
Even when you go on your phone to accomplish one specific task, it’s more than likely that you’ll end up making several stops along the way. The red notification badges will usher you into spending endless hours navigating through direct messages, posts, and recommended content that the algorithms “think you’ll like.”
Often, my search for the perfect engaging (or, maybe more accurately, distracting) content goes on longer than whatever activity I eventually force myself to choose.
Even as I write this article, I have a YouTube video playing in the background (this is most likely to temporarily stop me from having to deal with the weight of my own thoughts).
Another side effect of this oversaturation is an emphasis on multitasking to combat the emptiness we now feel in the absence of overconsumption. I think this is depicted most succinctly in the Subway Surfers gameplay edited into other short-form video content meant to vie for viewers’ attention.
This is our current relationship with the advertising world, which recognizes its need to compete with millions of other forces that ultimately want to win our eyes and wallets. Rather than winning anything valuable, though, I think this hyperactive landscape is causing decision paralysis, procrastination, and avoidance.
I find myself constantly flitting from app to app to find something that’ll be good enough at distracting me, effectively preventing me from starting to work on anything significant or meaningful; in other words, anything that’s challenging and mentally demanding. After I watch enough YouTube shorts or scroll through enough Tweets, I end up feeling enough guilt, frustration, and/or exhaustion that I give up on doing anything I find productive, once again. It’s a cruel cycle.
I’m not sure what a solution to this could be since I don’t think it’s entirely an individual problem. In many ways, escapism makes sense in a world that’s this vast and stressful. At the same time, a vast and stressful world only tightens its grip on us when we become even more insulated and detached from reality by carefully curating comfortable content for ourselves. Naively, I yearn for simpler times, even knowing that those times have probably never existed.
As for the phone specifically, I’ve found that turning off notifications can have its benefits if you’re sufficiently incurious about what’s going on across your apps. Using alarms, calendars, and to-do lists can also be helpful to prioritize what actually matters.
Simultaneously, though, it’s easy to blame such a real manifestation as the phone; we also have to acknowledge the media and market actors who push this process along to monetize our over-consumptive tendencies. It’s the news outlets that rely on exploiting existing fears and prejudices, along with the corporations that push unnecessary consumer dependence on their goods and services, even to the point of actual obsession and addiction.
This seems to be our modernity: projecting an image of simplicity and convenience, while covertly financing and constructing an ecosystem of (false) choice that’s not just complex, but utterly convoluted. It’s another chapter of capitalism in a book that’s still writing itself.