Unplugging Is Not The Solution You Want

The crisis of endless troughs of content, outrage-bait, attention incentives, intermittent reward slot machine dynamics, comparative quantified self-worth, static profiles demanding fixed personal brands, Zoom-fatigue, and our weakening muscle of discerning fact from fiction it’s all just. too. much. for our brains to manage.

Statistics about our declining state of mental health amid our increases in screen time are not even needed to support any of tech’s effects. Pause and take a breath. You can feel it. That’s enough.

For remedies, we’ve been prescribed to delete our apps, curb notifications, turn our phones greyscale, invest in flip phones, and look away from screens two hours before bed. Oh, and especially don’t doom-scroll or check work email (same thing) as soon as you wake up.

Whoops.

Meanwhile, the recommendations from the other extreme advise us to become more productive by upgrading our tool stacks — as if we can transform into machines, ourselves, dominating our problems with “hacks.”

Using more tech to defeat the pitfalls of tech? Nice try.

How many times have you plowed through your timed app limits in the last week?

Over the years, countless books and campaigns such as the Social Dilemma raised awareness and proposed the aforementioned solutions.

But I ask:

Has anything meaningfully changed over the last decade? No. Really.

What’s changed?

We now have TikTok. Screen time climbs higher. Our meditation apps interrupt us with push notifications urging us to return to their feed of more video content. A three year old is now impressively proficient with an iPad — good luck snatching that thing out of their clutch. Sludge content, unafraid, pleases our needs for stimulation. Hell, “brain-rot” is a phrase we don’t even question.