I remember when I was young I would actually spend time outside, I would go hours kicking a football against the wall, trying to perfect my game, developing a good touch, becoming quicker, getting better at tackling & understanding how to read the game more.
But as I got older I stopped going outside as much, I didn’t socialize as a much, and in my teenage years I stopped playing football. My life was consumed by my phone or iPad watching YouTube, when I wasn’t on YouTube I played Minecraft, and the only socializing I did was at school or over the internet.
Thanks to instant gratification through our devices, it’s way easier for us to choose to scroll on our phone than to do any other task like thinking, reading, working on projects or even developing our skills. In fact most people can’t even read a few pages without getting distracted. We get so engulfed in this world of fiction, a world that isn’t even real that we forget to live.
Apps like TikTok, the Reels section on Instagram and YouTube shorts, and even Mr Beast type of content are capitalising off our short attention spans making it even harder for people to pay attention. Now instead of just being able to watch a video like a normal person did, people need extra stimulation, as they watch brain rot videos with subway surfers, minecraft parkour, or a GTA race at the bottom of the screen just to keep them watching for longer.
See, most people can’t go minutes without checking their phone. Do you know how annoying and disrespectful it is to be talking to someone and they pull their phone out mid conversation. It’s like they can’t even think to stop themselves, they have an itch to scroll on their phones like a drug addict, and that’s what these devices are for people, they’re an addiction.
Now imagine you sat in silence away from all of the distractions, no devices, no stimulation, with the only options in front of you being a book, a pen and some paper, a computer only allowed for you to type on, and your mind, what would you do? You would have no choice but to think, to imagine, to learn through reading, to question reality using your mind, and to innovate, altering the state of the world merely using your mind.
This was the natural state of people 100’s and 1000’s of years ago, hence why we had such incredible minds, the likes of Davinci, Plato and Aristotle, and we had conquerors like Alexander The Great, and Ghengis Khan, because they utilised their minds and took action. But what we have nowadays are guys that are addicted to whatever gives them an easy hit of dopamine, things like video games, p*rn, and social media.
Sitting in boredom is the key, and the only way to enjoy being bored and sitting alone with your thoughts is to deprogram your mind from the instant gratification conditioning. Learning how to spend time alone only staring at a wall or utilising meditation will allow you to build this muscle. The more you deprogram your mind from the stimulation, the easier you’ll find things like reading, writing, meditating, and even staring at a wall to brainstorm new ideas is. Relative to what other options we have, doing the task we considered hard before, becomes easier now because if we stop using our devices we only have a few options left to stimulate our minds.
I know confronting your thoughts or sitting with your own mind can be scary at first, but the more you do it, the better connection you will build with yourself, and you’ll realise that the reason you were using devices to distract yourself in the first place is because it’s easier than sitting alone in thought or doing the hard work.
So is it realistic to stop scrolling and give up all stimulation completely, obviously not, for most of you you’ll go back to scroll right after this video, and a large chunk of people probably clicked off the video pretty quickly. But if you obviously don’t want to give things up, don’t give everything up, choose what stimulation brings you the most genuine enjoyment, for me it’s YouTube and Twitter, just stick to a few videos a day and use chrome extensions to block the recommended tab like I do.
But one thing I would recommend is not using Short form content platforms, like Reels, Shorts or TikTok, so your attention span can improve, because we all know it’s hard to stop scrolling once we’ve started. So I would say avoid it all together.
And so instead of scrolling, use your time to do things that are productive to your life, create a list of things you need to do every day, that will help you fulfill your long-term goals and complete that list. Once you’ve built momentum by completing what you need to do a few days in a row, you’ll be able to do more, and you’ll be able to stop the perpetual cycle of doom scrolling, which means you won’t need to rely on stimulation when you get bored.
See there’s nothing achieved when we sit and scroll on our phone for hours on end, we only put off the work that we need to do, and by the time we finish scrolling we feel worse than we did before we started. So YOU must be willing to put down your phone and make a sacrifice, otherwise YOUR life will be the sacrifice. Develop the skill of discipline and improve.
