Distraction Addiction
Have you ever spent an hour or more scrolling through numerous feeds on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or Twitter and realized you just wasted time again by not tapping your mind with one original thought nor one real emotion along the way? If you have, then you are human. That’s social media. It’s how it’s done. They want you there. However, if you conduct this lifeless and numbed scrolling several times a week, where the hours add up to one full day of the seven days, then you suffer from distraction addiction.
What is distraction addiction?
It is the avoidance of any productive use of your time or original thinking, in exchange for mindlessly and perpetually viewing an infinite number of distractive images and videos, all of which are designed to keep you distracted. You are trapped in viewing instead of doing. Distraction addiction is the predictable and desired outcome of traditional social media intentions because those ads follow exposure, likes and views. The software wants to keep you distracted on others and other things so they can float more content there to keep you locked in.
So if eyeball retention is the mechanism by which the outer social points are awarded or how ad money is spent, then there is an entire industry (and society), of which you are an unknowing part of, that perpetuates distraction addiction as an eventual path of emptiness, loneliness and life guilt.
What is the guilt in the guilty pleasure of distraction addiction? It’s that you wasted so much valuable time in your short life by watching instead of doing, browsing instead of creating, and numbing yourself to a mental idleness that makes the real world (and real people) less relatable or satisfying to you. That’s a shame. Life is short. Because there will come a day when distraction addiction becomes boring too, even tedious, like a mental chore and a fix your shrinking brain needs.
So set some limits for yourself. Get control of your own mind back. Browse and chill, then move on. Get an idea, and act on it. Scroll occasionally to find some new initiative, instead of passing by valuable years in your life, utterly lost and unhappy in distraction addiction.
Scroll wisely and start thinking, doing and living again. You might delight yourself in what you find in The Inner Social.
Drew Bartkiewicz
Co-Founder, Musist