I’m not particularly addicted to social networks; I often find myself “forcing” me to open Mastodon/Bluesky/whatever just to check what’s going on in the world. What I’m addicted to, however, is having constant brain simulation.

I can’t eat without watching a YouTube video.

I can’t work, or train without “listening” to music.

I can’t do the chores without playing a podcast.

I can’t getting started to read a book.

But what’s scaring me the most: I can’t observe the world and notice details like I used to.

It’s almost impossible for me to be focused on a single task, especially those ones that require a lot of thinking, without having something blasting into my headset, or having a video playing in the background. I’m not alone, society’s attention span is shrinking¹. It’s no coincidence, because attention is what’s worth in our advertising world. Google, Facebook Meta, most of the big companies are advertising ones. They deploy huge sums of money and effort to grab a little bit of our attention capital, one scroll at a time, to maximise the time we’re exposed to ads.

This is not breaking news, I’ve been knowing this for years. But in the last two years, I’ve been slowly realising how much I’m affected by this. Sometimes, I stoped listening to friends when they were talking to me (hence becoming a bad friend that ain’t remembering shit). I couldn’t start reading a book, the first 20 to 30 minutes being really hard to get into. When watching a movie, I pulled up and unlocked my phone for no apparent reason. I wasn’t in control any longer, so I decided that all of this has to stop.

I thought about it a bit, and identified things that are individually kind of easy to achieve, but together may make a real difference in my life. I’ll detail the list below, but the core idea is: being single-threaded again.

One of the first things I want to start putting in place is doing things on purpose. If I’m launching Spotify, it should be to purposefully listen to music, not to fill an empty space in my brain activity. The same principle applies for YouTube, or podcasts, or movies. And as strange as it may seems, this should also apply to social networks. I should open them to purposefully see what’s going on in friends’ digital life, or in the world. The very precise instant I’ll start doomscrolling will be the moment I should close the app. But this also means starting to work without music. Trying to be 100% focused on my code, my terminal or the doc I’m writing.

The second strategy I want to put in place is trying to be bored again, from times to times. Letting my mind wander, listening to the world’s noise instead of Soundgarden while biking or on the bus. I’m slowly getting started at photography, and I feel that this is a great way to try noticing things again. It’s a fun way to put effort into having a deeper look at my surroundings.

And finally, I wanna get rid of my phone. Not completely, I have to admit that those things are really useful sometimes. But I don’t need to carry it when I go shopping, or running. This may be the hardest thing to do because we’ve developped a fear of not being to reach or being reached, I think. But when I was younger, I used to wander in the countryside I grew up without any means of communication, for hours and hours. I should be able to do it again as an adult. Sometimes when I talk about it, people suggests that I use a “dumb” phone. But buying new (or even second hand) electronics to get rid of electronics does not seem to be the right solution to me. I don’t need another plastic box full of silicon and rare metals in my life.

I’m 26, and I’m worried about my growing disconnection from the world. We’re Saturday, 24 May 2025, and I’m trying to get back my attention. Let’s see how it goes.