It has been an odd couple of months for me to get back to reading books. Physically intimidating tomes and thin
novellas alike sit in utter disregard on the bookshelf accumulating dust. Often throwing mocking glances at me as I
pass by stooped ape-like over my phone engaged by the all-consuming algorithm.
And from what I've read in articles, heard over podcasts and spoken with flesh-and-blood real people, I've realised this battle is certainly not limited to the confines of my room. The ubiquity of declining attention spans brought on by the Tik-Toks and the Instagrams of the world has been seen and read over and over again in every media format available. And yet it feels we're so far from cracking on how to overcome the impulses from our limbic system to keep the tap of content consumption running.
Funnily some of the last few books I've read (or ironically started to read) are:
- The Shallows by Nicholas G. Carr
- Hyperfocus by Chris Bailey
- Stolen Focus by Johann Hari
All these books do toss, turn and play around the same concepts and insights. Sometimes forcefully deviating to add their unique viewpoint, but fundamentally not straying too far. This is primarily because the problem of focus in the new age stems a lot from our evolutionary wirings which aren't expected to change very soon.
So despite ingesting so many resources on putting up safeguards that don't hijack my focus, I circle back and come back to the same scenario where I need to massively rely on my own mindfulness to pull me out of these attention sinkholes. Now since it felt like a groundhog day scenario of helplessness, I tried to RCA (Root Cause Analysis) my way out of it. And the absolute generalised root of it boiled down to the ratio of the two C's: Consumption vs Creation.
But, how did we get here?
🪄 The illusion of competence and Tutorial Hell
There was a point in my Youtube history when it was replete with just movie trailers, stand up comedy highlights and old vine fail compilations that dug in to hours of my time. So in order to slap some sense into me, I started switching over to science and programming youtube videos as my primary subscriptions. Which further branched in to tonnes of channels where in what I thought I got was absolutely vital information as opposed to videos of hamsters eating carrots. And I visibly felt far less guilty now, cause I was learning a lot of new things, right? Or am I? * cue vsauce music *
The problem with back to back consumption of video that span over a wide range of topics is that your brain would try really hard to summarise them and maybe make succinct bullet points. But while switching contexts we tend to not give the brain enough time to process what we just watched, although we evaluate pretty optimistic versions of what we now know.
This inability to give space to comprehend and process tends to keep the new found information in our cache memory but fails to shift it to long term storage. Despite having watched so many videos on the geopolitics of the Vietnam war, my recall of "wtf actually happened?" still comes mainly from Forrest Gump.
This is quite analogous to the occurrence of what is known as Tutorial Hell. The act of watching tutorial on tutorial leads to a cyclic chain of learning to learn without actually implementing anything. But in the process the dopamine shots fired give you a false sense of accomplishment of having "done that thing". This is what the learn-by-doing movement has been trying to combat. And in retrospect, there's a lot of our schooling system that's to blame. But hell! That's a whole different rant for some other time.
This feeling of accomplishment further distances the need to generate an action by the self, which is inherently vital to validate the learning. And hence the feeling of having to do something gets satiated by the faux input of knowing how to do it (cause I sort of did that, right? Like in my head. Close enough 🤷♂️). Quite like the big lie we tell ourself that there's no need to write down that important thing cause our brain would be good at remembering it.
🍔 The consumption trap
Now that we covered the feeling of satiety without action, the other aspect of it is how the chain of consumption becomes recursive in nature due to the sheer escape velocity it takes to break from the barrage of recommended content.
Now the theory of the attention traps has far often been discussed on how the brain impulses are taken over by slot machine tactics of variable rewards. The result of this quagmire and the ease of consuming content through the day is further validated by the 1/9/90 rule, which states:
...on a social media network or review site, only 1 percent of users will actively create content. Another 9 percent, the editors, will participate by commenting, rating or sharing the content. The other 90 percent watch, look and read without responding.
The recommendation engines require longer engagement times from users to increase its own efficiency. As an insight of this rule it can be seen that the weightage of people to be kept on a platform would be targeting the mass 90% of passive consumers. The more you consume the more you get recommended content and so the better it gets and someone (maybe) gets the revenue for it.
🎚 The creation threshold
This skewed ratio exists despite the system being designed in a way that lowers the threshold for active participation. Even under the protection of anonymity people would still choose to consume rather than engage: primarily because it feels there's no need to. The feeling of everything that needs to be done or said has already happened so there's a feeling of a lack of need to pontificate on anything further. This is probably just one facet of our reluctance to fight the threshold of participation. A macrocosm of this can be seen on open source forums of how demanding the consumers might seem as opposed to the ever toiling creators and maintainers of popular repositories.
The creation threshold is met with higher resistance due to the fact that it requires a certain sense of exposing your work or skills on open grounds. This compounded with the fear of critique or rejection, even by your own self, would lead to the threshold bar being raised higher. There's also a larger mix of your own personality that comes into the equation on how much you trust yourself vs the people who will be reviewing your creations. This is why anything put up on the internet could be seen as a predatory judgement laden space by some and a space of open sharing by others.
The creation threshold also exists from how we perceive a skill and its application. We tend to over evaluate the skill as this constant reservoir which we need to tap in to for something to be produced. Where as the skill and its application both work off on each other and have a way more symbiotic relationship than something that is hierarchical in nature.
🧐 Okay! All that theory is fine, but what are we supposed to do?
For the people who are struggling with the creation of anything, including myself, probably it should be best acknowledged that this is a fight that most us go through.
One of the ways to effectively combat it would just be to start being mindful about the ratio. Use a time tracker maybe to get a better sense of how much time is spent in two broad categories: When you are consuming vs When you are actively creating something. The broad categorisation makes it easier to track and start simple.
The ideal state would be to work towards this:
But then again, this is the IDEAL state. The odds of technology are generally stacked against us due to the ease of consumption. But starting point would just be to keep the ratio consistent and work towards unity. The momentum builds up on its own on the presence of more action. And before you know the joy of creation would start surpassing the passive joy consumption.