Last June I noted some reasons why being online is so exhausting these days. I concluded:
All you can do is be more aware and a little more mindful. Maybe dip your toe into some explicitly positive content (Our World in Data, Reasons to Be Cheerful or A Weekly Dose of Optimism.) Unfortunately none of these odious trends are going to reverse any time soon. Buckle up.
To be clear, nothing has gotten better, in fact they have gotten worse. I have been writing a lot about the implications of the our new world. What we increasingly see is the billionaire class trying to sop our attention. In part for ego, in part to profit. Chris Hayes at The Atlantic writes:
Musk is an extreme example, but he is by no means alone. What you can see throughout his generational cohort is the same thirsty, grasping desire for attention: Silicon Valley billionaires starting their own podcasts, like the hosts of All In, or posting compulsively, like the hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman. This age’s new plutocrats are obsessed, for understandable reasons, with attention.
Daniel Immerwahr at the New Yorker thinks the issue is less about attention, and what we apply our attention to. There is no shortage of examples of consumers taking ever deeper dives into topics. He writes:
The nightmare the alarmists conjure is of a TikTok-addled screen-ager. This isn’t a full picture of the present, though, and it might not reveal much about the future, either. Ours is an era of obsession as much as distraction, of long forms as much as short ones, of zeal as much as indifference. To ascribe our woes to a society-wide attention-deficit disorder is to make the wrong diagnosis.
Simply cutting down on the amount of new and social media you consume can help. David Mack at Slate writes:
Personally, I’m going to try to turn off or silence phone notifications, or at least limit them. Instead of listening to cable-TV pundits or YouTube commentators or podcast hosts, I’m going to try to listen to people in my local community. How are they coping? What are they afraid of? What do they need from me at this moment?
A 2023 research paper, “Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens” by Koryzeva et al. note the importance of have coping skills for those of us online. They writes:
Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities.
The provide three coping strategies, depending on the type of content, but the underlying idea is engaging with what you have to engage and ignoring the rest.
Source: Kozyreva, A., Wineburg, S., Lewandowsky, S., & Hertwig, R. (2023). Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 32(1), 81-88. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214221121570
Jason Kotte at kotte.org has a great round-up of links on how to ‘weather the storm.’ Mike Monteiro writes about ‘How to survive being online.’ He writes:
Am I telling you to bury your head in the sand? Far from it. I am telling you to moderate your exposure to the bullshit. Your retweet or reskeet or repost is not going to save democracy. Your hot take on some idiot’s confirmation hearing is, at most, freaking out your friends. And if you want to remain on social media, as I will be, do your best to separate the signal from the noise.
One thing we need to do is to lengthen out our time horizons. Focusing on building value for yourself and society over the long run is in direct contrast to the overriding ethos of the day. Nick Maggiulli at Of Dollars and Data believes the only sustainable path is value creation not attention seeking. He writes:
Though the game is changing, I believe that value creation will beat attention chasing in the long run. It may not seem that way right now because we are in an extended bull market in crypto (and for assets in general). But, when things turn south, value will win out. It always does.
Kyla Scanlon makes the distinction between ‘attention harvesters’ and ‘real-world maintainers.’ If things keep shifting toward the virtual, the world in which we live in could degrade. She writes:
The more we treat things with no economic output as valuable, the less we’ll actually produce. This isn’t just about crypto or memes – it’s about what happens when narrative production outpaces real production…As more capital and talent flow to attention-based ventures, essential infrastructure could become neglected and society could become more fragile.
Chances are you are not going to catch the next big memecoin. You aren’t going to make a career out of posting on TikTok, or its next iteration. You need to focus on creating value over the long run. I wrote.
Do small, positive things on a consistent basis. Your present and future self will thank you. Remember, nobody is watching over you, waiting to come save you. For better or worse, you are on your own.
So choose carefully.
*Some related posts:
Sports gambling in the degenerate economy
Experience in a time when everything is up for grabs
When the game changes invent a whole new one
