Detox Diaries Part 1

Well, I’m embarking on a new adventure of sorts. It’s called de-consumption, where I work towards ending the farce that is scrolling and consuming slop all the time. I’ve reached a point in my life where I genuinely want to change for the better and improve myself. What will this involve exactly? I plan on cutting out as much crap as possible in my life and moving towards a state of being where I’m no longer frazzled by my devices and websites and general information slop. Now, whether this will involve getting rid of them entirely is another question. I’ve long debated my lifestyle and the benefits of having all this stuff (Wendell Berry famously said he would never buy a computer, and regrettably I have many at my disposal).

My biggest vice lately has been YouTube. Thibaut Meurisse described this as an “Open System” where the content is never ending and so you can’t easily reach an end to the external stimuli. It’s pretty much a tar trap for your attention span and falling into it is guaranteed to spiral into massively wasted time. This is something I wish to cut out of my life entirely so I plan to just stop using Youtube. No more video consumption and no more wasting time falling down rabbit holes.

4chan has also been horrendous for my mental health and attention span. I keep checking in over and over again throughout the day and it’s a pretty vicious cycle. I see some awful stuff on there so I hope that in cutting this out, I can regain some of my actual attention span and mental clarity. I never post on there either so I imagine ending the lurking aspect of it will also be good for me. It’s unfortunately a very addictive site. But the endless cloudflare verifications and the awful captchas that prevent posting make it a very unappetizing and flawed experience. I’m better off without it in my life anyway.

All of these dopamine spiking habits have to be replaced by something, but what could I do in its place? Principally I have to learn to just be bored. The internet revolution has made attention a hot commodity, and most of our online activities end up sucking our attention spans dry. I doubt that many zoomers can attain a state of boredom these days. So, I plan on doing activities that can regenerate my attention span. I have some big tomes to get through, notably Democracy in America by Alexis De Tocqueville. 19th century scholars are pretty dense by today’s standards so I wish to explore some more classic literature and see what the big ideas were back then. I want to get outside more and touch grass, so I plan on biking and running as much as I can. Meditation and stretching have been on my back-burner for a long time, so I think I’ll include that on my to-do list.

For all of my previous writings, I’ve always been suffering from sort of attention deprivation and general malaise. I hope that in at least starting this that I can achieve some sort of momentum and really change my life for the better. This is extremely difficult but I hope that with the grace of God and my own general luck that I can make it happen. I’ll keep writing and updating this topic to document my progress and hopefully illuminate for others what life can be like with an actual attention span.