“How many more screens can I shove on my face?“
Have you ever had that experience when, while staring in front of your computer screen doing work, you gave in to the urge of reaching out to your mobile phone on the left—just to check the latest Facebook update—while the documentary you thought was interesting to watch is playing through your tablet screen to your right?
Ha, yep. That’s me some days. Ehrm, okay, probably most days until I felt the need to wrench my gut out.
And as if woken up in a trance, my gut tells me that there’s something wrong with that. Especially when after reaching one mobile phone, my hands are still itching to check the notifications of another mobile phone, which ends up with me having to split my attention between four screens.
It’s like a dream in a dream in a dream, virtually escaping what was already in my face by going down three screens deep.
Wake-up call
The first thing that came to mind was: Oh, what a distracted brain I have!
And you know what? These episodes often end up with a throbbing head, telling me that I have overstimulated my brain—information overload—and that I am starting to have eye strain.
Screens can easily swallow our lives. They disrupt our local experiences tens or even hundreds of times per day. They pour information out in such quantities that we spend our working lives touching and tapping—and our resting evening sitting and staring.
In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World
Living in a tech-saturated world
The main reason why I was compelled to write about being digitally distracted is that I am going through it (again and again and again) and I want to speak to others who are also trying to at least regain control of their lives, using their technology instead of being used by them. I know I have written so many times about my love-hate relationship with my devices and perhaps I would end up writing more.
It even took me almost three weeks to finish this blog post because I was so swamped with devices, shuffling from one screen to another, trying not to be awash with competing (online) responsibilities. Is losing focus the cost of convenience?
These days, I struggle to recall what it’s like to be without mobile devices and my little Hey Google assistant, sitting and waiting on the bookshelf, listening for my next command or request. I can remember when I was in the office when I had the sudden urge to ask, “Hey Google, will it rain today?” so I could pace my work and decide if I can stay longer only to realize that Google Nest is at home, 30-minute-commute away from where I was.
Choosing to be in the moment
What I’ve noticed is that setting a daily goal helps me stay focused and my mind wanders less from one device to another.
Take, for example, finishing this blog post.
Picking up this draft meant that my hands were tapping on the magic keys (which meant I can’t scroll on my phone) and that my mind was focused on thinking about and translating my mental gibberish into coherent ideas that hopefully you would come across and read.
And choosing to be in the moment required discipline. Oh, how discipline feels restraining at first! But I realized that once you give in to reigning in your impulses to do everything else but the thing that matters to you and helps you become better, discipline creates freedom that bears fruit.
Out of the brain fog
But how have I become a slave to my devices?
People outside the technology world are often surprised to learn how much research and engineering goes into making modern digital technology compelling.
In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World
Well, after I have granted my devices my attention, now I am compelled to keep using them like mental candy because they make me feel good—which by the way is ephemeral—at the expense of missing out on the joys from my physical environment, the here and now.
Somehow, choosing to be here typing away the overflow of my remorse towards my phone addiction made me feel better because I am no longer a passive consumer of content but a creative—breathing life into words for another person to read—spreading ideas that are hopefully contagious enough to spread even further.
Tuning out the noise and listening to your voice
When I am mindlessly consuming content, to simply pass the time, I barely hear myself thinking. And even when it feels freeing at first, building this habit of dissociation kept me from gauging my moral compass, my beliefs, and my principles. Having too much information has been wearing me down.
Do we have to know everything just because we can?
Because of the unsettling bubbling up inside me, I was scouring for resources and stumbled upon the book In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World by Nate Anderson.
There was a specific passage that explained why I feel worn out consuming so much information, even when I haven’t spent physical labor doing so.
Without coherence, informational garbage can actually harm us “when it has no place to go, when there is no theory to which it applies, no pattern in which it fits, when there is no higher purpose that it serves.” This is disorienting, and it engenders feelings of chaos and confusion. Avoiding informational garbage requires us to make sometimes painful choices about what (and how much) we read, listen to, and watch. But many of us have lost the communities and traditions that in past centuries helped to shape and even constrain our life choices; instead, we have embraced a boundless global freedom. This can be liberating, but we also risk incoherence or simply wasting our time. In the absence of tradition or culture or religion or some other organizing principle, commerce can easily sway our choices.
In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World
And so, without boundaries, there is chaos.
Creating boundaries
I remembered how, in the story of creation in Christian culture (Genesis 1:3– 2:3), God first set boundaries to establish order.
So, to finally have the mental space again for my internal voice to flourish, I should set boundaries to create an environment that makes flourishing possible.
I have tried putting away my devices in another room (far away from my purview, just like how “out of sight, out of mind” works), and it works. I also coupled it with creating a task list and keeping myself from multitasking.
Finding others in the same boat
Now that I can hear myself clearly, I thought about sharing with you 23 blog posts I wrote about distraction, which you might like to explore. These blog posts would reflect how much my thoughts about it have changed (or perhaps remained the same) since 2021.
If you’re nodding along, know that you are not alone in the struggle to regain ourselves from the grip of our addictive tech. Sure, there are ways to use our technology intentionally rather than letting it use us and rule us to submission. It’s more about deciding to snap into the physical where stimulation goes beyond the mental, where our bodies are allowed to experience and enjoy the world beyond our interconnected devices. In the end, the goal is not to become a digital hermit but to create a space for what truly matters for us—to live a life well lived.
jessa 