I was taking the train from Taipei to the airport, and at one point I looked around at everyone else on the train and literally every single person – probably 100 within eye shot – was on their phone. Just glued to it.
They weren’t talking on their phone or anything, and from what I could tell, nobody was even doing anything productive. They were all just scrolling through mindless content.
And it made me realize just how completely devastating this is.
I feel like the “elites” have been doing everything they can to control people. Historically, that was done predominantly through vices like drugs and alcohol. One could argue that’s also the primary purpose of sports viewing.
But I would argue this is far more effective.
No longer are people ever alone with their thoughts. They have no time to do things with their lives or think through their own problems because every free moment is spent just staring at a screen and consuming mindless content.
It’s the most effective possible way to control people.
I think it’s probably far worse for people than anyone realizes.
When you don’t sleep properly, your body can’t recover from stress properly. Your brain doesn’t function right. You struggle to learn things or even form proper memories.
But what if you’re never bored? What if you’re never alone with your thoughts?
I believe that’s when you slip into the Default Mode Network (or perhaps I have it backwards).
What if this state is just as important as sleep? How are people supposed to take a step back and look at their life and make improvements if they never slip into that state?
I’m certainly not immune to the allure of doomscrolling. I’ve put a lot of effort into stopping and also eliminating most options for even doing it, but I do still find ways from time to time.
And I think that’s going to have to stop. It just made me to sad seeing so many people, not saying a word to each other. Just numbing themselves.
I think it’s so easy to just say it’s harmless, but I’m feeling more confident every day that it’s not true.
I think the people in charge absolutely know it’s not harmless and are trying to control the narrative so people don’t realize it is.
We know that much of this is true: I know at one point some private correspondence from Facebook came out proving that Mark Zuckerberg knew how harmful his products were to people and they just sort of ignored it.
I can’t control what other people do and I’m certainly not judging anyone. But I do control myself, and I think I need to make the decision to basically block all possible forms of mindless content consumption and make sure I never go back to it.