I've already talked at length about how short-form content trains our brains to adapt to jumping rapidly from topic to topic. I've explained how the content itself is largely irrelevant (beyond being superficially entertaining enough to keep us watching). What matters is the repetition of the process, the neural shift to discontinuous information flow that primes us to be unable to focus for extended periods (even 10 minutes) on a single topic. No wonder people don't read! No wonder people don't watch movies! We can barely get through commercials without seeking new stimuli, new input... the cadence of change is getting hardwired into our brains -- so the question is: can we survive this?

Obviously, the smartphone is the purest bastion of instant, frictionless entertainment. It does, after all, give you immediate access to all of the world's information.

It gives you an easy way to get social status and feel pseudo-connected, and at the very least to be immediately entertained by a YouTube video served up based on gobs of info the algorithm has on you, specifically to keep you viewing. It's all seamless. It's all better than the alternative: being bored; being alone with your thoughts; being the only one face-down/thumbs-up with life intermediated by a 2"x4" panel of touchscreen glass.

The companies (X/Meta/Alphabet) aren't evil -- they're companies. They want to deliver a compelling product, sell ads, make a profit. They are for-profit companies. They are incentivized to keep users online as long as possible. It's our responsibility to know this. It's also important to acknowledge that there is genuine "good" that comes from using the product -- it is why people use them! People find things they wouldn't otherwise be exposed to (for better and worse), and we also get (essentially) free, always-available entertainment. It costs our attention, both practically (we watch our phone in lieu of other activity) and abstractly (short-form media trains us to be unfocused), but it's monetarily free.

The problem with frictionless, easy entertainment is that we become deconditioned to sitting with our thoughts. (Blaise Pascal's old bromide: All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.) We used (circa 1995) to have to learn this skill. And with it came a drifting of our thoughts, a reckoning with how we feel and what we want. How do we discover who we are or what we want without quiet, non-entertained time? I feel it myself when sitting alone on the couch; what used to be pleasant fantasizing has morphed into a twitchy discomfort, waiting to click the white envelope on my iOS mail app to see if anyone has written me in the 15 minutes since I last checked. I rationally know this is pointless, but the edge, the tension, is still there. It used to be so much worse when I used Twitter and TikTok; there was literally always something to read or see that was stimulating. But now we've come to a point where content is "maturing," tuned to our exact attentional hooks. Content and its discovery are the worst today that they will ever be going forward. Why won't we have fully bespoke AI content generation optimized for our particular inclinations, dynamically changing to give us exactly what we want? Surely the great algo gods won't get worse at surfacing and sequencing content to engage us, let alone creating it themselves to be completely inescapable. Little by little we're ceding control of our minds. No individual choice, swipe, or refusal to tolerate discomfort is enough to fully reclaim our ability to disengage and free ourselves. But year after year of this, our higher-order thinking capacity is toast. What makes the dead space so valuable? Why does cramming a TikTok or Reel into every gap in our lives lead to decay and diminishment of ourselves? It is in the gaps, the periods without entertainment, that our minds sort how we feel and what we want. The interstices of our minds allow thoughts to move, connect, fit together coherently, and generate a complete picture. Our minds are like sliding-piece puzzles (imagine a 3x3 grid with 8 tiles and one empty square that lets you move the tiles into a coherent picture). We need the empty space to manipulate the contents of our minds into the larger whole that all our sensory input and knowledge add into.

But in our current situation, all 9 squares are filled with content. Some might argue (truthfully if not helpfully) there is more content/information in this arrangement. Yes, but! But stuffing all the gaps in our minds with short-form tidbits means we have no room to maneuver and orient disconnected information into deep knowledge. Yes, there are more pieces, but what good are they if we can't use them to make something beautiful (or at least clear)? Our minds are jammed, stuck, content-laden, larded up on memes, never able to link them into deep, true understanding.

The combination of short-form and always-available content is exponentially deleterious to our minds. We lose our ability to focus while also losing the ability to coherently reason about why we're losing focus. Short-form keeps us jumping from topic to topic, denying mental time to process, while infinite entertainment jams our brains full of content, denying the mental space to process. No mental time plus no mental space means no mental life. This is our current trajectory. Why think when you can vibe? Why tolerate the discomfort of uncertainty, ambiguity, or even uncovering your own ignorance when the salve of short-form is there to soothe you?

The answer to both issues (no mental time or space) is to discard the phone, delete your accounts, and re-anchor yourself in the world of atoms and flesh and halitosis. It's to be extremely offline, to use a pen with ink on paper, and be unentertained by your own bad writing for minutes or hours. Or whatever it takes to start to retake the mental space, the gap of being contentless. This is a start. You can't fix the mental-time issue while using a phone -- it is intrinsic to the medium. But we can pause the content barrage and reintroduce the empty tile in the sliding-piece puzzle of our minds. The odds are against us. The future truly looks bleak to me. I don't know what to do with my daughter when she inevitably asks for a smartphone after her friends mock her or ostracize her for not being on IG. I don't think my arguments will persuade her, so I'll be left being draconian or a hypocrite enabler. I'm certainly leaning draconian now, but I have a few more years before my final position needs to be established.

And for myself it remains clear: no short-form, no content stuffing, scheduled time to process/write/think at least 3 days/week, and no excuses. This is my hill to die on. We are not just losing our ability to think or build or make great art; we are voluntarily gluing it up in exchange for 30-second dance videos and easy kitchen-cleaning hacks.