Mind Fields Part I - How Short-Form Video is Robbing Your Future Self – Goldmind Health

Thoughts are things. Ideas and images get planted like seeds in our minds and grow on their own once in the soil. What we plant into the soil of our subconscious is up to us -- an apple seed does not grow an oak tree.

We can consciously seed our mind fields with messages of health, happiness, and abundance. Or, we can passively let the outside world press in its own seeds, or worse, salt our earth and keep anything good from growing. Take this post as an appetizer to the multi-course meal, which includes a clear plan of action and a deeper interrogation that I'm also writing called "Mind Fields" to come out later, and a follow up on this piece out now (Mind Fields Part II: Are Thoughts Enough?).

🌱 The Seed Thief: SFV and Mental Barrenness

Short-Form Video (SFV), like the content found on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, is the mental equivalent of grabbing a handful of random seeds, some leftover jelly beans, and a button or two, and tossing them willy-nilly into the dirt.

There is no digging a deep hole, no careful planting, watering, fertilizing, pruning, weeding, or protecting the crop. There is nothing done to ensure anything grows at all. The soil has the capacity to grow a harvest, but it will not do it without more help from you. SFV will not do anything good for your future reaping.

The fallow mental field is your future. The harvest that could have happened -- but didn’t -- is what SFV has stolen. Reaping requires sowing and tending. To benefit in the future from your thoughts of today requires you to use those productive brain cycles…well, productively. Right now, your attention IS the harvest.

The Pernicious Force

A fragmented mind, perverted by the dopamine squirts induced by rapid-context-switching, novelty-hijacking clips of content, will not yield a bounty. You are planting next season's crop right now. This is urgent, and it is something you can change today.

SFV is picking the seeds you are planting; the algorithm chooses what enters your conscious and, subsequently, your subconscious mind. SFV is making it so that you’re:

Less capable of thinking for yourself.
Less able to discover on your own what you want.
Less willing to establish a clear plan to get what you want, then creating the ideal conditions to execute the plan.

SFV is tossing disparate seeds on the ground, then urinating on them and telling you, "This is what a person like you wants." This is a truly pernicious force for barrenness --intellectual, emotional, financial, and personal.

SFV is taking over responsibility for your future, and it does NOT have your best interest at heart. SFV wants your attention; it wants to feed on your focus. It is a fiend for fragmentation. That keeps its engagement up. That keeps its ads rolling. That keeps its ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) growing.

You get endless, infinite entertainment. You lose a future. It's a historically bad trade, but much more clandestine than an addiction, because it doesn't look harmful.

🔬 The Case for Unique Corrosiveness

This sounds histrionic, okay, but this future-theft is actually happening. By fragmenting your mind with novel videos and rapidly and dramatically changing context, SFV is changing you. It is superficializing you, influencing you, altering your thoughts, mutating your mind seeds, and keeping you from doing the work today that will yield the future you want.

Why is this any different than TV? I can hear the skeptics saying, “Yes, and radio, TV, and the internet were all also going to lead to the downfall of society, yet here I am reading this polemic against SFV, and society goes on.”

SFV is not TV. It is not the internet. It looks a lot like those forms of media but is exquisitely tuned to rot brains. This is the difference: it is optimized for decoherence.

The clips are long enough for novelty recognition and the corresponding highly-reinforcing dopaminergic stimulus, but short enough (under $\sim90$ seconds, but often watched for $\sim30$ seconds) to escape coherence in your cortex. It flushes your short-term memory and leaves you without a fully constructed concept of the scene before ripping you into a completely different world over and over for hours per day (for most SFV users).

I've cited the Chiossi ( $2023$ )* study multiple times in "Attention, Please" because it clearly shows that SFV is different from YT/X (and therefore, TV). It is not video (V) that is the problem. It is not short-form (SF) that is the problem. It is S.F.V. That is uniquely corrosive.

This singularly destructive force is future-poison, and it particularly needs to be kept from young, developing minds. Remember, absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence -- Meta/TikTok/Alphabet are not funding this research. I worked with a team (of LLMs) to construct a better experimental trial to really put SFV to the test -- a trial which, to my knowledge, has never been done, and which you can read about in the endnote below.1

🌾 Your Mind Field: A Final Reminder

So, back to our mind field: what are you planting?

Your tomorrow is already in the ground. It's baked in. You won't have fruit from trees that never grew because the seeds were never planted. You can't go back in time to plant, tend, and protect the seeds that were scattered. Tomorrow you might have to live off scraps.

But you still have the field. You can still plant new seeds, and next season a bounty can be yours. Thoughts are things. What we repeatedly think and visualize and plant in our minds with feelings of expectancy are what manifest in the future.

Without clear minds -- defragmented minds -- we can't plant clear thought-seeds, we can't prepare for a harvest, and ultimately we will reap nothing but weeds. This is your future on SFV. It is playing out as we speak.

AI isn't helping, feeding us into thinking thought is easy -- that it is always here at the tippy tap of a prompt. It's not your thought. They are not your seeds. It will not be your harvest. But I think AI can be used for good or evil. SFV has only one use -- and you already know which one it is.

📑 Endnote

$^1$ The Study We Should Run on Short-Form Video (SFV) and Focus

A detailed protocol for a four-arm, parallel-group randomized controlled trial to test the unique cognitive effects of SFV versus longform video, reading, and no-screen activity.

Trial at a Glance

Detail	Description
Design	Four-arm, parallel-group randomized controlled trial.
Arms (90 min/day for 8 weeks + 4-week washout)	1. High-SFV (algorithmic feed, $\leq60$ s clips)
	2. Longform Video (20–30-min segments)
	3. Reading (ebooks/articles; matched duration)
	4. No-screen Analog (e.g., crafts/walking/journaling; matched time)
Population	N=800 adults (18–39), daily smartphone users, no ADHD on medication.
Primary Endpoint (Week 12)	Change in sustained-attention composite ( $z$ ) vs baseline (after washout).
Duration & Budget	$15$ months. Budget: $\approx \$2.0$ M.

Key Secondary Outcomes: Task-switching cost, inhibitory control, working memory, RT variability, mind-wandering (MWQ), real-world attentional lapses (CFQ), sleep regularity (actigraphy), and dose-response to verified exposure.

Hypothesis: High-SFV causes a > $\geq0.30$ SD decrement in sustained attention vs. pooled comparators at Week 12 (after washout).

Call to Action: This trial would cost about $2M and take $18$ months. Funding this research could shift the conversation from, "SFV isn't great but probably equivalent to TV" to "SFV is a singularly destructive force."

* In reference to: Francesco Chiossi, Luke Haliburton, Changkun Ou, Andreas Martin Butz, and Albrecht Schmidt. 2023. Short-Form Videos Degrade Our Capacity to Retain Intentions: Effect of Context Switching On Prospective Memory. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 30, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580778

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