Social media wasn't the final boss

This is the story of my attempts to reclaim the distraction-free mind I (presumably) once had. I railed against social media only to find that there were many more bosses ahead. In the end, I was forced to wonder: is any of this actually productive? But, I'm getting ahead of myself– let's start at the beginning.

In my sophomore year of high school, some switch flipped in my brain: I became aware of my productivity. This sudden awareness was probably due to the fact that, for the first time, I had gotten involved in enough things that I wasn't able to effortlessly balance all my coursework and extracurriculars anymore. At the same time, I was obsessively listening to the podcast Hello Internet with Dr. Brady Haran and my soon-to-be idol, CGP Grey. Grey was the role model I didn't know I needed; he was smart, funny, eloquent, opinionated, creative, and analytical. I found myself agreeing with essentially everything he said, and I even tried to sound like him in conversation.

Oh, and he was productive. Grey introduced me to the world of Getting Things Done, inspired me to read The Checklist Manifesto and Atomic Habits, and generally got me thinking about building a system to help keep me productive. Getting swept up in the excitement, I even made a spreadsheet to collect data on almost every quantifiable aspect of my life for two years; I would log all my daily activities down to the minute (e.g. school, homework, sleep) and track other variables like how much yerba mate I drank and how productive I felt. With all of that data, I made a bunch of nice-looking charts and dashboards. I even had a category for the atrocious amount of time I spent working on the spreadsheet. Turns out I slept more on the weekend and felt less productive on Friday. Who knew?

I knew that productivity required focus, but my focus was like an untamed horse: I'd try to get the horse to trot north, but instead it’d gallop east. Later, I’d try to get it to gallop east, but this time it wouldn’t budge. That's how I could spend massive amounts of time polishing my mega-spreadsheet even though it was practically useless. On another memorable occasion, I spent 3 consecutive days doing literally nothing other than writing a rulebook for a sport that could only be played on my college campus while my actual obligations fell to the wayside.

Ever since I became aware of that aspect of myself back in high school, I've wanted to change it. And so, with CGP Grey, James Clear, and random people on r/productivity as my mentors, I decided to start making a conscious effort to get better at directing my attention and avoiding distractions.

We’ll fast-forward a few years to 2020, a year when nothing particularly noteworthy happened. During the period of the pandemic, I became acutely aware of the extent to which I could be dependent on my phone and social media. In fewer words (namely, one Oxford 2024 Word of the Year): brainrot. I couldn't seem to focus on anything that required effort for more than 15 minutes without checking my phone and absentmindedly scrolling through something. For me personally, that "something" was usually either doomscrolling Instagram, falling down YouTube rabbit holes, or browsing meme subreddits.

Determined to make a change, I uninstalled Instagram from my phone. I also made a rule for myself that I could only open Reddit or YouTube on Wednesdays. At first, it was difficult, and I couldn't wait for each Wednesday to arrive so I could get my fill of content. Over time, though, the impulse got weaker, and the thought crossed my mind less frequently. I started forgetting to even check Reddit or YouTube when those Wednesdays rolled around, and eventually the urge to open social media apps vanished entirely.

I had done it: I had beaten the final boss. That wasn't so hard.

Except, I hadn’t beaten the final boss; the hydra of available distractions had just grown new heads. In those same moments when I used to open Instagram or YouTube, I would now just open something else, like AP News or Hacker News, and start scrolling. Sure, it was easier to find a justification for those: after all, there's nothing wrong with staying informed about global events, or keeping up to date with the interests of the hacker community. But the feeling was the same- the slightly shitty feeling of knowing that there’s something I should be doing, and that on some level I want to do, but because it’s not immediately fun or engaging, I instead open up literally anything else and start absentmindedly scrolling. It wasn't about being informed, it was about avoiding hard work. So, I started blocking Hacker News and AP News as well.

But the hydra just grew more heads. My next target came as a surprise to me: Chess.com. I wanted to believe my relationship with online chess wasn't a problem; I had enjoyed playing chess ever since my dad taught me to play as a kid. Being (relatively) good at chess was always a fun skill to have, and it allowed me to assert moral authority over other kids in primary school. After all these years, how could chess be holding me back? But I could see clearly that I treated online chess in exactly the same way I treated Reddit; just something to do because I needed a break from even the slightest friction that comes with doing effortful things.

The tipping point came during an online meeting with my college research advisor. I logged onto the meeting, gave a quick progress update, asked my advisor a question about the project, listened attentively to his response, and– oh, god. I was playing chess. Not even five seconds into my advisor's answer to the question that I myself had asked, some subconscious reflex caused me to launch a 5-minute Blitz game with a few keystrokes. That's it, I told myself. If becoming better at chess wasn't a life goal for me (which it wasn't), then it would have to go. I uninstalled Chess.com and Lichess from my phone and blocked the websites on my laptop. I quit online chess cold-turkey and didn't look back.

There was a brief period in time when I felt truly victorious; I had identified the habits that were enabling my short attention span and vanquished them. I felt secure knowing that nothing else stood between me and my dream of infinite productivity.

Surprise, it's me. Specifically, my brain, and more specifically, the thoughts that sporadically pop into it. In the middle of a blissful moment of concentration, I'll get suddenly curious about allergies (what we know about their epidemiology?) and begin scrolling through the Wikipedia page for Allergy, and then Metal allergy, and then Type IV hypersensitivity, and so on. Partially for illustration purposes and partially for my own amusement, here's an abridged version of my Wikipedia history from the past few days:

If Wikipedia really was the problem, I could try to block it or impose some time limit, but the problem clearly isn't Wikipedia. The truth is that I'm fully capable of distracting myself with nothing but the ol' analog noggin, no fancy technology necessary. For example, a few days ago I was trying to focus on a particularly tough task, and I caught my inner monologue go:

And if I hadn't forcibly interrupted this train of thought, I would have let ten minutes vanish into thin air, just naming station names. After all the uninstalls and website blockers, I was still riding that untamed horse. Except this time, I didn't have any apps left to blame.

After I ruled out surgically removing my prefrontal cortex in my pursuit of productivity, I acknowledged that I'd been trying to solve an ill-defined problem from the start. For one thing, what do I even mean by "distraction"? In other words, where's the line between doomscrolling and just... regular scrolling?

Obviously, what one person considers a distraction is someone else's passion. For example, take this hilariously elitist tweet that made the rounds a few months ago:

Labeling something as a distraction casts an implicit judgement that the person should be doing something else, if they had the willpower, work ethic, intelligence, you name it. What's sad is that, as offensive as I find this tweet, I've found myself casting a similar judgement upon myself sometimes. For example, playing music has been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember, but even still, I've had moments where I wondered whether I might be more successful in [insert arbitrary metric of success] if I just stopped spending all those hours playing music. The obvious answer is "probably a little" with a side of "is that really what I want?".

Humans are not single-objective optimizers, at least, not by nature. It's possible to become one, but the cost is steep, even if that objective is virtuous. To that point, Tyler Altman wrote a fantastic personal account about how he suffered in his attempt to become an Effective Altruism machine, which I would recommend reading when you've got the time.

In fewer words, I sometimes acted as though the path to happiness looked like this:

But in reality, it's more like this:

With this view, it's hard to say that activity X is categorically a distraction whereas activity Y is not; everything is interconnected. It's impossible to compare the productivity of an evening of focused coding versus an evening hanging out with my favorite people. I mean, two weeks without a good hang will kill most of my motivation to get things done anyway. Even scrolling Hacker News (in moderation) can get new ideas running in my head that wouldn't have otherwise occurred to me, and there's something productive in that.

Thus, we return to a blindingly obvious fact: it's only doomscrolling if you feel the doom. I've felt the doom in all sorts of situations, from scrolling Instagram and Wikipedia, to playing online chess and even pursuing music as a passion. But that doesn't mean that these things are the things that stand between me and my visions of grandeur.

I realize now that when I name an essay "Social media wasn't the final boss", I'm somewhat obliged to say what I think the final boss actually is. My safest answer would be a non-answer because I don't know you, finding what productivity means to you is a personal journey, etc etc. But that's no fun at all. So instead, I'll confidently claim that the final boss is learning to coexist with the Scroll.

Like all relationships, it's a give and take. Sometimes you control the Scroll, and other times, the Scroll controls you. But as long as you don't let it become abusive to the point where all your scrolls are doomed, you're probably ok, and– if I'm allowed to assume– I don't think it's the thing holding you back. Because even if you cut out every app or activity that you could possibly doomscroll (literally or figuratively), you can always doomscroll your own thoughts. It's turtles all the way down.

Just to wrap up this mish-mash of thoughts about focus, productivity, doomscrolling, and (apparently) happiness, I wanted to include a snippet of a conversation from the Dear Hank and John podcast. In one segment of the episode, the two brothers are answering a question about rockets, and how easy or hard it is to turn them around. The conversation pivots from space exploration to terrestrial exploration, to exploring our own minds, and (naturally) the nature of consciousness. They have this exchange that I thought was brilliant:

Obviously, in a literal sense, we're always conscious beings, but clearly what Hank and John are getting at is the difference between thoughtlessly consuming content and the effortful concentration it takes to produce something. And in that sense, the sentiment of having a "lower stamina for conscious work" is a common one. I certainly felt the same way, which is what started me on this whole path to begin with, and what got me to quit social media.

Looking back, it feels like I was trying to win chess by just capturing pieces; a good idea, but still slightly flawed. It certainly helped in a few ways, like disconnecting from the most algorithmically addictive apps and learning how to recognize the feeling of doomscrolling before it gets too bad. But, it didn't automatically restore my mental stamina because I could always find other "non-productive" activities during those lulls in energy.

I somewhat suspect that instead of my "stamina for conscious work" having decreased, my expectations for my productive output may have just increased. And, perhaps more importantly, I think I've been in the habit of burning myself out and staying burnt out for long periods of time, which is generally not a good recipe for finding one's focus.

Recently, I've been working on being more forgiving with myself, and becoming less obsessed with labeling everything as either a "distraction" or "not a distraction". For example, when a random thought pops into my head, I'll sometimes let myself crack open the Wikipedia page and take a look, but I try to be sensitive to the moment when the fun vanishes and the doom sets in, at which point I'll close the tabs and take a moment to reset.

And as for riding an untamed horse, you know what? It's fun to just ride one every once in a while. Like that time I spent three days writing a rulebook for a new sport? What's funny is that I remember being so preoccupied with all the obligations that I let drop, but I can't remember a single one of those obligations now. Did any of them actually matter? What I do remember now is how much fun we had playing Omegaball. ■