The Anti-Social Network - Battling the brain fog
It’s a lazy Saturday afternoon and the irony of how many of you would have found this post certainly isn’t lost on me.
Rightly or wrongly social and digital media has become a huge part of how we communicate, interact and gather our information. (Or is that misinformation?)
Humans have never been more connected, or so Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg keep telling us.
How then, in a world where we have never been more connected do rates of loneliness and mental health continue to soar (particularly among young people) to what some experts have described to epidemic proportions?
I’ve recently become interested in the work of Mark Manson following his success with his bestseller; The Subtle Art of not Giving a Fuck
Rightfully, Manson describes social media interactions as empty calories. The analogy that social media is contributing to a poor mental diet is a perfect way to describe the current effect that ‘social’ media is having on our social lives and personal relationships.
I like to think of it as ‘fast food interactions’ - A good idea at the time but like devouring a 10-piece KFC bucket all by yourself, before too long the regret that you didn’t go for the more wholesome home-made chicken salad starts to kick in. Anyway, back to doom scrolling.
Now, you’re probably thinking that you’ve heard all this before. Remember when television was the root of all evil and was going to turn our eyes into perfectly formed cubes and mush our brains?
For many, the constant need to be stimulated by your device supersedes anything the television has ever delivered. Luckily many of us have both devices on stand-by just in case.
Just as our social habits are contributing to an unhealthy and empty social state, our creative desires and curiosities are also taking a hit.
“When I was growing up, my mom said, over and over, “Garbage in and garbage out.”
The constant need to have all five senses stimulated, our mind constantly entertained and our body force-fed dopamine up to the eyeballs, means our own creative instincts have also become suppressed, with any short-term efforts to ‘defog’ the mind seeming futile.
Like an addictive substance, the idea that we can enjoy one simple thing in it’s entirety and to its maximum value just doesn’t seem to satisfy, we need more and we need it now, and don’t forget about the panic when we can’t find our phone, forgetting it’s on charge in the bedroom.
The need for instant gratification means we can’t even sit through the 42 second intro to Friends re-runs. Quick! Where’s the skip button?
In a world where we are constantly bombarded by information and content, like leaves down a stormwater drain theres only so much we can filter before we need to remove the grate and clear out the sludge.
Austin Kleon in his masterpiece Steal like an artist wrote - ”Garbage in - Garbage out“, that is what we consume, not only in a nutritional sense but also in mental sense will be essentially what we produce.