App-driven

As pathetic as it might sound, it has finally come down to this. 

The online civilisation is being driven deeper and deeper into a never-ending whirlpool of contents. Information overload every.single.day. In that threshold between wakefulness and sleep at the end of each day, I find myself trying to recap what I had learnt and witnessed that day. More often than not, it seems as though I had toured the world and back. 

While the information had come from various sources e.g. books, real-life communication, work etc., the bulk of it is still derived from the internet. Of course, the internet is where the most varied types of contents are fed into the head—also often within a limited timespan. From talking dogs to stock market to the latest anti-[enter ethnic group here] news, the mind is never in one place when it comes to the www. 

Today, it has finally come down to a point that after a good amount of time on Youtube (that it gave me a headache, physcially), I felt the need to put a stop to this. 

ActionDash (Android): On individual apps, limit usage time, place a 'pause' for the rest of the day, or block the app altogether during 'focus time'. Great interface. All the stats (plus graphs) on usage time successfully guilt-trips a person into acknowledging how much of their lives is being whiled away on the smartphone.

BlockSite (Mozilla Firefox): Literally just blocks specific sites. Sites will be accessible again once they are removed from the add-on. Works wonders though. Somehow if things are just a tad more tedious to access, it keeps the impulse at bay.

StayFocusd (Google Chrome): Basically works like BlockSite but does allow setting a time limit on the access to specific sites. That's a little kinder. Well, I dropped my time limit on Youtube to 1 minute and StayFocusd gave me the *slow clap*. 

Yup, definitely deserved the *slow clap* since my (and thousands others who seem to be using these apps) self-control level has disintegrated to this stage. I guess this even deserves mockery from my dead ancestors (and probably some living people around me who aren't afflicted by this digital plague).

It reminds me of something a Youtuber whom I follow once said about "digital minimalism". He kept his phone in a lockable cookie jar. So the phone stays in there until the timer beeps, while the owner is left dying from cold turkey beside the cookie jar? I don't know. If it's that bad, perhaps smashing the jar would be a better option. 

Just a thought: if self-control in this aspect is already that minimal, can it also translate into poor self-control against other more harmful behaviours in life? Addiction is, after all, wired similarly in the head. Low defense against impulses is an equally disturbing idea. 

Thankfully, I've cut myself almost entirely off social media e.g. Facebook, Instagram etc., with the exception of a little Twitter for the news. However, there exist tons of other addictive platforms like Snapchat, FB Messenger, Whatsapp, Tiktok etc., that people (especially the younger generation) can dump their lives into. 

It's surreal to think that perhaps in the future, civilisation will retrace this movement from the massive confusion of information back into simpler existence. It's a sweet idea to entertain when the world becomes a bit quieter. The compulsion to click away into passive information consumerism is significantly lower just by taking some simple steps to restrict the usual commotion. The fact that app blockers exist simply goes to show a growing demand for them.

I'm kind of already indulging in the effect of silence and concentration within hours of shutting noise out. Otherwise, I would not have gotten down to write anything at all. 

Some time back, I'd finished reading 2 books, Silence by Erling Kagge and Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World, by Michael Harris. These books put a certain something into my head, which contributed partly to the actions today. 

Look forward to compile a little notes on these books in the near term. The latter is particularly well-researched and wonderfully-written, in my opinion. Was tempted to steal the book from the library. So reluctant to return it since it's a rare book I don't mind re-reading at all XD