#attention

[posseydo-n]

Fairy girl

[love-romance-relationships]

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

do you have any advice on how I can work to "retrain my default" for lack of a better term. I feel like i always default to scrolling social media and would love to retrain myself to make my default like, writing or going on a walk outside or something

You have to remember: People are being paid a lot of money to use the most powerful tools in the history of the world to capture your attention, and then they are giving you access to those tools for free.

(This should give you some idea just how valuable your attention is.)

So the first thing I'd say is that you should not be too hard on yourself that you spend a lot of time scrolling. Scrolling is incredibly and (literally) unprecedentedly good at distracting us from boredom or ennui or whatever else we would otherwise be feeling.

Walking and writing, meanwhile, are much less good at distraction. They are better than staring at the ceiling, maybe, but not better than Instagram or Tiktok.

The problem, which you point out above, is that Instagram and Tiktok both solve for anxiety/boredom/isolation in the short run and worsen anxiety/boredom/isolation in the long run. And so you have to make incredibly difficult, counterintuitive decisions to resist the most powerful attention-holding tools ever created.

That's difficult! But it's also possible. For me, it begins with acknowledging the difficulty but also acknowledging that what I want out of life is more and different from scrolling. Instead, I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here. And on that front, both walking and writing are good work worth prioritizing.

[theeroticlover]

I need to feel your touch like this....

[philosophybits]

Be silent. Listen. Let it overflow.

Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1942-1951

[vintage-tigre]

[thedutchmansship]

Every time and more than once