Are You Mentally Obese?
[Author’s note: This post is a chapter of my forthcoming book
RESET: Building Purpose in the Age of Digital Distraction]
Chapter One: Choke
Where does all my time go?
“It’s named the ‘Web’ for good reason.”
David Foster Wallace, American Author
A swipe on your phone. Or a quick tap on your watch. That’s all it takes to start choking.
A few months ago, I was having a great morning at work. You know the feeling: everything is breaking your way. I had a good night’s sleep. I felt energetic and optimistic. I was flying through all the stuff on my to-do list.
A great morning by almost anyone’s standards.
Then it all went sideways. I was finishing a sentence and needed to use the word “unnecessary”, but couldn’t remember the spelling. Was it one c and two s’s, or the other way around?
Yes, I could just type it and wait for the red squiggly line to tell me if I was wrong. I know that, but I am weird about stuff like this. I wanted to guess the spelling, then verify the spelling by using an online dictionary. Then I could see if there was something cool I could learn about the word that would help me remember the correct spelling next time.
Like I said, I’m weird.
So I did what anyone would do. I opened a new browser tab, Googled “unnecessary”, and started reading. Of course, it didn’t stop there. Before you know it I was watching some YouTube video about the first successful launch and landing of a SpaceX rocket. And then another video. And then another.
When I finally shook myself out of this trance, I had wasted 45 minutes! What started with the spelling and etymology of “unnecessary” had morphed into SpaceX rockets, and then ended with me watching a Drunk History episode with Will Ferrell as Abraham Lincoln and Don Cheadle as Frederick Douglass.
The Drunk History video was hilarious, but it had absolutely nothing to do with what I wanted to accomplish. My goals for the day were laid out in front of me, untouched. The day’s momentum was completely erased. So of course, I started beating up on myself for getting distracted.
Sound familiar? How often do you end up being knocked off track by a stream of irrelevant — but “free” — content? That, my friends, is choking: mindlessly consuming information that is unrelated to our goal at that moment.
We all know the choking position. Both hands are on your phone, with thumbs perched above the screen like little gargoyles. Your head is tilted down at a forty-five degree angle, staring intently. You are completely oblivious to the rest of the world.
This is the official posture of the 21st century.
We are tempted to choke just about everywhere, all the time. The digital world always has one more interesting thing for us to look at. Texts, emails, posts, pins, tweets, likes, favorites, features, alerts, flashes, quick reads, promoted ads, suggested friends, comments, trending topics, numbered lists, banner ads, skims, news briefs, takeaways, FYIs — on and on it goes.
Life is wasted while we’re choking. We consume and consume without any thought of why. Details, ideas, concepts flow into our minds, then out again just as fast. Choking is like being on an information treadmill. We are rushing through a tunnel of blurred impressions and half-formed thoughts.
Choking crowds out everything else. We can’t consider changing our behavior or perspective when we’re choking. Why? Because when choking, we can’t do anything else! We miss out on the opportunity to adapt and improve ourselves as a result of the rich sources of information to which we have access.
We are only a Google search away from starting to learn a new language or skill, but instead we are addicted to distraction.
Anatomy Of Distraction
The information that keeps us choking is so ridiculous and over-the-top that we feel compelled to click. Here are a few examples, pulled randomly from articles that I (sadly) found easily online.
“Which 90s Cartoon Dog Are You?”
“She Thought She Was Just Playing Super Mario, But Instead, He Was Proposing To Her!”
Is it any wonder that 660,000 Americans are using their phones while driving during peak traffic hours? Or that surveys show 67% of us use phone at the dinner table, and 35% of us use them at church? How about the fact that over 90% of us stare down at our phones even while we’re walking?
This isn’t just an American phenomenon. It’s global. A Chinese city recently installed a “no cellphone” lane for people who want to walk without running into distracted citizens.
Why is this such a big deal that we’re addicted to a stream of constant information?
Unhealthy Information
Humans do not respond well to an infinite supply of anything. This is the reason that obesity has become such a problem around the world, not just in America. When we have too much food, our default is to eat every last bit of it. That’s why obesity rates have more than doubled around the world since 1980.
Choosing quality over quantity is hard for us. Present someone with the choice between eating vegetables or cookies. What do they think that person would choose?
The cookies, of course. We will go for what’s immediately more appealing without considering the implications of that single choice, or the habit we are reinforcing.
In this way, information is basically the same as food. We aren’t wired to know when to stop. That means choking on all this newly available information is natural. We’re curious creatures, and at some basic level we want to see it all. We enjoy the mental stimulation, and the illusion that we’re learning something new.
That’s the tricky part. Choking often feels like we’re doing something active when we are actually consuming mindlessly. That feeling of activity is what lets us stumble along with our heads down, thumbs a-blazing.
And what happens when you are using any computer that’s connected to the internet? Distractions assault you with a vengeance as soon as you glance at it.
Unlocking your phone is about you getting access to it. It’s about the digital world getting access to you!
Personal computers — desktops, laptops, tablets, phones, watches, and more — do not function like our tools anymore. They are starting to control our behavior in some deep and troubling ways.
A Digital Diet
Consider the sheer volume of information. One new book pops up on Amazon every 5 minutes. 300 hours of YouTube videos are uploaded per minute. 6,000 tweets per second. There is so much information out there. The scale of production is staggering. And so is the threat to you and me, yet somehow we have to figure out how to deal with it.
Let’s return to food for a minute. How do we address obesity? We try to teach people how to be healthy. We help people adopt the right mindset and behaviors. We want everyone to be able to manage their own weight. And if we have the means, we will probably find an expert to train us in the best practices of diet and exercise. That way we ensure that the habits stick.
The same straightforward logic applies to how we consume information. Instead of savoring high-quality information — what we would call knowledge or wisdom — we cram ourselves full of whatever junk is right in front of our faces. What’s worthy of consumption gets lost in a tsunami of crap.
But it’s so convenient! We jump from pin to post, or post to article, or article to video, or video to thread. And then back again.
We think we can handle this abundance, but we can’t. It’s like trying to sip water out of a fire hose. We are taking on way too much. When fun and appealing information comes at you, sooner or later — and it will probably be sooner — you’re going to choke.
Knowing Is (less than) Half The Battle
We need to understand how we process information to truly understand choking. A better grasp of the situation will help us take corrective steps to minimize the problem. Let’s dive in…
All the information we consume falls on the spectrum of comprehension. On one end, you have passive comprehension. On the other, active comprehension. Passively comprehending means we consume information without intending to process or act on it. It’s just there, so we let it wash over us. On the other hand, actively comprehending means we carefully consider information and then — if appropriate — modify our mindset and/or behavior.
It’s up to us whether we comprehend something passively or actively. Unfortunately, passive comprehension is intuitive. But we are all great at mindless consumption. No training required!
Where we struggle is carving out time to spend with the good stuff. The stuff that could change our lives.
Active comprehension means wrestling with something — often for a long time on a deep level. Active comprehension requires focus. You are marinating in the information. And to do that, you need to be right there in the moment, fully present.
Being focused and purposeful is one of the hardest things for us to do in the world right now. Almost none of us can break the spell of addicting information delivered directly to our eyeballs. So we choke instead. We consume without exercising judgment or connecting to a larger purpose.
When we choke, all information is experienced the same way, from pure gold to total rubbish. You’re still looking at a screen. There are still words. There are still images. There are still videos. There is no obvious physical reason why you should be paying more attention to some information and not the rest.
Without any useful filters we go for what’s convenient. We want what feels good right now. Right now! Right now!
Choking 2.0
I’ve encountered this problem in my own life, of course. Witness my Drunk History story from the beginning of the chapter.
But it’s not just me. Everyone deals with it. Choking, being completely overwhelmed with information flows, is the single biggest practical problem we face related to technology. It defines our relationship with almost everything invented since the iPhone came out in 2007, igniting the smartphone revolution.
There are now millions of businesses operating online that compete for our attention. They are constantly coming up with ways to keep us riveted and strung out on “free” content. It’s no accident that YouTube modified their platform a few years ago so another video loads automatically after the first finishes.
That’s an example of infinite scroll, the ultimate choke point. You keep scrolling or thumbing down the page. It goes on forever. You could keep scrolling for the rest of your life…
As we’ll see in later chapters, these digital intrusions are only going to get worse. The more sophisticated the technology, the better the design, and the more customized and seamless the advertising experience, the easier it will be for us to choke. You thought the smartphone made it hard to get things done? Wait until you are plugging into a virtual reality bodysuit in a few years. Or when you are directly connected to the internet via nanobots in your brain. Even though it sounds like science fiction today, these developments are already underway.
A Brave New World
There are thousands of innovations happening right now that will make it even more critical to reset our perspective and habits for the digital world. Each of them is a double-edged sword — sharp enough to be useful, but also sharp enough to be dangerous.
It’s up to us to harness each wave of products and services. There is an near-infinite horizon of possibilities for us if we can just get started down the path of a purposeful life supported by the right mindset, habits, and structures.
That’s how we can avoid physical obesity, and that’s also how we’re going to avoid mental obesity.
This is the challenge and opportunity of the digital world. Yes, we have to avoid distractions. And yes, these same technologies and companies can also be incredibly valuable to us. The difference is whether we reset our mindset and daily habits.
If more information was the answer, we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs. — Derek Sivers
If we reset, we will be rewarded with a more meaningful, fulfilling, and impactful life. If we reset, we will be able to find and absorb the best from the world’s experts on any subject. If we reset, we will be able to learn to cook a delicious meal, build a robot, negotiate a million dollar deal, lose weight . . . anything! We will be in control of our own futures in a way that was impossible just a generation ago.
The only catch is that the process will be difficult. It takes time to learn how to adapt to the digital world. We need to reset many fundamental aspects of our lives. Why? Because our default settings actually undermine our lives in important ways.
Just look at how we behave today. Adults in the U.S. spent an average of 5 hours and 31 minutes consuming some kind of video content each day. That was in 2015. Which direction do you think that number is headed?
This explosion of consumption extends across the world. British research group Ofcom tracks the amount of time people spend online every day. The total figure in 2005 was 9 hours and 54 minutes. Ten years later and it more than doubled to 20 hours and 30 minutes.
Our distracted and mindless behavior — choking is only the most obvious culprit of many — takes us away from doing what we want to be doing. All our normal excuses miss the point. It’s not the lack of time, or the terrible boss, or the annoying friends, or the student loan debt.
It’s the fact that we spent so much time choking instead of pursuing a purpose to which we choose to dedicate ourselves.
Starting to get the picture? Our current behavior isn’t sustainable. What used to work has become the source of our problems. Now we are distracted, overworked, anxious, and disconnected from the people around us. That’s what happens to us when we mindlessly repeat the behavior of previous generations. Things are changing too fast now. We need to update our thinking and our behavior.
Meet A Choker
My friend Andrew is a perfect example of how easily we get distracted in the digital world. He runs a mobile application development company in San Francisco, and has made hundreds of apps in the last few years.
Andrew is a productive guy, but nowhere near maximizing his potential. If there was ever a guy who should avoid distractions, it’s him. He can bring in a lot of money when he is on point. A good day for Andrew could be making $5,000!
This overwhelming profit incentive still doesn’t stop him from choking. Andrew’s worst enemy is Reddit. He is just four keystrokes away from being completely derailed. He hits Command + T to open a new tab, then types the letter R, and the Reddit URL automatically populates in the search bar. Then he hits Enter.
That takes what? Two seconds?
Once he’s on Reddit, Andrew will waste at least an hour of scrolling through random fun facts about the internet. Maybe after that he’ll get back on task. Maybe.
Think of how different that is from the world just a few years ago.
The good: Andrew can accomplish an incredible amount when he’s firing on all cylinders.
The bad: he could also read random threads on Reddit for hours at a time.
Andrew is a smart guy with a good education. He triple majored in philosophy, mathematics and economics at a great college. But he still chokes. We all do!
Being smart or educated isn’t the solution. Intelligence will not save you from choking. Neither will a PhD, nor computer programming skills, nor a million dollars. You are going to need a lot more if you want to be productive and fulfilled in your daily life. You must connect to your work, to the people you are impacting, and the life you aspire to live.
Changing your online behavior can seem incredibly difficult. It doesn’t matter who you are or how much self discipline you have. I still end up watching things like Drunk History on a regular basis, and I wrote this book!
There’s no escaping the digital world. Our thumbs are itching to explore all the crazy and ridiculous stuff out there. Scroll, scroll. Tap. Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. Tap. We are hardwired with certain tendencies that make us susceptible to distractions, which we will learn about in later chapters.
The digital genie is out of the bottle. From now on there will be an endless line of new innovations for us to figure out how to use. First it was desktops and laptops, then phones, now it is watches and glasses, soon it will be implants, and who knows after that. These products will keep coming. And you’re fighting to keep yourself on track and be purposeful, to be the master of your own life.
Against some formidable opponents.
What to remember about “Choke”
- We spend a lot of our time online exposed to constant distractions
- Choking occurs when become overwhelmed with information
- Advances in technology will make it easier every day for us to choke
- We must develop habits to help us avoid choking
Take three minutes to reflect on these questions
- How often do I get overwhelmed with information?
- During a typical day, when and where am I most likely to choke?
- What is my favorite source of mindless information?
If you want to spend five minutes learning more about choking, read “Addicted to Distraction” by Tony Schwartz.
If you want to spend eight minutes learning more about choking, watch “We are all cyborgs now”, a TED talk by Amber Case.
