Distractions — A Cancer of the Mind
Until recently, I had about 8 games and 2 entertainment apps on my phone, today I uninstalled all of them.
I realised these apps are really good at keeping my mind occupied. They distract my mind and avoid it from feeling empty and restless. However, I realised that this feeling of emptiness is required. It forces introspection and triggers the search for meaningful work.
I explored this idea with the help of an analogy. Think of the mind like a bucket — an empty bucket. The empty mind is restless, and has an urge to be filled by something. What you fill it with, makes all the difference.
Now think of cheap distractions like games or YouTube or social media apps like foamy soap water. It has a lot of froth and occupies a lot of volume initially.
For a while, this feels good. Your mind is filled, it is occupied and you don’t feel restless anymore. But over time, just like a real life bucket of soap water, the froth settles down, the foam collapses. And no matter how much you shake or rinse the soap water, it fails to produce any more froth. Its volume reduces and you realise your mind is getting empty again. Once again triggering the feeling of restlessness and the urge to fill your mind.
This time however, you’ve already exhausted your cheap distractions. So you have no choice but to look for meaningful work, which no doubt is harder and takes more time and effort to fulfil your mind, but it does so more reliably. If cheap distractions are as simple as dumping foamy soap water in a bucket, then hard work is like shovelling sand from a pit into the bucket, under the hot sun. It will take longer, it involves more effort, but you will feel significantly more fulfilled.
Through this exercise, I realised 2 harmful (and arguably obvious) consequences of indulging in cheap distractions:
- You lose out on time — lots of it
Although you eventually fulfil your mind with meaningful work, depending on the nature and intensity of your distraction, it can occupy your mind for hours, days or even weeks, before you exhaust it and get to real work. - The distractions fatigue your mind
Whether your distraction involves a lot of active mental energy or not, it leaves your mind fatigued. Reducing your capacity to do real work.
Effectively, you’re left with LESS TIME to do real work, and in that less time too, you have LESSER CAPACITY.
In a way, distractions are like cancer, using your own resources against you.
On the other hand, the empty mind when left empty, allows for all sorts of deep insights, explorations, introspections and realisations (much like this article you’re reading). These deep insights will come, provided you give your mind the opportunity to explore them. Filling it with cheap distractions robs you of that opportunity. It’s a daily cycle that looks something like this:
Obviously the step where we need to intervene is the 3rd one where we fill our mind with distractions, break this cycle and jump directly to the 5th step:
Will uninstalling all the games from my phone really help me achieve this objective? Will I relapse into binging Animal Planet videos on YouTube in a few days? Only time will tell. Until then, my hustle is ongoing, I hope yours is too!
