December 7, 2025
I think I was fortunate to have been born in the early 80s. I had my first computer at 15, a bit later than most of my peers. Before then, I had to escape boredom with analog activities: listening to music, reading, window shopping, etc. These days whenever I feel like it is impossible to go without the internet or my phone, I think back to myself then. If I could do it as a hyper-curious adhd teenager, why can’t I do it now?
I was one of those people who kept rolling my eyes whenever they warned about the dangers of internet addiction. I had never considered myself addicted to the internet, believing that I could always choose to do more important things if I wanted to. The way they wrote about it is as though we would start hyperventilating once the internet goes…
December 7, 2025
I think I was fortunate to have been born in the early 80s. I had my first computer at 15, a bit later than most of my peers. Before then, I had to escape boredom with analog activities: listening to music, reading, window shopping, etc. These days whenever I feel like it is impossible to go without the internet or my phone, I think back to myself then. If I could do it as a hyper-curious adhd teenager, why can’t I do it now?
I was one of those people who kept rolling my eyes whenever they warned about the dangers of internet addiction. I had never considered myself addicted to the internet, believing that I could always choose to do more important things if I wanted to. The way they wrote about it is as though we would start hyperventilating once the internet goes off. I felt like I was always in control: it was just a source of knowledge, connection and entertainment for me. Early on I had already switched off most of my notifications, so most of the time I’m not obsessively checking my phone for updates.
I have always loved reading and had no difficulty as a child reading 500-page novels. But I was lost, confused and lonely during my 20s, so I sought other forms of gratification. So I had to learn how to read books again. That was my first memory of having an attention span too compromised to read.
In recent years I have slowly begun to realise that in life, the things that are worth doing tend to require patience and attention. For example: cooking. It is almost impossible to eat nutritiously without cooking. But I have found cooking to be tedious and it feels like a chore. Why cook if I can order food with a few clicks?
Everything these days is within a few clicks. I used to wait 10-20 minutes for a bus, and now even waiting more than 5 minutes feels too long. My brain can no longer tolerate slowness.
So I have realised: the insidious thing about the internet and the speed it enables is not that it grabs my attention or even hoards it. It is the fact that it is always available to engage my brain when it is bored or depressed:
Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration. – Cal Newport, Deep Work
Just like a muscle gradually losing its strength without training, our brains gradually loses its ability to be in a unstimulated state if we are constantly gratifying it with stimuli. It is like a normal life would feel intolerable to a drug addict used to the highs.
But the capacity to focus comes from being able to direct our attention onto one thing instead of a multitude of things at will. It is difficult to achieve this state if our brains are used to constantly being highly stimulated. It wants to look at a thousand things quickly not just one thing slowly and deeply. Without the capacity to focus we can only engage in shallow interactions. Why read a 500-page book when we can have multiple payoffs scrolling social media in 5 minutes?
I have gradually built an improved baseline of health over the past few years with zone 2 training and weightlifting. Due to chronic health issues I have to train slower and rest harder in order not to risk burnout. So my progress has been slow, and sometimes regresses. But once in a while I catch myself feeling a sense of stability, strength and well-being. Or I am in the middle of a run and I find myself taking slow, deep breaths instead of being unable to catch my breath. These are moments that do not deliver the kind of euphoria associated with pleasurable dopamine hits, but a deep, profound sense of satisfaction. The work has been hard, the journey has been long, but something has emerged in the process. I am reminded of an old chinese story about someone grinding an iron bar into a needle.
This is what I think of good health: it is mostly invisible, but it is the foundation to everything else in life. I used to feel fatigued all the time, and even if I had no other psychological issues the fatigue itself was chronically depressing. I would carry a grocery bag and it would tire me for the rest of the day. A 10-minute walk to the mall sounded like a trek to the himalayas. I am able to appreciate the invisible well-being I possess now because I have this contrast.
This sense of health is very gratifying, but it took a long while to get to this point. I realised this sort of gratification has a very different dimension from the type of gratification I usually seek. It is there deeply within me, and it is easy to forget it exists. I could say the same of this blog. I’ve had it for years and it has become so entrenched in my life that it is difficult to feel its meaningfulness. Maybe starting a new project will feel way more gratifying and shiny. But once in a while I could grasp a more third-party point of view and I could sense its presence in my world, a kind of presence that is only possible because it has grown up with me over these years.
I don’t know if it is ageing or a rebellion against the current world, but I feel more and more inclined to participate in deliberate slowness. I am beginning to be aware of my phone’s relationship with my capacity to tolerate slowness. What the phone does is to manufacture frustration, a frustration that would not exist if we were not used to being quickly and easily gratified.
I thought I was impatient and intolerant, but I wasn’t really aware how my phone was making it worse. Doomscrolling feels like such a lightweight activity, it is just not obvious that it slowly but thoroughly depletes my mental energy. It is ironic because I doomscroll precisely when I am tired and depressed, but the doomscrolling makes it worse by making me feel more tired and hence more depressed.
Even though I know what I would intellectually prefer to do, it is still difficult to apply it day to day. I would love to cook more for myself and eat healthier in general, but I am still very drawn to the instant dopamine hits of unhealthy food. I would like to doomscroll less and work on more slow, creative stuff, but the internet seems so full of interestingness…
Sometimes I think life is just a lifelong journey of being able to convince our selves to go in the direction we actually want to go versus simply going along with our desires and impulses. It took me more than a decade to have a positive relationship to exercise, maybe it will take me a similar amount of time to manage my attention. I feel like I don’t have control of where my attention goes now, the capacity to slow it down or direct it. But I am starting to feel connected to the part of me who now desires a deeper dimension of life versus getting cheap dopamine hits. I don’t even know what a deeper dimension of life actually means for someone like me, but I feel glimpses of it once in a while. Sometimes it can be as simple as the sense of fullness after reading a really good book, or the ability to notice the preciousness of a mundane moment. At least I know it is somewhere there.