Distracting Yourself to Death
Channel surfing your way through life
When I was a kid, I read A LOT of comic books. As I got older, I got out of the habit, although I still read an occasional graphic novel and enjoyed the wave of superhero movies that surged into the theaters over the last decade until the quality level went downhill. Well, somehow I got signed up for Quora Digest which regularly emails almost hypnotically intriguing answers to questions about superheroes like:
Who is the most powerful villain in Marvel?
Who is the scariest comic book villain of all time?
Can the Hulk drown?
Who is stronger and tougher in Marvel comics, Luke Cage or Colossus?
If you used to be a comic book junky, these are fairly interesting bits of knowledge and theoretical questions. In fact, if you’re not careful, you can very easily spend 20 to 30 minutes just surfing from answer to answer.
It’s kind of like “channel surfing” used to be on TV before we got Amazon Prime, Netflix, and all these other services that gave us more control over what we watch. You’d sit there, kind of bored, and say “Friends” would come on. You weren’t really a huge fan of “Friends,” but the couch was comfortable, and it was tolerable. Then, “Oh look, it’s ‘Seinfeld.’ I’ve seen this episode, it’s okay, but I don’t have anything else to do.” At least when you binge on “Game of Thrones” or “Breaking Bad,” there’s an endpoint. You immerse yourself in it and you can’t wait to see the next episode, but then it’s over.
Is binging on a show like that a bad thing? Generally, I’d say, “no.” Sure, you may spend way too much time on it and it’s probably not going to be one of your lifetime highlights, but typically people really enjoy doing it and since it does have an endpoint, you can only spend so much time doing it. If it disrupted a week or two of your life, but you were able to relax, let go, and have fun, it’s not so bad. This differentiates it from channel surfing, which is only mildly entertaining, but it never had to end. Is that good for you? No, because it can suck up large amounts of your life without really adding anything of value, even a good time.
You may say, “Binging on a show, channel surfing, whatever. What difference does it really make?”
Well, it actually makes a big difference because, in the modern era, we increasingly have something called an “attention economy.” We now have a variety of social media sites and even games that make more money by keeping you on their sites for as long as possible. It would be perfect for them if you slept, then got up, got on their site, and used it all day long, even when you were eating dinner or on the toilet. Rinse and repeat, FOREVER.
TV was also like this, but TV was very limited in how it could target consumers. They’d pick a show that they thought would target a particular demographic, they’d put it on at a certain time and they’d hope people would bite. Of course, the shows typically didn’t run that long, so they’d need other shows that also targeted that same audience. Even if they had a hit, would the audience like the other shows around it? They could only take educated guesses until they went on air. Plus, the shows were expensive and took a long time to make. Even if they had a winner, would the show lose steam because the writing slipped, or the audience got bored of the concept? That was always a possibility.
Now, let’s compare that to YouTube. For example, here’s a slice of mine:
I used to never look at YouTube, but eventually, I started paying attention to it because I wanted to learn things. Exercise techniques. Martial arts strikes. Self-help tips. How to better understand topics like the gut biome and quantum physics. It all sounds very useful and maybe even a bit noble, right?
However, YouTube has a sophisticated algorithm that decides what videos they show to you, and they don’t care what you INTEND to watch or what noble intentions you supposedly have, they’re going to show you videos based on what you actually click on. In my case, we have 11 videos here. Two of them are exercise-related, two are self-help and the rest are comedy, funny animal videos, a comic book-related video, and reviews of movies/TV. You can (and I sometimes do), go down a rabbit hole on YouTube and wonder what happened to the last 30 minutes of your life. The answer to that question is you spent it watching funny skits, dogs playing, and clips from movies you saw twenty years ago.
Social media? It sucks you in the same way. You’re typically following your friends and people you admire or find interesting. The more responses you make, the more chance you have to draw eyeballs. If you’re somewhere like Instagram, the more pictures you put up looking hot or doing cool things, the better chance you have to catch someone’s attention.
We’ve now reached a point with some video games where you’ll need hundreds of hours to become genuinely competent (not exceptional, just competent) at all of the characters. Of course, we also can’t forget the limitless possibilities of modern pornography. You could look at 5-10 different videos every day and still probably only see a fraction of the ones that are out there before you die of old age.
Of course, on top of all of this, we’re about to explode into the age of AI which will make all of these distractions orders of magnitude better at sucking you in while it creates all new distractions at the same time. You’ll be able to have AI friends. AI boyfriends. AI sex partners. All of which may, as they grow to know you intimately, be even more enticing than the real thing.
Does that seem possible? Well, imagine if you had a thousand years to learn how to charm and seduce human beings. Now consider that ChatGPT alone has over 200 million users. How long do you think it would take it to accumulate not just a thousand years, but 10 thousand years’ worth of man-hours of conversation with human beings? With the limits of AI today, it’s still not as charming as a person. However, in less than a decade, chances are AI will be able to push your buttons BETTER THAN a human being.
All of this is important because life may seem like a long process, but you would also be surprised at how fast it passes. One day, you can feel like you have your whole life in front of you without ever realizing you’ll reach a point in your life where you’ll wonder where all the time went.
What do you want to spend that time doing? Falling in love? Getting the body you always wanted? Going to see your favorite band in concert? Surfing for hours? Starting your own business? Going to dinner with your friends and hanging out for hours afterward? Going on that trip to Athens you had been thinking about for a decade? Learning to code? Playing paintball? Learning to shoot a bow and arrow? Learning to cook? Playing fetch with your dog? Getting a promotion at work? Running a half marathon? Ditching some Christmas presents on some needy family’s doorstep ringing the doorbell and running away… or do you want to spend day after day surfing YouTube videos, playing Call of Duty, and arguing with mentally ill idiots on X?
We are in an era where you can very easily use up your life moving from distraction to distraction without ever doing the things that matter and it’s only going to get worse as AI reaches its full potential. If you’re not aware of that, you may wake up one day and realize you spent your whole life distracted instead of ever doing the things that really mattered. There are going to be hundreds of millions of people like that across the globe in the coming decades. Don’t be one of them.