Found in the BBC today… a piece about how adding more things that are inconvenient can give you better all around human skills like talking, feeling, and relating to others.
‘… a 45-year-old artist living in Bournemouth, in the UK… found himself unable to paint for more than a half-hour without reaching for his phone and its infinite distractions.
‘Modern technology… may come at a cost: early data suggests that our attention span may be shortening, critical thinking capabilities weakening, emotional intelligence fading, and spatial memory getting worse as we offload human tasks to our devices…
‘Technological optimisation doesn’t seem to be making us happier, either… people still report high levels of stress and loneliness.
‘A growing number of people are rebuilding tolerance for inconveniences. The idea is to find tasks or ways of doing things which involve a level of difficulty, time or patience. This could, for example, involve going “old school” and swapping digital tech tools for analogue solutions, such as reading rather than watching YouTube, navigating by road signs in place of Google Maps or calling a friend for advice instead of consulting Chat…
Read the story here: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260227-can-friction-maxxing-fix-your-focus
I always call people instead of talking to ChatGBT. I haven’t ever owned a smartphone. I think people were like, ‘How do you live?’, before, but this article makes me feel glad I didn’t fold to some social expectation that to be ‘with it’ one had to be ‘always on.’ But in some placees, kids just like to have expensive phones to show off. That’s what they told me, in Ho Chi Minh for ex.
Thinking about it, today.
I read this the other day, too. ‘Across years of professional posting, she’s gained precisely two clients from social media… and both came via her personal account, not her professional one.’ It’s in this article: https://www.creativeboom.com/insight/is-social-media-over-for-creatives-or-are-we-just-waking-up-to-what-it-is/
Besides all this making ‘content’ to be discovered or something, what was the value of the time spent on that? I don’t know about you, but chasing a big number to feel valuable just isn’t worth the energy, for me. I saw people who did this, get big, famous, and very popular. But if you talked to them, they just looked… tired. Early-days influencers, I suppose: this was in Seattle. I guess for me, I just wanted to be in the parks more and walk around, and go to cafes, and sit and talk to people who were friends in those days.
It’s not much different from here, and now. Only: it’s not the same kind of city, country, culture, and attitude. But: it’s its own thing that I get to immerse in. So I’m seeing and learning, discovering… every day. That’s valuable to me even if it takes some energy to work out. Meantime, going ‘back’ to the US… not an option.