I was linked to a poorly-written article on Medium [1] (some might argue that
all articles on Medium are of poor quality, but that's a discussion for another
time) titled "Why Excessive Consumption Limits your Creativity". The article was
light on details, but the author seemed to be saying that if a person gets into
the habit of checking things too much, be that email, social media, or whatever,
then said person will find it harder to later do things that require more brain
power.
Like most articles on the Internet, nothing is backed up with anything other
than anecdotes from the author and there's no real conclusion reached, but I
figured it was a decent place to start since the problem of limited creativity
is something that I've been dealing with for a few years now, and am only just
now starting to come out the other side of.
The problem isn't necessarily excessive consumption. To be creative you do need
to have an influx of information that you can use as a base inside your own
head, and from there you can use that information to make new and interesting
connections (or old and noninteresting connections, which might lead to new and
interesting connections given the right circumstances). You need to have a pool
of knowledge to build from, and that pool has to come from somewhere.
"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot
and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no
shortcut." -Stephen King [2]
Excessive consumption, then, is both good and necessary to be a successful
creative-type. What the author of the Medium piece missed, I think, is that it's
not the excessive consumption that gets in the way of our brains being able to
dive deeply into tasks, it's the constant interruptions to our workflows, the
constant calling out for attention that pulls us in a different direction every
few minutes (or even every few seconds) that's the ultimate culprit.
It's your notification bar on your phone, it's the website that scrolls downward
into infinity, it's the newsfeed that puts '(x) new stories' every so often at
the top to entice you to click on it again, it's the autoplaying next video that
The Algorithm (tm) has decided you might like. They slowly train our brain to
always be on the lookout for the next novel thing, and if it can't find
something, it starts to get antsy looking for it.
I've seen this myself, and since turning my back on social media late last
year[3], I've been taking steps to get my attention back and my creativity back.
In no particular order, some of the things I've done are:
1. Signing out of YouTube and turning off Autoplay. I also clear everything out
of the apps that I use to watch some videos. If I want to watch a YouTube video,
I have to search for it. Once I started doing that, I realized how broken
YouTube's search really is.
2. Deleting (most) of my social media accounts and blocking them at the DNS
level. I have a pi-hole in my home network, and I used it to block all of
Facebook's domains and all of twitter's domains. This helps prevent them from
tracking me somewhat, sure (it doesn't follow me when I leave my house, so it's
limited in that way), but it also helps eliminate the temptation to just pop
over to those sites and see what's going on (which is usually outrage, which I
no longer have time for).
3. Using the pi-hole to block Disqus. Disqus powers comments on most of the web
these days for some reason (webmasters are lazy and don't want to build their
own commenting system), so I started blocking that, too. Comments can be useful,
but the Disqus-powered comments were almost universally about the same quality
you would find on Facebook or twitter (i.e. easy to read, but ultimately not
very useful or interesting). It's little pockets of social media embedded in
nearly every article, and they had to go.
4. Stopping going to sites that encourage addictive behavior. I won't name names
or anything, but any site that shows something along the lines of "(x) new
stories/comments/whatevers" after idling on the page for a few minutes had to
go. It's scummy and only exists to keep me there, clicking on things and
generating ad revenue until I'm dead.
I'm still in the early stages of this experiment, and it does seem to be working
so far, but I still have a long way to go. Even while at my Real Job(tm), when I
sit down to start a task I get a couple of minutes into it and I feel a
compulsion to go look at another tab for a minute and then come back. It was so
weird that I didn't even realize that it was something that I had been doing for
years. I just didn't realize it until I had closed the tabs and then didn't have
anything to go to. My brain kind of flailed around for a minute to get its
bearings before I was able to bring my full concentration to bear on the task at
hand. That's something that I hadn't been able to do for a long time.
One of the experiments that I have tried is to just close my browser.
Completely. I've had a web browser of some kind open and idling on my computer
for the majority of the last two decades. But by closing it down and forcing
myself to look at the other things that I have on my computer. To learn about
the things my computer and smartphone can do other than just trying to addict to
me to the neverending dopamine-seeking rush that is the majority of the modern
web. It's robbed me of too much of my time, my energy, and my creativity, and
I'm drawing the line here.
I'm still going to use the Internet and the World Wide Web, but I'm going to do
it on my terms.
[1]
https://web.archive.org/web/20190517100036/https://medium.com/the-mission/why-excessive-consumption-limits-your-creativity-6e925dd66daa
[2]
https://web.archive.org/web/20190517122227/https://publishing-resources.org/stephen-king-quotes-how-to-become-better-writer/
[3]
http://ymodem.org:70/phlog/2018/nocialmedia.txt
