Consumption brain rot

The overwhelm has gotten worse recently. Life is just... So fucking noisy. My autistic brain already struggles to keep up with life, let alone without all the war, fascism and doom scrolling. I wrote about this last year, and I was onto something. Consumption is the core of this brain rot. But so is the stress from everything turning to shit, being unemployed and stuck in life... Which also makes it harder not to doom scroll, thus the cycle spirals out of control. But I've recently found out my patterns have changed.

Whenever I'm online now, I feel like I'm anxiously searching for something to occupy my attention. I don't fully commit myself to anything I'm doing, I'm always tab switching, always peaking at my emails, Signal or WhatsApp. Always peaking for a better dopamine spike than what I'm doing right now. Doing this all day? It exhausts your brain from the inside out. Everything becomes exhausting and overwhelming, which makes focusing even harder and the lack of commitment entrenches.

What annoys me, is that I know what works for me:

• NO heavy phone usage after waking up (checking messages is allowed, but NO YouTube or Instagram).

• No news for the first 3 hours of my day.

• Limiting short form content to 15 minutes at a time, maximum!

• Reducing stimulation while doing cognitively demanding tasks (maybe my playlist isn't what my brain needs right now while I'm debugging this hard problem?).

• Reducing context switching: if I'm coding, don't listen to a video essay in the background! Splitting my attention will make me feel worse.

• Stop watching a video if I'm not really engaging with it or focusing on it.

These rules are hard for me to follow, but I'm trying to get better at them. The video embedded in this post bought the importance of that last one to my attention. I watch so many videos. So many of them I can hardly recall, even those I really enjoyed! This video talks about how we have access to more information than ever, but we seem less able than ever to actually turn that into something. That we get trapped in these hideous loops of consumption for consumption's sake, spending all these precious hours of our lives without anything to show for it.

I've always felt similar about books. I can read loads of books and barely recall them a year later. I want my reading to be impactful, expansive and enriching, to help me grow my understanding of the world and develop ideas. So I've started doing little summary dumps every time I finish reading. Just little key points, ideas and themes that jump out at me. And then? Once I've finished the book, I'll write my own throughs on these points and ideas, maybe even try and relate them to my life.

This video reminded me that doing this for video essays would be a great idea too. Hell, it might even be a good way to help revive my blog a little bit. To get my brain better at engaging with the things I consume, I'm going to start blogging about 1 video in a week (or maybe every 2 weeks) that stands out to me. It'd be really cool to tell everyone about it, and share my own ideas and how they relate to my experiences.

The truth is, big tech and social media giants want us to become passive consumers. They want us dependent on their platforms, their content and brain rot to be nourished and enriched. I can already feel my brain's ability to focus has been destroyed. This stops here.

Happy belated new year, and look forward to yapping about the next video next week...