I’ll be painfully honest; I am writing this half-asleep. Not the kind that comes before rest, but the other kind, where you are awake and technically functioning yet somehow dimmer than you should be. Like a phone stuck at thirty percent. I have deleted Instagram maybe four times before. I am writing this on the evening of a potential fifth, and I am beginning to suspect the two facts are connected in ways I have not yet fully mapped.
The brain is the only real estate that has ever truly mattered. More than land, more than money, more than lineage. And like all valuable real estate, it does not stay empty. When we arrive into the world it is open, fertile land, and then, the construction begins; family pours the foundation, religion raises the first walls, school installs the windows and decides what view they will face. Culture, media, the internet; they all move in and begin to renovate, constantly, according to their own blueprints. What we believe is real, what we consider possible, what we tolerate, all of it is architecture. Somebody designed it. The question is who, and whose interest they were serving when they picked up the pen.
On the other side of the screen are rooms full of the sharpest minds this generation has produced, whose singular professional purpose is to understand the precise neurological cocktail that will keep me scrolling for twelve more minutes. Seventeen. Forty. They are not evil. That is the part that burns. There is no malice in it, only optimization. I am not being targeted. I am being harvested. And if doom-scrolling truly diminishes something in the quality of my attention, in the clarity of my thought, then the question I cannot stop returning to is: how am I supposed to build anything? How are any of us supposed to? How are we going to compete on a global stage, let alone fix our corner of it?
I believe that those responsible for developing the minds of the younger generation have not taken it seriously, and I do not believe it is an accident. A population that cannot think critically is a population that can be governed easily. A man who has benefited from an unjust system long enough begins to need that system to continue. And so nothing is planted. There is a saying that a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit under. I look at what has been planted here, and I know something went wrong at the root.
You could ask: why not just drop the phone, leave social media for a while? But the honest answer is that I needed the distraction, at least at the beginning. There was something I did not want to sit with, and the scroll of doom was always there, always willing. The problem is that the distraction has now gone on so long that I can no longer clearly name what I was running from. And in its place I now have a restlessness I cannot settle, an attention span I cannot reset and a nagging sense that I have been a willing participant in my own diminishment.
My verdict, with whatever brain cells I have left to form one is this: the battle for the mind is the only battle that has ever mattered. Every other fight, economic, spiritual, political, flows from it. I have handed over square footage I cannot fully account for. But I will fight back for it, even though the algorithm knows me better than I know myself, even when the system was designed to keep me distracted, even when it feels like a losing battle. Ehn…Maybe I’ll just delete Instagram again.