The abyss

I got home from my girlfriend's around 8 am this morning. She was supposed to study on her side, and I on mine. I have around 7 hours of courses to catch up on, that I have been postponing all week. Today was a day where I had nothing else planned but studying. And I did nothing. I maybe studied seriously for 10 minutes. Other than that, I did no physical activity, or anything productive or creative. But I scrolled youtube for hours, gulping down large helpings of content that mildly grabbed my attention without really watching anything to the end.

The consumptive side of the internet, once it holds me in its sickly, velvety grasp, veils my determination in a black fog. My mind and inner peace become heavier than lead, and coated in a tar that cannot wash off, no matter how much water I rinse it in. Its slimy nature covers my being and clings on as if it had a will of its own. Like a nightmarish mosquito, that uses the blood it sucks out to increase its capacity to hold the vital substance, and so continues on absorbing more and more as time goes by. It does not stop. And as time goes by, my thumb and index, take on a robotic pace, while with a mechanical scrape, they scavenge, digging through the two dimensional lifeless projection of reality with no real purpose. I slowly turn into the most primitive shell of a robot that can only perform one task.

"Onto the next. Gotta stay busy. Can't start thinking. If I start to think, I'll have to stop consuming. Consuming is the only source of pleasure. Everything else is boring."

And as soon as content appears that could trigger an interesting thought, either about myself, or about the tasks that I should be doing, or about how I should change the way I am currently doing things, I zap the channel.

"Consume. Absorb. Feel empty. Need information. Not too important or I will remember."

Why do I inflict this upon myself ? Am I in control of this ? Am I the only one bothered by this ?

I must be in control to some degree. But I feel like the algorithm is simply to powerful to fight at some times. It is becoming more so every passing minute. It has been created with the purpose of making as many people as possible consume its contents as much and as long as possible, for the greater good of some company, be it google, youtube, facebook, instagram... and it has even been given the order to modify itself to make itself better...!

Since the beginning of organized agriculture, we have been aiming at making our lives easier. We have worked so hard on making our lives easier, and we finally had a breakthrough : we are now at the turning point where the creative and intelligent work is being done by our tools, and we are becoming the monotonous machines of our own creations.

My attention is now a controlled, quantified, and marketed good.

Can anyone see an actual good side to any of this ? And does it outweigh the bad side ? Why continue this madness ? What can be done besides administering medication that doesn't really work and makes us want to stop communicating with others ?

How can anyone call this freedom if I can't focus my attention on whatever I choose ?

"Be determined!" "Focus" "just do it!"

If it were that simple, there wouldn't be a problem.