In the last post I talked about my relationship with the physical stuff that tends to accumulate over a life. There is another, more sneaky kind - the Digital kind.

Over the past 2-3 years, I noticed a few changes in myself which I couldn’t quite attribute to anything particular:

  • I was always stuck in a “buy this, buy that” loop. As soon as I placed the order for one thing, I was on the hunt for the next - not even waiting for delivery and actual unboxing or usage
  • Low-grade anxiety and insecurity: more so about my professional life. The echo chamber around AI made me feel like I was constantly behind and “failing” in life
  • Catching myself on the phone what seemed like every 10-15mins: scrolling provided easy dopamine hits. 95% of the time I didn’t even remember what I had watched or read. My screen time stats were off the charts

Ironically, I spent even more time online looking up what was wrong with me.

It hit home when B asked me to delete LinkedIn from my phone, fed up with yet another one of my rants about my anxiety. I was comparing my behind the scenes life to someone’s highlight / showreel. What Instagram did to most people, LinkedIn was doing to me.

As I started to declutter my digital life, I noticed other things that I had to streamline - and redefine what I gave my time and attention to.

What lives on my phone

My screen time report was a helpful starting point to see how much time I was really spending wasting on different apps and sites. I implemented a few levels of change to reduce the time I spent on my phone. Some of this worked on my laptop as well, though it’s still a WIP there

Oddly enough, the “hack” that worked insanely well was the simplest. My fingers instinctively typed “9” (for 9gag) on my laptop when I was bored. By simply deleting all instances from chrome history, there was enough of a barrier that I was able to completely shut it off after.

Obviously, delete offending apps entirely works - I found it helpful to take a break and prove to myself that I could do without [insert name of app here] for a week / month. For a more gradual transition, only access it on desktop - works beautifully for something like Instagram (bonus: no ads! if you have an adblocker installed)

Implementing screen-time blockers (Apple’s Screen time is good but easy to bypass; One sec is a great and cheap upgrade) is the next best thing.

While my screen time is still pretty high, I find it’s been steered a little bit more into things I want to spend time on. Doing this much helped me reset time spent on 9gag (down to 0, FTW!), Instagram and Youtube.

Tyranny of the algos

Engagement optimizing algos completely dictated what I watched / read on almost all apps (Youtube, Instagram, Reddit, LinkedIn). Of course, this meant I was slowly but surely being shut in a bubble that kept confirming my own biases. It also wrecked my mental health as I mentioned above. One only has to make a new account and see how bad it really is - the algos are screaming for your attention, hell-bent on showing you only 4-5 types of content that you interacted with once - the Dead Internet1 seems to be already here. 2

By resetting history and curating who I follow, I was able to reduce the bombardment of very similar content. You can also find in-built app settings if you need something less drastic. 3

The reset I’m now trying to do is turning to more “human-curated” content - the front page of HackerNews is great, so is the Whatsapp groups I am a part of (Clear Writing, 6% Club). Both these sources have diverse and mature content that gets recommended and discussed in depth. I still get to pick and choose, there is no doom-scrolling involved, and it comes from a community of brilliant, invested folks guided by tight rules.

Stuff I now read feels thoughtful and thought-provoking, lovingly crafted, and most importantly - not optimized for engagement.

Decluttering my second brain

My hoarding instincts extend to the digital world as well.

Guided by Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain and Everything is a remix, I had a host of links and snippets saved across Notion, Chrome bookmarks, Reddit, LinkedIn, Instagram and GMail. I was saving them in the hope of bringing up mind-blowing connections when I eventually started writing on substack, but only ended up revisiting and skimming with no real action.

As I sat down to start writing, I quickly realised the chaos I had built. Don’t get me wrong - I did see the value of such a system. However, it was too disconnected, too repetitive. Decluttering this was, by far, the biggest exercise out of the 3 things in this post, yet the most satisfying.

Almost 40% of the content I had saved was repeated - either from the same platform or across platforms. This was quite surprising and told me two things:

  • On a positive note - if I was saving it again and again, meant that this was one of the core things I care about. Buckets here included - entrepreneurship, relationships, creating content, AI, good “taste” and writing.
  • On the negative - Tyranny of the algos showing up and keeping me hooked using the same content I had already consumed some time back. And the fact that I consumed something, liked it enough to save it, but had no strong memory or recall of it. My brain had become very efficient at scrolling without really consuming - something I still can’t digest very well.

Another avenue of digital hoarding had been the ton of subscriptions by great writers that flooded my inbox every day. A small Google appscript using chatGPT helped me filter out the ones I truly do not read, and using a 2-step process of a) unsubscribing completely b) reducing the subscriptions to only weekly emailers helped me tame this. 4

I sorted the remaining (sane amount of) content into buckets (and had fun reading and revisiting some great pieces of craft). I intend to use some of it in my writing, and some I will just publish as-is to spread the joy here.

Attention is all you need

I probably do have too much time on my hands to indulge in all this declutter. However, this turned out to be almost a therapeutic exercise that’s set the stage for my relationship with technology and stuff in the future.

Humans truly aren’t built to absorb or even consume so much information, it’s a fool’s endeavour to even try. Yes, I’m saying this as someone who is just starting off his own substack, go figure.

I’m resetting my attention and bandwidth towards my own curiosities - moving away from algos, towards more human-curated content, and starting to create instead of just consuming. In a world that’s set up to take away all sense of self, it will be tough. This process has already helped me uncover parts of me I didn’t know about, and I hope to turn my attention into something worthwhile I can leave behind as a complex human being.

PS: Attention is all you need is of course a nod to the seminal paper that helped kickstart the current LLM craze.

PPS: Inspired by this piece

Footnotes

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory ↩

  2. I tried making new accounts on Youtube as well as Reddit (without deleting primary ones). It was scary how quickly my feed was full of inane, mindless posts because I simply clicked on stuff that immediately caught my eye. (Does it say something about me - probably. How dare you!) ↩

  3. Optimizing Youtube is quite easy - you can completely remove and pause history - makes the home page look like a blank wall. Of course, I do miss the content I used to watch - but the easy fix is to subscribe to people you like (all of their content lives within the subscriptions tab on the sidebar). If you’re really craving something specific - a simple search finds you the best thing to watch one-off, without feeding the algo monsters. Similarly, you can reset the “explore” tab on Instagram. I haven’t been able to find a reliable way to healthily consume Reddit still - suggestions welcome. ↩

  4. Gmail has a new “subscriptions” tab on the left sidebar (below the inbox, spam, trash etc.). Do check it out ↩