The Time Drainer

Being informed is a virtue. It helps us make better decisions and encourages us to take action.

Getting hooked on an endless scroll of media inputs is not the same as being informed. There’s long been a business model of urgent news (“man bites dog!”), but now it’s been leveraged, amplified and optimized to suck people in for hours at a time. And division is much easier to sell than progress.

If it’s not helping you take action to make things better, what’s it for?

(copied from Seth’s Blog, by Seth Godin, July 21, 2020)

Well, this just about summed up what I’ve been thinking the past few days – am I wasting the days of my life on efforts to stay informed?  The answer is becoming more and more clear, yes. Yes, dear, you are.

I’ve always tried to hold social media at a distance.  I’m not like some people that are on it the entire day.  I don’t get notifications that demand my response, but I do find myself scrolling along quite frequently.  If I’m bored or avoiding doing something I need to do I think, well I’m just going to scroll through and see what everyone is doing.  And, I scroll and scroll, comment, and scroll some more. I tell myself to limit the scroll to twice a day – morning and evening – but rarely succeed.  I need to be informed, but as Seth says I get sucked in.  Time wasting at its finest and I’m not really informed of anything worthwhile.

And the news.  Oh my!  I’m a news junkie, I just want to know what is going on in the world all the time.  Got to stay informed, so I get sucked in, but not really informed.  Truthfully, I spend as much time fuming at the news as I do reading it or watching it.  Sometimes the news itself and most of the time the slant that is given to every news report.  Is there truth anywhere?  And what is wrong with the people of this world? Both questions absorb to much space in my mind and as Seth states, “division is much easier to sell than progress”.

Oh, there’s more, but, dear reader, you get the point.  I am spending too much time being informed and not enough time doing what is really important. In thinking about all my activities/hobbies/chores/projects I know that much of what I do needs to be prioritized and/or eliminated.  I need to be mindful of my time and what I’m doing.  I’m not alone either.  We have become a society of time wasters in the name of being informed and/or being productive.

Seth always tells it straight and today he confirmed my self questioning. “If it’s not helping you take action to make things better, what’s it for?”