More Than a Data Point: What I Consumed Instead of Doomscrolling
Why reclaiming your attention is a tactical intervention
There is a very specific kind of exhaustion that comes from consuming absolutely nothing of substance all week. It isn’t the noble tiredness of a day’s hard labor, nor is it the soft restoration of true rest. It’s a hollow, static-filled fatigue. The psychic equivalent of eating an entire bag of cotton candy and wondering why you still have a headache and a lingering hunger. We’ve all been there: a steady intake of other people’s curated lives, aesthetic breakfast bowls, and manufactured urgency, until your mind feels like a crowded subway station, yet your own life remains curiously untouched. This is not consumption; it is a quiet forfeiture of the self.
This week, I staged a small, tactical intervention. I stopped treating my attention like a public utility and started treating it like a sovereign territory. I paid attention to what I was actually letting past the gates; not as some trendy “digital detox” or a performance of discipline, but as a basic matter of authorship. The difference, as it turns out, is about as subtle as a solar flare.
The Unsolicited Intervention
The week opened with two pieces of media that delivered the same inconveniently accurate message in very different octaves. The first offers a charming premise that quickly reveals a jagged edge: if your life is boring, you will leave it. Repeatedly. You aren’t “distracted” because you lack character; you’re distracted because you’ve built a reality you’re constantly trying to escape. It reframes scrolling not as a personal failing, but as a design flaw in your own joy.
Following that poetic wake-up call, I dove into a much deeper architectural study: Tracee Ellis Ross discussing “Scaling with Soul.”While it clocks in at over an hour, it is a masterclass in clarity. It presents your life not as something to endure or optimize for someone else’s KPIs, but as something you are actually allowed to run. Together, these pieces reminded me that autonomy isn’t a “vibe” found at the bottom of a matcha latte, it is a grueling, daily practice of refusing to pretend you aren’t the one in charge.
The Myth of Constant Availability
This thread of reclamation continued with a sharp piece on the distinction between boundaries and availability. We talk about boundaries as if they’re these heroic walls we build after someone has already stepped on our toes. But availability? That’s structural. It determines if the line is even approachable in the first place.
To be perpetually reachable, digitally, emotionally, or intellectually, is to fragment your soul into pieces too small to be useful to anyone, least of all yourself. It is the architectural equivalent of leaving every door and window in your house wide open and then expressing genuine shock when the room fills with dust and uninvited opinions. Access, when left unexamined, is nothing more than erosion.
Control Without the Illusion of Clean Edges
Somewhere in the middle of the week, Found entered the rotation, watched purely for entertainment purposes, mostly because Shanola Hampton is the lead and I’d watch anything with her in it. The show follows Gabi Mosely and her crisis management team, who specialize in finding the missing people the rest of the world tends to overlook.
It is high-stakes, fast-paced, and I have become completely obsessed. Shanola is absolutely magnetic, carrying the intensity of the show while her character balances her own dark secrets. It is exactly the kind of gripping, well-acted drama that makes it easy to put the phone down and actually focus on the screen for an hour.
Endurance Absent Certainty
The week anchored itself with The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson, read purely for escapism in the world of the Cosmere. It was our March pick (I’m a little behind!) for our Conquer the Cosmere book club on Fable. As the conclusion to the original Mistborn trilogy, it follows Vin and Elend as they face the return of the deadly mists and the god of Ruin, bringing the epic fantasy heist story to a close.
But beyond the plot, this isn’t a story concerned with the ‘easy win.’ It’s an exploration of sustained, compounding pressure and what it actually means to keep moving forward when there is zero confirmation that the outcome will justify the effort. Moving without certainty isn’t recklessness; it’s the definition of discipline. It’s the ‘Mountain’ standing firm even when the ‘Wind’ is screaming that the effort is futile.
Final Thoughts
If you do not decide where your attention goes, the algorithm will happily decide for you. Not because it hates you, but because it’s efficient and you are a data point. The cost of this passive living isn’t just a few lost hours; it is a gradual, polite displacement of your own soul. You lose authorship by degrees, usually while you’re busy looking at a video of someone else’s cat.
Reclaiming your attention is a series of small, repeatable decisions that reestablish your internal authority. It means noticing what you allow in and realizing that not everything deserves your focus just because it’s loud. It means selecting inputs that reinforce the person you are becoming rather than the one you are trying to escape. What emerges isn’t perfection, but something far more stable: a sense of internal ground that doesn’t shift every time your phone pings.
