After reading "Deep Work" by Cal Newport, and revisiting "The Social Dilemma" after, the two ideas that come together from these two pieces of work are the following:
The distraction machine that is social media and most technology, on the surface at least, provides very little real value per person. The attention concentration of billions of superficial and unremarkable human signals, coalesce into one very overpriced and sub-par experience.
Repeated, and replicated over and over again.
There's nothing new on social media, the emails and notifications of the same tired half-arse of a human experience, are not anything we haven't seen a gazillion times before. Sure, the colours and resolution of this clickbait and outrage-inducer is of a higher, sharper quality, but the content- the subject matter? Zzzzzzzz.
The alternative...
is the the product of a long, deep, disconnected and undistracted space in time that involves your brain churning over, working, frustrating, boring and if we're lucky "enlightening", to bring forth something, anything that may add value to another persons life. And at the very least has added the value of resilience, perseverence, knowledge, mental growth and prosperity to the practitioner of the exercise.
We think the flashy, fast, on-demand track of social and technology is bearing valuable fruit, because its producing something every 50ms. But I would argue that "something" isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
Maybe we reverse the time/space equation we've mapped out for ourselves that fills up as much space per unit time, and just "space out" instead.
Do nothing, must definitely be better than doing "crap".