You need to have a big ego to survive in today's world.
I will explain why that is and give you a question to ask yourself every day, multiple times a day, that will help you not become another casualty of the silent war we are in.
We live in the age of one of the greatest wars humanity has been in so far: the war on attention.
Sure, you don’t hear about it on the news, there is no talk about the casualties, and you don't see any bombs dropping.
But make no mistake, this war is real. And every single day, there are fewer humans engaged in life and more brainless zombies with 3-second attention spans walking around in this world.
This is how serious the situation is:
Just by the fact that you are reading Existential Espresso and are interested in the topics I write about, it means you are not the average TikTok scroller and have a decent attention span. But even for someone like you, I needed to start my essay with a somewhat controversial statement. And as I'm writing this, I'm trying to make it as easy to read as possible because I know how many temptations there are for you to stop reading and open another app.
From the moment you wake up until you close your eyes to sleep, multibillion-dollar corporations are competing for your attention.
They have all the money they need and teams of the world's brightest nerds building algorithms to get you addicted to their platform or product.
I say it’s from the moment you wake up until you close your eyes to sleep, but even that doesn’t paint the full picture.
They are fighting for your attention so aggressively that they don’t even let you go to sleep.
People are literally becoming unable to put down their phones and go to sleep of their own will; they scroll until their eyes get so tired that they cannot help but close them.
In a world like this, to survive, let alone thrive, you have to have some ego.
Here is what exactly I mean by that:
If you don't want to become a brainless zombie like most people today, I challenge you to ask one question when you notice yourself glued to the screen.
Let’s say you are scrolling on social media or you're stuck on YouTube, and you find yourself consuming content that does absolutely nothing for you but create distraction. It's nothing educational, or at least nothing relevant to your growth.
Ask this question:
Who is this online creator for me to give them the most precious resources I have: time and attention? Who are they to deserve that?
It might sound cringe, but I invite you to take this seriously and even ask this question out loud the first couple of times.
If you ask this question when you catch yourself mindlessly consuming content, you will find that the answer is: they are no one.
With all due respect for them as human beings, they are no one, or at least should be no one in your life.
Unless they are somehow contributing to your growth as an individual, they are no one.
I said that you need a big ego to survive in this war because I am aware of how egotistical and narcissistic this question sounds to someone who is not used to it.
But, in reality, I am not asking you to become some self-centered douchebag.
I am just asking you to have some self-respect.
Someone who is creating content completely irrelevant to your life doesn’t deserve your time and attention. Or at least they don't deserve as much of our time and attention as we tend to give them.
At the end of the day, it comes down to what you want your life to look like.
If you are not satisfied going to sleep knowing that you spent most of your day staring at a screen and getting almost nothing out of it, then I suggest you take my advice.
All online creators, including myself, are concerned with their own growth. Some are more concerned with the growth of their audience size, some with the growth of engagement, some with the growth of income, and some with the growth of the impact they make.
So you might as well start being concerned with your own growth and ask yourself if we are contributing to it.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for your time and attention.
Free Resources:
My free ebook: The Lost Art of Reading
Paid Resources:
The Art of Showing Up: A Clear and Practical Method for Mastering Consistency
The Gold Pill: Timeless Ideas for a Life Worth Living
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Amen. Seeing my activity levels on apps can be startling on days when I don’t have work to focus on. We need to break the cycle
Preach. Attention at the highest level is like worship