As the semester progressed, I noticed that it is harder for me to concentrate on something. I started to skip parts of a paragraph and miss information in the process. Whether when I would like to review part of my class material, or just write some new feature in my project, I started to procrastinate and progress started to stall. This is kind of strange because back in January I was able to do a full rewrite of the Portable code base. Something has changed my brain, and it somehow slipped through unnoticed.

Just when the doubt kept rolling and the troubleshoot was starting, I picked up the phone again, and that was an a-ha moment: the culprit was the misuse of my iPhone rather something else. Checking the screen time statistics reflected that: it paints a slowly, but surely growing pattern of usage of a specific type of application: SNS as it reflects an increasing domination of my attention pie.

The pattern of mine, of which unconsciously picks up a phone and fire up Twitter (now X) or other SNS apps can be classified as path dependence. It is a phenomenon where past events and experiences influences influences future decisions. In this case, it is a perfect descriptor: I figured out doom scrolling on SNS can help me kill some time previously, and the more instances I fire up an SNS while idle, the dependence somehow gets more intense because it is such stable, available anywhere and more importantly, plain addictive. The loop starts running. After such prolong period of time it developed to a symptom where I would keep staring at the screen instead of doing something I actually enjoy, becoming a soulless, never stopping, content consuming machine.

What happened is that , with the boom of UGC (with or without AI), the algorithm prefers videos over text or even images because they are fundamentally more attractive and does not even require one to even get a grasp about what’s going on. Combined with the aforementioned path dependence creates a powerful effect that makes your brain rust.

For now, I’m going to arbitrary limit my screen time spent on the phone. We’re going to see how that performs presumably soon.