Scroll Span
My attention has come to my attention recently. Do I think good thoughts? Are they runny, solid or mildly scrambled? What’s your scroll <span>?
A man walks into a bar and asks, “Why do I no longer think fully formed thoughts?” but instead of answering, the bartender points a gun to his face. The man says thank you and leaves the bar satisfied. Why did the man leave the bar satisfied even though he didn't get what he asked for? What was his purpose?
How we fulfil our mental stimulation is rapidly shifting. Now, more than ever, we watch the experiences of others rather than feel our own. Like experience proxies. It’s not as rewarding, but that’s made up for by the volume you can absorb in a short amount of time. Why create art or explore the world when you can just scroll the dopamine wheel? And yes, I’m overgeneralising (maybe). However, it’s an omnipresent feeeeeeling. Broken conversations and preoccupied dispositions are generally normal now. Ya really gotta rattle someone to get their attention.
I’ve noticed I can easily slip back into the virtual stream (Twitter is my crux). It feeeeeels like I’m learning and staying across important stuff. But am I? How much have I retained? Very little. In fact, when it’s something important, I often don’t read it; Instead, I knowingly participate in my own save-for-later fallacy loop.
Like an Atomic Habits aficionado, I’ve been recognising when I’m about to mindlessly scroll-it-up and instead use that as a trigger for something more productive. This is more regularly becoming writing, which has the opposite effect of social media. It puts me in active mode as opposed to passive. I’ve been leaning into Sunday Minutes as that outlet. It’s a discipline trade-off.
The Japanese phrase “Hara hachi bu” comes to mind:
A term meaning “Eat until you're 80% full.” It originated in the city of Okinawa, where people use this advice as a way to control their eating habits. Interestingly, they have one of the lowest rates of illness from heart disease, cancer and stroke, and a fairly long life expectancy.
In some ways, it’s related. I could shovel my fat face with endless memes, hacks and links, or I can consciously restrict it (I disagree with the theory of abandoning it altogether).
Free idea: An AI that does all your mindless scrolling across networks and consolidates the highlights that would matter to you once a day. Sad.
TWIL: You can create seamless tiles in Figma quite easily. The Cosmic Egg is a thing, and there are religious myths about its origin, the Finnish version is my fav:
The goddess of the air, Ilmatar, longed to have a son. To achieve this, she and the East Wind make love until she conceives Vainamoinen, the child of the wind. However, she was not able to give birth to her child. A certain eagle swooped down and impregnated her: as a result, six cosmic eggs were birthed or laid, as well as an iron egg. The eagle took these eggs for himself and protected them by sitting on them, but this came with sitting on Ilmatar as well. Upon the movement of the air goddess, they rolled into the sea and the shell broke: the fragments formed heaven, earth, the sun, moon, stars, and (from the iron egg) a thundercloud.
I’ve been trying to sport my marketing cap more and came across The Game podcast. It feels practical. In this episode, he drops the concept of “leading metrics”:
Track leading metrics instead of the lagging metrics. Lagging metrics are what happened? These are the output. The real things to track what you were doing to create the output
This is a novel way of focusing on the right things and ties well with the theme for the week, “creating” rather than “consuming.” Another concept I liked was “whisper, tease, shout.” Don’t start with “shout.” Effective marketing is a long-lead game; start the clues early and with subtlety.
WHISPER, TEASE, SHOUT™
