Digital Nicotine

The illustrious art of doing nothing

Jason Chang

A faint white glow emanates from the thin brick in my hand, my portal to a whole new world of infinite possibilities. Despite my best efforts, I have increasingly found this ritual bookending my days: eyes glued to a screen, mind-numbing content flashing past at a hyperactive pace as my telomeres slowly shorten and the Earth hurdles onwards around the Sun. I never imagined I would one day join the ranks of screenagers, but here I am, a growing victim of the doom scroll. And I’m sure more of you can relate to than perhaps you’d like to admit. 

When astronauts sent to space see the Earth for the first time, everything they have ever known fitting neatly in their field of vision in a sphere they can cover with the palm of their hand, it is said they experience an indescribable paradigm shift. A transcendental enlightenment that forever changes the way they experience the world. This phenomenon has been termed the “Overview Effect”. Recently, online blogger Thomas Flight coined his own variant, the “Digital Overview Effect”, pointing out that over the course of a single, caffeine-fueled doom scroll session, we may very well be bombarded with more novel ideas and concepts and people and places than some of our ancestors may have been exposed to in their entire lifetime. 

And it’s true. In an ever-expanding virtual realm where virtually nothing is ever deleted and new post-grad influencers are adding their voices to the chorus every day, the sheer amount of information on the Internet is near incomprehensible. One could not consume all of the content available if they tried. Yet more is not always better. An inexhaustible source of quick dopamine hits keeps many of us ensnared, paralyzed by the sheer amount of choices of what to do next, while our expanding social media merely feeds us with a million more photoshopped lives to compare ourselves against. Worst of all, this sudden shift in access to information has left our minds unequipped to handle the change. Human brains aren’t built to be stimulated twenty-four seven, and our brains are left overloaded trying to process everything, everywhere, all at once. The truth is, we need periods of inactivity. We require lapses of boredom, of idleness. But when there’s always a new YouTube video to watch, a new Gordon Ramsay Masterclass to follow, and a new coding bootcamp to work through, it’s hard to find time to just relax.

That’s a major problem. As psychologists have found, many of our most important ideas are generated during periods of idle mind-wandering, when we’re not actively working on the task at hand. What’s more, experiments have shown that learning and processing itself requires the presence of “sharp wave ripples”, brain patterns that exclusively occur when our brains are “idle”. Beyond all of the scientific jargon, it simply leaves many of us just feeling fatigued and overwhelmed. With a billion voices screaming for our attention every second from the moment we wake up, we’re left drowning in a bottomless sea of content and dopamine, wrung dry in our new economy of attention. 

See, for the first time, our daily dilemma is not searching for something interesting to do, it’s letting yourself do nothing at all—and that is so much harder. With anything you could ever dream and everything you never could have imagined constantly at your fingertips, the most difficult thing is to do nothing at all. To resist the call of ecosystems and algorithms carefully designed by corporations to tap into our basest biological mechanism and allow ourselves time to rest. 

And while I still find myself sneaking in some Instagram Reels between homework assignments from time to time, I’d like to think I am getting better at resisting the allure of the Internet. The Internet dangles promises of showing me everything, but as Albert Camus once wrote, “You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetic justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.” So tonight as I lay down to rest, I will extinguish that magical portal I hold in my hand and let my mind wander as I watch the shadows dance across my bedroom walls, allowing myself to take a breath and simply exist.