A one-track mind is an idiom used to describe someone who thinks, talks, or cares about only one particular subject or goal, ignoring everything else.
I was just watching footage of the flooding and landslides in Nepal and how horrifically powerful nature is. And the more we screw up the environment, the more volatile it is going to get.
Just before watching that, I was reading a story about Meta giving up on defending its case against US states about purposefully making their platform addictive, and agreeing to an 18 billion settlement paid out over ten years. That is nothing for them. And, they will only pay the full amount if other platforms like TikTok and YouTube implement similar measures and pay similar amounts.
But these two stories got me thinking again about what the problem is with news and the platform feeds, because they are very much unrelated. Sure, relationships can be made about the state of society, how we consume, behave and treat the environment and how it all has an effect - but for me right now, sitting here in this chair - the stories are unrelated.
Yet, both of them take my attention.
And this I think is one of the key problems with the way we consume information today, because it is short content that skips from one topic to another, without those two data points being related to each other. One piece grabs our attention for a moment, and then the next piece grabs it, with no connection between the two. Just two random bits of information, no sinew or story between.
While no one truly has a one-track mind, someone who is very interested in a single topic tends to be a relative expert in it and surrounds themselves with information that broadens and deepens their knowledge. They not only think about it, but seek out supportive content. They become hyper-focused on what they are interested in and stick with it, over and over again.
However, people who consume a lot of short-form, random content like on the "social" feeds have interests that grab their attention from moment to moment, pulling it this way and that, but never really fleshing out any depth. It is like the people who used to read only headlines from the newspaper, and then believe they knew what it was all about. Except, very little of what people are consuming is actually relevant to their daily life at all, it is just filler for avoidance of discomfort or boredom.
It could be though that instead of being hyper-focused on one topic, what is happening is we are micro-focused on many topics, with each giving us the dopamine hit we crave from the things we enjoy and are interested in. Except, watch people's faces as they scroll and tell me, do you see enjoyment and interest? No. They are focused, but they aren't enjoying the process and often appear more in pain than anything else, perhaps as they scroll through drivel in the hope to find a little bit of something that makes them laugh.
The news itself has changed a lot in the last few decades especially, but it has been happening for a while. I always imagine news starting as a bulletin board at the church a few hundred years ago, where a note was left for Mary who was unable to attend, that there are wolves roaming about so watch the cattle. It was all pretty relevant to their life, because news didn't travel far very fast, and there was no point sharing what wasn't relative. It had to be "new" and useful.
But now, with the speed of communication, we can get videos of a landslide in Nepal almost while it is happening, as well as the result from a court case in the US, news that Tim Curry died, and the results of a sporting match simultaneously. But when it comes to our daily lives right now, none of these things are really relevant or will have an impact on us directly. The only people impacted directly, are those on location. But how much of what we consume is actually from where we are and relevant to who we are, what we are interested in, and what we want to do with our lives?
We should be a little more focused on what we want to accomplish, how we are going to accomplish it, and doing what we need to make it happen. Right?
It is good to have a broad understanding of the world, but I do not think it is healthy to have no focus within our daily lives on what we are looking to do with the potential we have. This doesn't mean we can't consume, but perhaps we should have a little more of a one-track mind and identify what we want to do and surround ourselves with the content that helps us achieve that end, or at least, take that journey.
For a long time I have written and talked about just this topic, where I think we have to be careful with what we surround ourselves with, because we are what we eat. If we want to accomplish something, we need to design our environment to feed us what facilitates our actions toward that goal, and remove what doesn't as much as possible. Yet, it appears that instead of flooding ourselves with the right content, we are surrounding ourselves with unfocused and random pieces of information that do not create a coherent story, let alone clear action toward our goals.
No wonder we fail to meet our goals.
We don't have goals. Not real goals anyway. We want things and want to have more things, but we don't really solidify what that is going to look like, what needs to be done, or how we are going to get there. So, all the scrolling of news and feeds doesn't set off the trigger that we are doing the wrong thing to meet our wants and needs. But if we were to actually surround ourselves with the content that does help us, we will be constantly reminded to stay focused.
Something, very few people seem to be able to do these days.
The feeds are not linear, they are not a story. They are an algorithm feeding random bits of information designed to keep us scrolling, instead of doing what makes us satisfied.
Taraz
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