So, while observing recently, I've been noticing something that has been catching my attention.
There is quite a very big shift on how we are living our life today compared to before. It's like we are all caught up on fast things these days. We want quick notifications, we want quick videos, quick messages and endless scrolling of short information.
I admit that I've all been there too. We have all caught up and our phone has been the easiest distraction. We love to jump from one place to another. The other day I tried sitting down trying to read a book for a long hour but what I found out I struggled to focus.
As I said, I was losing my focus. I could not stay focused for some minutes to read because I was already used to so much distraction in my life and getting quick information. I know that was a very hard moment and something dawned on me. My mind kept wondering and looking for something new to engage on instead of focusing. That got me thinking.
We are now in a society where fewer people have attention to even read or focus more deeply to write thoughtful things or give time to create something meaningful or writing down something meaningful. This has been a very big problem to our society of today now. I remember when I used to lose myself when I wanted to write long articles or novels.
Every word, every idea was just in my mind. There was something that was so magical about it like this moment where I would pen down a single sentence and that could lead to more words and more creativity.
That could allocate for many moments of time but it's like now we are training ourselves to just skim through things, jot down things, get a glimpse of everything and a piece of information without going into details, without allowing it to sink in, without allowing ourselves to absorb all this. And this is not just about reading. It's more of a reflective skills which takes time to cultivate. And this mental stillness, we are losing it.
I have to catch myself, jotting down thoughts just to keep up with all the pace of everything that's happening. And this is not just about everything. I see this everywhere. Friends, you cannot just sit to even watch a movie again without checking their phones. Colleagues, you cannot just read for a few minutes without being distracted or going or talking about other things.
We are just trading depth now for speed. We want everything fast. We don't want stress. We want to make everything fast. There is no deep thinking again in our society. Even our writing skills have declined because of some short form of words, everything.
And this is making it hard to understand ourselves, each other. Because even in relationships, we just want the surface of it. It's not going deeper. We try to connect more. But here is the thing. I don't think it's too late for us to do all these things. Maybe we can cultivate the discipline to cover times for us to begin to bring back our mental health.
I could remember last week I spent hours writing some essays without distractions. I was writing some ideas without allowing myself to be distracted by anything. Just me, myself, my book, and my pen. It was not just a test to post or anything, but just for reflections like this.
Sometimes it might be messy at first, but at least I'm making progress. I can do all this. We just have to reclaim this focus back. We have to keep reading. We have to keep writing deeply. We have to start thinking deeply instead of getting a glimpse of all these things.
We are losing ourselves so we should bring ourselves back into our deep thoughts mode.
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