9:18 PM
Each coming year I seem to be bombarded by more and more attention-preying services, every one promising the same thing: to satiate curiosity, drive away boredom, and fulfil social desires. This promise is nearly always left undelivered. My peers have repeatedly echoed this sentiment: Scrolling Instagram reels or binging YouTube or playing mobile games always feels good in the moment, but after the fact feels like nothing more than a colossal waste of time.
These activities fit into a larger class of I'll call "truly unproductive actions", defined loosely by their tendency to leave behind imperceptibly small (and sometimes outright zero) positive long-term impact on the self. Not all forms of casual unproductivity are truly unproductive. For example, most people would consider staying up late texting friends to be a poor use of one's time. However, maintaining interpersonal communication is a genuinely important part of social relationships - without regular communication, friends drift away. This of course does not speak to what point too much texting becomes too much, but that is a question of scale, not existence.
...tags: life