Stop clicking away. No stop! You didn't get the gist from the title. There is no gist to get. Stop it.
Stay here, right here. Over here. *Snaps* Hey! You good? You good?
Okay. Now here's what I have to say: your brain is a fat piece of shit. It's got excess blubber all over your cerebellum, and cellulite on your frontal lobe. Your brainstem gap is garbage.
The nice thing about brain-shaming people is that it's not a thing yet, so we haven't been thinkpieced into thinking it's a terrible thing to do.
Which is good, because it's not a terrible thing to do, either. It's actually a great thing to do. You should be thanking me for telling you about your frontal lobe cellulite.
Here's what I mean: most muscles don't actually matter. In the grand scheme of things, having nice abs or sweet deltoids is kind of an outdated thing in 2016. Sure it's nice for when you're moving or carrying home groceries or want to trick some intoxicated attractive person to let you put things in them. But since we're past the point where we need to worry about fistfighting bears, it's generally no longer giving you a real advantage at life
The only muscle that still matters is your brain, and we don't talk about working that out at all.
(If you're reading this and thinking "the brain isn't a muscle, it's an organ, DUH! No one cares. Follow the logic for two seconds.)
As someone with diagnosed and treated (kinda) ADHD, I can speak from some experience. ADHD is essentially when your brain becomes a little asshole who is completely spoiled by stimulation. Your brain develops very specific standards to what is stimulating, and if your brain is not stimulated by information--whether it's by a textbook, or a story from a work acquaintance, or doing 90 on a freeway, your brain will leave you and go do something else (mine oscillates between massive theories about humanity and Katy Perry songs).
You can be born with attention deficit problems, or they can develop later on. Unfortunately now, they seem to be developing at more rapid rates.
I don't need to tell you that your brain gets better and worse depending on what you do to it. There's obvious examples of things that fuck up your brain chemistry like concussions and meth, but there's also things we've all been through. We've all felt our brains become less tolerant of boredom as we surround ourselves with more opinions, boobies, and action movies. We all felt our attention spans waste away as we grew up on MTV and Michael Bay. That wasn't in your head. It really happened.
We've felt ourselves becomes more dependent on our phones as we've had them for longer and longer--not because we have that many friends, but because we now have stimulation in our pockets.
And let me be clear. I'm not about to go on some rant about how our phones separate us from the world. That's fucking dumb. We're using them to see what people are saying thousands of miles away and to respond to it. We're plenty connected.
The problem isn't that. The problem is our phones are another in a long line of items destroying our attention spans, and we don't seem to give a shit about it.
We laugh about our dwindling attention spans. We make jokes about how we can't stop looking at our phones, or how "lol I'm totally ADD--oh look a squirrel!" (WHICH IS HILARIOUS AND HAS BEEN EVERY TIME FOR THE PAST 30 YEARS PEOPLE HAVE MADE THAT JOKE. HAHA--LOOK AT YOU, COMMENTING IRONICALLY ON THE THING YOU JUST SAID. HA, HA, HA! TERRIFIC!).
And at no point do we seem to acknowledge, "Hey wait, this is really fucking terrible."
We never seem to remember that our attention spans are incredibly, vitally important. They're an absolutely massive part of our brain functioning, which is in turn a massive part of our life functioning.
Attention span gives you the ability to read a whole article, or to listen to what somebody says. It enables you to follow your own train of thought. You're able to actually perceive something close to what's really happening in the world instead of 3 second clips at a time.
You try to read an article about an important topic, but shit, like 4 words in a row were boring and you had to click away to a video. But God damn it. The video has an ad. So okay. You mute the video and check Twitter on your phone. You scroll, looking for accounts that you actually like to follow, scrambling desperately to find the dopamine hit of a good joke...and you do, and it feels great. But uh-oh! Someone didn't like the joke, and there's a Twitter war started, so you start looking at that, but then it makes you feel guilty, so you check out Facebook and--oh good God, why did you ever check out Facebook? There's nothing of value there. Just skip straight to Instagram, of course. Oh that bitch is 'shopping here bikini pics again. Everybody knows it. Ha.
Oh shit! My Youtube video already finished and autoplayed, and now for some reason it's footage of a beaver building a dam with death metal playing. Fuck, what were you even looking to watch in the first place? Let's just go back to that article, read two sentences besides the headline, use it to reinforce your opinion and call it a day.
A bad attention span you're unable to both take in information, and you're unable to figure out what any information actually means.
This means you're just walking around, reading headlines and assuming you know what they mean, and then motormouthing your opinion to whoever is unfortunate enough to be in the path of your uninformed nonsense.
And I hate to tell you, but that describes most people that I know. Our need for constant stimulation is snowballing in a hurry, and it's becoming an extremely widespread, devastating problem. But because it's not a drug, and it's kind of vague, and because we ultimately need our phones, and we even kind of need TV, it's not treated as the public health problem that it actually is.
And it is a public health problem. People are floundering idiots now, and I'm one of them. We're junkies wandering around, waiting for the next joke, the next observation, the next clickbait to force its way into our brains without much fuss, and as a result, the world itself knows less and talks more.
We need to start prioritizing this as the public health concern that it is. Our brains are all characters on My 600 Pound Life. We feed them all of the junk that they want, and we don't exercise them, and we need to do something about it before they get fused to the couch.
Shit right now, but it's on its way. Review the last one from Wp.com.
1) we think we know stuff based off of almost nothing.
2) This is a public health problem
3) Things we can do to use this.
4) Things we can do to combat the problem
Stay here, right here. Over here. *Snaps* Hey! You good? You good?
Okay. Now here's what I have to say: your brain is a fat piece of shit. It's got excess blubber all over your cerebellum, and cellulite on your frontal lobe. Your brainstem gap is garbage.
The nice thing about brain-shaming people is that it's not a thing yet, so we haven't been thinkpieced into thinking it's a terrible thing to do.
Which is good, because it's not a terrible thing to do, either. It's actually a great thing to do. You should be thanking me for telling you about your frontal lobe cellulite.
Here's what I mean: most muscles don't actually matter. In the grand scheme of things, having nice abs or sweet deltoids is kind of an outdated thing in 2016. Sure it's nice for when you're moving or carrying home groceries or want to trick some intoxicated attractive person to let you put things in them. But since we're past the point where we need to worry about fistfighting bears, it's generally no longer giving you a real advantage at life
The only muscle that still matters is your brain, and we don't talk about working that out at all.
(If you're reading this and thinking "the brain isn't a muscle, it's an organ, DUH! No one cares. Follow the logic for two seconds.)
As someone with diagnosed and treated (kinda) ADHD, I can speak from some experience. ADHD is essentially when your brain becomes a little asshole who is completely spoiled by stimulation. Your brain develops very specific standards to what is stimulating, and if your brain is not stimulated by information--whether it's by a textbook, or a story from a work acquaintance, or doing 90 on a freeway, your brain will leave you and go do something else (mine oscillates between massive theories about humanity and Katy Perry songs).
You can be born with attention deficit problems, or they can develop later on. Unfortunately now, they seem to be developing at more rapid rates.
I don't need to tell you that your brain gets better and worse depending on what you do to it. There's obvious examples of things that fuck up your brain chemistry like concussions and meth, but there's also things we've all been through. We've all felt our brains become less tolerant of boredom as we surround ourselves with more opinions, boobies, and action movies. We all felt our attention spans waste away as we grew up on MTV and Michael Bay. That wasn't in your head. It really happened.
We've felt ourselves becomes more dependent on our phones as we've had them for longer and longer--not because we have that many friends, but because we now have stimulation in our pockets.
And let me be clear. I'm not about to go on some rant about how our phones separate us from the world. That's fucking dumb. We're using them to see what people are saying thousands of miles away and to respond to it. We're plenty connected.
The problem isn't that. The problem is our phones are another in a long line of items destroying our attention spans, and we don't seem to give a shit about it.
We laugh about our dwindling attention spans. We make jokes about how we can't stop looking at our phones, or how "lol I'm totally ADD--oh look a squirrel!" (WHICH IS HILARIOUS AND HAS BEEN EVERY TIME FOR THE PAST 30 YEARS PEOPLE HAVE MADE THAT JOKE. HAHA--LOOK AT YOU, COMMENTING IRONICALLY ON THE THING YOU JUST SAID. HA, HA, HA! TERRIFIC!).
And at no point do we seem to acknowledge, "Hey wait, this is really fucking terrible."
We never seem to remember that our attention spans are incredibly, vitally important. They're an absolutely massive part of our brain functioning, which is in turn a massive part of our life functioning.
Attention span gives you the ability to read a whole article, or to listen to what somebody says. It enables you to follow your own train of thought. You're able to actually perceive something close to what's really happening in the world instead of 3 second clips at a time.
You try to read an article about an important topic, but shit, like 4 words in a row were boring and you had to click away to a video. But God damn it. The video has an ad. So okay. You mute the video and check Twitter on your phone. You scroll, looking for accounts that you actually like to follow, scrambling desperately to find the dopamine hit of a good joke...and you do, and it feels great. But uh-oh! Someone didn't like the joke, and there's a Twitter war started, so you start looking at that, but then it makes you feel guilty, so you check out Facebook and--oh good God, why did you ever check out Facebook? There's nothing of value there. Just skip straight to Instagram, of course. Oh that bitch is 'shopping here bikini pics again. Everybody knows it. Ha.
Oh shit! My Youtube video already finished and autoplayed, and now for some reason it's footage of a beaver building a dam with death metal playing. Fuck, what were you even looking to watch in the first place? Let's just go back to that article, read two sentences besides the headline, use it to reinforce your opinion and call it a day.
A bad attention span you're unable to both take in information, and you're unable to figure out what any information actually means.
This means you're just walking around, reading headlines and assuming you know what they mean, and then motormouthing your opinion to whoever is unfortunate enough to be in the path of your uninformed nonsense.
And I hate to tell you, but that describes most people that I know. Our need for constant stimulation is snowballing in a hurry, and it's becoming an extremely widespread, devastating problem. But because it's not a drug, and it's kind of vague, and because we ultimately need our phones, and we even kind of need TV, it's not treated as the public health problem that it actually is.
And it is a public health problem. People are floundering idiots now, and I'm one of them. We're junkies wandering around, waiting for the next joke, the next observation, the next clickbait to force its way into our brains without much fuss, and as a result, the world itself knows less and talks more.
We need to start prioritizing this as the public health concern that it is. Our brains are all characters on My 600 Pound Life. We feed them all of the junk that they want, and we don't exercise them, and we need to do something about it before they get fused to the couch.
Shit right now, but it's on its way. Review the last one from Wp.com.
1) we think we know stuff based off of almost nothing.
2) This is a public health problem
3) Things we can do to use this.
4) Things we can do to combat the problem
