I am angry. There will be swearing. I am trying to change your mind.
I was once given some advice on charging money for things. There are only 2 prices — what it costs, and free.
From the consumer side of the equation “if I’m not paying for it, what is it costing me”, means that you could be loosing more than your money.
The past few months I’ve fixated on this concept. I want complete control over what is allowed to have my attention.
Anything that tries to shift my attention without my consent I’m taking as a personal insult.
My family sat down to watch curling replays on Peacock for the Olympics. What follow may be familiar.
On Apple TV I pick the curling replay I want to watch on the Peacock App:
If you pause the match at any point (say to look at the house or look at signs in the crowd) the paused frame does not persist, rather an ad takes over the screen obscuring the paused frame.
If you swipe to go back 30 secs to watch a crazy shot, you are blessed with yet another 120 seconds of ads.
To get an hour of sport in, I’m forced to gag down 18-20min of drug commercials, beer ads, oddly sexual laundry detergent skits, insurance ads with celebrities showing up to help, or sports betting. That is a 1 part ad to 3 parts content ratio of the time spent.
This is made worse because all of these ads are a complete waste:
Now I am sure Peacock or these advertisers would have a few rebuttals:
My response to all of this is…
Get fucked.
Fuck timelines, fuck feeds, fuck algorithms, fuck ads, fuck you building a profile on me so your data analyst can figure out how to increase my cart by 23%.
When something is free we should question the cost of it, because it is not free. It costs your attention. Our attention should be sacred, and valuable beyond any amount of money, guard it.
When something is easy, who benefits? Why is it so easy to have this thing?
The curling match is free because you have to give 20 min of your attention to a poorly targeted marketing campaigns.
In 20 mins you can: meditate, make dinner, walk a mile, read a chapter of a book, clean a room, write a journal entry, play a card game, sketch a bird, learn a song on a guitar, take a nap, pet your dog, help your kid with homework, call a friend, take a shower, stare at the wall, take a shit — all of which I posit are better than watching 20 mins of advertisements.
When you sum all the media that you hit in a day, you are losing at least a full hour of your day to ads. That’s 20 days a year. This is likely worse if you use social media (since most of the posts you see are also paid for, and I would argue 100% of what you see is meant to keep your attention indefinitely).
What could you do with 480 more hours a year?
Human sacrifice, bloodletting, laudanum, cigarettes, leaded gasoline, high-fructose corn syrup, scrolling. Things that humanity eventually decided are not worth the destruction they bring. I will even submit that some of these things may have been necessary steps in our growth as a species to the scale we have reached, but each must be outgrown.
I see this lack of control over attention as this generation’s vice. I have decided to treat all social media as radioactive. I assume all of it is controlled by ad dollars or political rage bait to keep me there to gain tracking data to sell ads to future me.
Be careful what you make easy and what is default behavior.
Work harder to make your priorities easy, not someone else’s.
The rest of the world is working their butts off to make it easy for you to do what they want. Be ruthless about how you spend your time and your attention. Don’t waste another second on letting others decide how you spend your attention.
Find your own path through this world. Watch, learn, read, cook, eat, walk, make, think, rest, play.
Please do anything else with your time other than scroll and doze into the marketing abyss, be intentional with your attention.