I often find myself swiping endlessly through Facebook. Past the memes that people tag each other in, the recipe videos that look much nicer than they are, and the targeted ads that seem to think I'm some sort of amateur cryptocurrency trader. Then I stop myself and realise what a phenomenal waste of time this action of scrolling is.
What terrifies me is how effectively this format caters to our desire for stimulation and expending minimal resources. This is such a paradox because in western society there are way more resources to go around than we need. Capitalism in its current form is an economy of supply. Essentially, we go "just produce all the things first, and there will always be someone out there willing to buy it". And thus, advertising was born. Get this: companies sell excess products and services by advertising, and with the excess profit they buy more advertising. This circular logic makes it hard to think outside the box for an alternative.
To be clear, I'm not blaming the companies or taking the moral high ground here. People will usually do what benefits them the most. However, the system is clearly sub-optimal and excessive at best, and detrimental to our standard of living at worst. The most important resource we are wasting in this process is our time. We spend more time working to produce the excess that we consume, and less time growing as human beings.
Let me take an example:
Suppose you're watching a drawing tutorial on social media. You're doing that for free but you're forced to watch ads too. You're paying with your time. Furthermore, someone out there put a lot of time and effort into making that ad to convince you to buy something you could probably do without. The artist who made the video also had to expend their own resources to make the video, and possibly paid so it could reach its target audience. Last but not least, the social media platform reaps all the rewards. Facebook takes everyone's cake and eats it for them.
If this dynamic was different, you could spend that time producing value of your own; and use that value to pay the artist directly. And I'm quite confident that everyone would enjoy their time more. Sadly, it's not that simple because monetising your value is very difficult. Everything is saturated with content that people are willing to pay to promote, even though your content may be better. Therefore, the status quo crystallises as advertisement becomes the only way to compete.
Peace!
Milo
You raise a lot of good points here. Time is not only our most valuable possession, in many ways it is the only thing that we can ever actually claim to be our own. Unfortunately, as you mentioned, most of our time is probably wasted. We often do jobs that do not give us a sense of mastery or autonomy and are therefore, largely meaningless to our lives. Then to escape the frivolity of our existence, we waste our moments of freedom by zoning out to cheap entertainment. Nice post! Really makes me think
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Where do you draw the line between entertainment and art though? When I connect with a piece of music, my time never feels wasted. Entertainment, on the other hand, is more of a product to be consumed and promptly discarded. However, the definitions are not so clear cut and it depends more on how we interact with art and entertainment.
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Yes I completely agree. I was speaking very "matter of fact" and overgeneralizing to get my point across. I agree though that it is not all wasted time and even that not all work is meaningless. I was thinking more in terms of what you were writing about - the mundane social media scroll in which an hour can pass without us even opening an article to read it or watching a video in its entirety. Art, in all its forms, can be very meaning and influential though. It can inspire and provoke.
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