Attention Grab

My spiritual elimination diet

I deleted all my apps.

It was an impulse decision. I recently (finally) deleted Instagram from my phone. Shortly thereafter, I deleted every app with a scrollable feed.

At 3am, after my 3 year old daughter woke me up, in a time when I need to scrap and claw for every wink of sleep, I found myself 30 minutes into an infinite scroll. Angry with myself, I held my finger on the app, and without hesitation hit delete. Like most impulse decisions, it was years in the making.

What I’ve learned since surprised me. I was sure there would be some kind of withdrawal and cravings. I knew there would be phantom pocket notifications and I assumed I’d find myself staring at a home screen, unsure why I went there or what I intended to do. All of this was true, but the complexity and persistence of the craving ran deeper than I expected.

After I deleted Instagram I found myself doing the exact same half vacant dead eyed scrolling on Reddit - App deleted. Then X - deleted. Then Substack. Then I migrated to scrolling news apps. Deleted. Then Strava... what's wrong with me?!

A few weeks in, I’ve identified and labeled 3 distinct categories of craving that seem to be driving my behavior and impulses - Social, screen, and stream. And one category of aversion - Stillness

Screen

Raw screen-time. The deep addiction to staring at an illuminated rectangle filled with shiny objects. The most basic and reptilian, and also the most persistent. Even on a phone absent of alluring apps, I found myself scrolling randomly through photos, opening apps for no reason. Why is the calculator app open?

This is close to physical addiction. 3 weeks in, the impulse is slightly waning but far from gone. I can now approach it with more mindfulness and less impulsivity - also less anger at myself when I catch myself craving it or doing it. I just note how silly it is and move on.

Social

This feels like the most real and abiding of the craving categories. Though most of the "connection" we get from scrolling is para-social - the single-sided interaction of looking at other's lives and feeling connected. Without the endless stream of IG stories to fill the void, I felt out of touch, floating, on an island.

Last week I had a week filled with wonderful community time - a family bike ride for lunch in town filled with chance encounters, a ski date with friends, mountain bike rides with neighbors, a neighborhood party, visits from family and friends from out of town. Still, somehow, I found myself reaching for my phone at any tiny break in conversation or moment of quiet. The urge to reach for the phone and check my notifications while actually spending time with others whose company I genuinely enjoy illustrates just how powerful and pernicious our addictions to social media have become

It's helping to continually to remind myself how much more important, powerful, and fulfilling in-person connection is. I’m trying to better cultivate those opportunities.

I also had to remind myself that I LIKE alone time. I just hadn't realized how MUCH alone time I was filling with para-social behavior.

Stream

This was the most surprising of the craving categories and maybe the most powerful - The addiction to inbound information. News, headlines, memes, stories, shorts. It's the low level dope-amine of "learning" about new things but without actually learning much of anything. The feeling knowing what's happening in the world without any real engagement with the ideas... Just pure inbound flow.

This feels like the root of so much of our societal strain. A deep addiction to half learning headlines and then feeling informed, coupled with a degraded attention.

The only remedy I've found is good old fashion mindfulness. Noticing the craving. Naming it. Giving it grace and space to exist without feeding it. Dispassionately but curiously examining it - how does it appear in my body? What words am I telling myself about it? What images am I conjuring in my mind? What am I actually looking for? Often, by the time I've given the object of attention a close enough look, the craving has passed.

Stillness

I’ve been somewhat surprised to find that I feel a real gap in my life without these apps. I think I miss the distraction—especially when life feels hard. The infinite scroll and semi or para social connection is a masking drug - a portal away from difficult thoughts or emotions. The drive to scroll is an aversion to stillness, where these feelings pool and swirl.

It was always a romantic notion that if I just stop so much scrolling, I’ll find better focus, more time, more creativity. Some of that is true, but I’m learning it takes work to actively fill that gap - or to not fill it and re-learn to swim in the waters of anxiety, worry, regret, or boredom.

I’m sharing all this knowing we’re all struggling, to some degree, with the chaos and unwanted distraction of all this. I hope these insights are helpful in some way.

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Stories You Can Touch

The vast majority of what I create only lives in abstract 1’s and 0’s swimming in the circuits of some remote computer. It always feels rare and wonderful to touch the work, to share physical space with it - on a wall or in a magazine.

I was thrilled to collaborate with Onus IV recently to tell the stories behind some of the imagery on their walls.

I plan on making more of these little mini stories. I’d love any feedback, criticism, or encouragement. (first thought is I should edit them for landscape as well as IG stories)

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Something New (and Weird) Is Coming

I’ve been quietly working on a new series for this newsletter—something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.

I want to share the bizarre, intuition bending, illuminating findings of peer reviewed, replicable experiments that show us we’re not seeing what we think we’re seeing. Or choosing what we think we’re choosing. Or even being what we think we are.

This new series is short-form and high-impact. Each post takes one experiment, illusion, or cognitive glitch and unpacks what it might say—not just about perception, but about the deeper machinery behind consciousness, identity, and experience.

• Another “you” inside you seems to appear when we cut the connection between brain hemispheres.

• Our brains change the color of pixels before our eyes.

• How can someone hear speech through the skin on their back?

It’s early. I’m still workshopping the concepts, the style, and the title (The Unreliable Narrator, is currently in the lead)

My hope is that this series becomes a kind of antidote to the noise. Short, easy to read. But full of ideas worth sitting with. Little moments of awe that leave you thinking differently about your own experience—and about the world humming quietly behind it. I’m really excited to start putting these out soon. Feedback, ideas, encouragement, or discouragement welcome.

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