Hey, everyone! Fed up with your ridiculous procrastinating? Don’t worry, this article will tell you how to stop once and for all.
“Most of the tech industry is designed to turn you into a vegetable. They invite you to click on things until you click ads, and then they try to make you click ads until you click buy. Since many of us work on the screen, it can be confusing to discern between consumption and production. Here is a guideline:
- No one came back from YouTube feeling fresh and energized.
- No one peeled out motivated and happy after two hours of scrolling through Instagram.
- No one ever got inspired to finish things up after a Netflix Bonanza.
- Buying some stuff online is not very productive. It’s consuming.
Hang on.
I can’t comment on Instagram; I don’t use it. But I most have definitely come back from YouTube feeling fresh and energized; I most definitely have been inspired to finish things up after a Netflix Bonanza, and I most definitely have been productive through buying things online.
Take YouTube; it never occurred to this person that someone might genuinely be inspired by what they see there. Or, in my case, use it as a proper research tool. Which I do, endlessly. You only have to read my articles on here to know how useful people’s uploads are to me on Dirty Feed; here’s a particularly good example.
Or how about having a “Netflix Bonanza”? Well, there’s a loaded phrase if ever I heard one. So let’s replace it with the rather more normal phrase “watching television”. Now we have the phrase “No one ever got inspired to finish things up after watching television”, which is a self-evidently ludicrous phrase. As though television can’t be inspiring. As though television hasn’t inspired most of the writing on this site. It’s the same old “television is mindless” stuff, all dressed up for a new generation. There are times when I have watched some TV, and not been able to resist the urge to immediately go to my laptop and start writing about it.
As for buying things online? Bang go all the books I’ve bought which have been vital while researching one of the most popular things I’ve ever written, then. Writing that article took the purchase of four books, none of which I could easily access any other way.
Indeed, discerning between “consumption and production” is difficult at best. So much of the writing I do here involves both. I consume in order to create. The two are entirely intertwined. Consumption here is being painted as entirely passive, and I really don’t think that is the case at all.
But the further I get into the article, the more I blink in confusion. Here are some things which have apparently “never ignited any meaningful action”:
- Discussing with strangers
Discussing things with strangers has lead to endless improvements and corrections to the articles on this site.
- Reading the comments
- Reacting to comments
Comments on here have lead to endless improvements and corrections to the articles on this site.
- Reading tweets
- Liking tweets
Tweets have… fill in the rest of this sentence for yourself.
Some of my best work here has involved reading tweets and comments. Without them, the site would be far less worthwhile, as I wrote about recently. “Reading tweets” was responsible for a major update and correction to one of the most popular pieces I’ve written all year.
Now, if you want to argue that writing this site isn’t “meaningful action”, then that’s fine. I feel awkward making the argument that it is, because if you’re a certain kind of person, you’re conditioned into thinking that’s arrogant and self-important. But this site has given enough joy to people over the years for me to confidently state that what I do here is, in fact, meaningful. And all the above would be absolutely terrible advice for me, and I think many others.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be careful. I presume what the writer is trying to say is that you should be careful about distractions. I get it, I truly do. But trying to entirely silo off “consumption” and “production” is not the way to make your case. It’s not that simple. Nowhere near so, in fact.
And if you truly think that watching television is always that passive, or that reading tweets is always that pointless, I would suggest that you aren’t very good at either watching television, or reading tweets.