This blogpost is a stream of consciousness spinning around the traps of the options provided by computers and smartphones. If you do not want to read a long-format, inside-my-mind version of things, here are my main points in a short version. But I dare you to spend a bit more time, to answer the questions at the end of the text and engage in a conversation.
Main points
1. The internet and digital tools are both powerful and dangerously distracting.
While digital devices linked to the internet and with all the apps and options offer efficient and wonderful opportunities for connection, learning, and productivity, they also come with a constant stream of interruptions and temptations. These distractions often derail focus and erode the core purpose behind using the technology in the first place.
2. Superstimuli overwhelm our natural instincts and reduce our ability to choose consciously.
Referencing Superstimuli by Niclas Brendborg, a book I just binge-read, I talk about how modern life bombards us with exaggerated versions of what we’re biologically drawn to—leading to overstimulation, desensitisation, and reduced well-being. This manipulation affects everything from food and media to technology and communication. And more.
4. We need awareness, boundaries, and authenticity to regain control.
The solution isn’t abandoning technology but using it with intention. This includes recognising when we’re being pulled off track, returning to simple tools like pen and paper, and resisting the push toward spending MORE time with the devices, using them for MORE things. The productivity trap really is a trap. Most importantly, we must become better role models—especially for the younger generation—by showing what conscious digital use looks like.
5. The teenager, the parent and the electronics.
See, the main idea here is: we all get pulled into this by superstimuli, but the in-built spend-more-time mechanisms in all of the devices, and by the distractions. Somehow we lose control, and we lose it fast. In many different ways. If we want to form solid opinions on how our children use their devices and how they spend their time, we need to beware of how we ourselves are affected by the way this whole circus is actually flowing.
And here comes the actual text — the stream of consciousness, the nuanced, in real life and poetic version of what I am saying here. I dare you to read it without fancy subheaders luring you in and beautiful pictures for every 3 lines :)
I sometimes feel the computer is a self-sustaining-eternal-life-self-feeding-forever-going-kind of machine. It is not just a tool — it is a cycle, constantly generating new reasons for me to stay online. To use it a bit more. To keep going. To add another way, another app, another task. Give it another go. Spend a bit more time. Be more invested. Read a bit more. Try again. It endlessly justifies itself, endlessly convinces me I need it.
It is often a distraction. It is full of elements eating my time. My focus. My ability to focus. My main points.
My humanity?
Even as I am writing this, only two sentences in, I did several things: I turned off Grammarly, the tool I use to help me write correct English, and I flipped over my phone, as the no-notification setting somehow still allows for the screen to sometimes light up and distract the corner of my eye.
This is AFTER I spent the first 20 minutes in front of the machine doing “little things,” even though I sat down to write a stream of consciousness, a note on how this works and feels, and some points on the parental worries on kids and electronics. It was not unnecessary little things, but for sure not core-important things either. I bought avocado oil on Amazon, and zippers. I read a few of the 250+ emails in my e-box. I texted two friends and two of my kids. And researched the price of organic coffee in bulk.
I was tempted to buy a yearly use of a productivity tool recommended by a friend and use my website-host to schedule our newsletters. But I did not.
I am grateful I have learned to go nowhere near social media.
All of these things generate more of the same. More hunting for bargains. More planning. More tools. More emails. More to read about and think about.
The more I do, the more it suggests I could do. It grows by feeding itself. Every action becomes a breadcrumb to the next action. Endless suggestions of tools to use, updates to make, revisions, short versions. Every update wants to take me through the wonders of the new version, “teaching” me how to use it. Every tool suggests more I could do.
It never ends — it builds upon itself, as if the machine’s only purpose is to keep me engaged, generating tasks from tasks, distractions from distractions.
It is not all bad. But somehow it takes over, keeps going, growing, overwhelming me, taking the center out of it. I use my computer to write my two books, and my blog, to create podcasts and to research, plan and learn, and to work with one of my hobbies: photographs.
But I lose control. It somehow takes over. And I realise I have to be very well aware to not let it overflow the actual core of why I am using it in the first place. It feels like it has its own mind, its own agenda. To keep me there in front of the keyboard, to keep me busy, to keep me online. It creates a loop — a self-reinforcing rhythm of action and re-action. One tool leads to another, one curiosity opens a huge number of tabs and ideas. It leaves more half-done stuff, and too many more options. Somehow there is always more “useful suggestions” and “helpful tools,” but they are not useful and helpful — they are distracting, throwing me off track.
There is so much nothing going on, and it becomes a problem, not a solution.
I still have pen and paper next to my computer. I have tried all the productivity tools and calendar hacks, and at the end of the day, I need the good old pen and paper to sort out my life, to write my lists, and to stay organised to the extent organised is what is needed.
I just read the book Super Stimuliated by Niclas Brendborg — I read it in Danish (he is Danish and so am I), where the title is much better: Creatures of Habit (in direct translation). At the core of the book is the concept of superstimuli, how we can hack human nature by bombarding it with stimuli designed to overwhelm our instincts— basically using our basic biology and human nature/psychology to overwhelm ourselves to such an extent we become victims.
(...)
It just happened again. I needed to check the table of contents from the book but the book was in a different room, so I googled it — and was almost distracted (again) by all the other things I got. I did not get the table of contents, but other books by the author and questions other people ask about the book. Read the book, it is great. It is a page-turner. I loved it.
Isn’t it fascinating — how all the platforms try to keep you inside? How it is designed to look helpful, but actually often functions as a self-feeding monster — dissolving your focus and feeding itself with your time?
I get A THOUSAND IDEAS every day, sometimes several times a day. What I need is silence, not suggestions, not MORE options.
At the core of Super Stimulated is the idea of the superstimuli, and how we get desensitised by the ever-escalation of these stimuli. It is horrifying.
And I can guarantee you: we ALL fall for it. No one can beat it. The book is about food, drugs, Netflix, pornography, painkillers, cosmetics, social media and more. We are bombarded with stimuli and our nature creates cravings for more. It physically ruins our brains, our bodies — and is literally life-threatening both in terms of the quality of life we can live here and now, and our life expectancy. It is serious business.
(...)
And right here I got distracted in the good way, when I was first writing this thing. A friend showed up in the office room and told me everyone had arrived for a beautiful evening at the farm, where the host was cooking an awesome ramen. Same friend had brought good wine, and my oldest daugther joined from Copenhagen with her boyfriend and another friend.
Life is full of distractions. Right now I have to take a bread out of the oven, without losing my cool, my focus, my intention to finish this blogpost today.
My point today is how the electronic devices feeds more and more time spent — it is not the internet in and of itself, but the internet with all it created: The easy email, the access to workspaces, entertainment, learning opportunities to the level of university, calendars, apps, message systems and social media, photographs, creations of books, movies, blogs, podcasts, newsletters.
It all connects and expands — one tool suggesting another, one article leading to ten others, one idea spawning endless more.
It all is this cacophony screaming for our attention, shouting louder and louder, arguing more and more efficiently as to how spending a bit more time would be all worth it, would make us smarter, richer, healthier, more efficient, more famous, more whatever.
Back when we did not have emails, nobody had to correspond with so many people every day. Back when we did not have message systems, we did not spend an hour each day reading messages and responding. Back when there was just the national TV, we did not watch that much, because there was not much to watch. And let’s not even begin to talk about YouTube, Tic-toc and social media.
It is what it is, with its benefits and drawbacks.
But this — this loop of constant invitation — is what I’m really talking about today.
he drawback I am mostly annoyed about today is how it is eating our time, dissolving our focus.
Take this text I am writing. I had to turn off the “helpful” tool. I had to push through the little things of planning and responding to messages in three different platforms. And I continue to ignore my more than 250 emails. I am tempted to buy a woollen base layer and to download a planning tool to see if that can make me keep up with my many projects.
The helpful tool is not just confusing me with its corrections while I write — it is also suggesting “improvements” all the time, competing with the built-in tool, that will prompt me, “Do you want help to write this text?” whenever I stop writing just briefly. How would google-docs know what I am trying to say?
Every pause holds an invitation to dive deeper into the system. Not to breathe. Not to reflect. But to continue.
It never encourages me to stop — only to do more, consume more, optimise more.
I have to resist checking on the internet the facts behind the thing I am writing here, and I get distracted if something pops through my mind — wanting to just send a quick text message or email, because it is “so easy.”
We need to stay clear in our heads. We need to stay focused.
We need to really think about when and how we use our smartphones and computers.
We need to use them for what we intend to use them for, we need to use them in a way that is mindfuld and conscious, and we need to grow stronger and stronger as the superstimuli grow faster than we can imagine. Good old disciplin will come into play here. Good old core value work.
Because—
To be real, these are amazing tools. I would not want to live without them. I love blogs, and I love staying in touch with my friends and family. I love love love the internet, the way I can find information so easily and go all obsessive on something or just get to the core of a fact right away when I need to. YouTube is a game-changer if I want to learn something manual, and the openness of universities, the accessibility to learn languages — well, to learn anything — is amazing.
But it is also a vortex. It pulls. And pulls. Not because you’re weak, but because by design it is eating our attention, and a distracted person is very easy to lure into all kinds of non-productive and not-interesting rabbitholes.
We just have to stop and think about how it sometimes is just time-absorbing, distracting, confusing, noisy — and we need to do that before we start judging our children.
I am no saint. I make a lot of mistakes. I know I am not doing this right, at all. I mostly stay away from my computer, and I observe it closely — when I get distracted, pulled in, and when I am fooling myself to think the social media or some app will make my life better.
Usually it is WAY better to stop and think about what it is we really need. With the project management, pen and paper took me through university and has worked for generations before me building empires and small businesses, making every element of life work. With the grammar and spelling, the online tools rock, but should be used wisely. The new “AI” bullshit — “refining” our language — is just making everything sound like ChatGBT.
And that’s a part of it too — even the tools for clarity end up costing a lot of time, if I take myself seriously enough to go through it all. And that I do.
We have to sound like ourselves. We have to be authentic — and say what WE have to say, not what the computer proposes when we get stuck for a while.
We also have to make sure we are not watching a movie just to pass time or just to be entertained, missing out on sunsets, novels, art and conversation. I just talked with a teenager last night, an 18yo homeschooled one, and we agreed: A movie has to be VERY good to be worth 90 minutes of my time. Let alone a show with several seasons.
What happened to staring out the window?
What happened to being in awe to how the wind moves to the crop on the fields, or the rain changes the quality of the light?
We have to make sure we are not constantly overwhelmed, and overly stimulated.
And more than ever, we have to also be aware of how easily we are lured into spending more time by the keyboard than we really want or need to.
We, the parents, have to do it. First.
We are the adults.
We are not here to judge. We are here to be good role models.
And most of us — let’s face it — are not, when it comes to electronics.
So let’s start there, I was about to say, but this is not my first thing on electronics.
Instead — let’s continue from here, when thinking about teens and electronics.
(...)
And please join the conversation.
Where do you feel lured into spending more time on the computer/smartphone than you want to?
When do you feel worse after spending the time — not better, not smarter, not more calm?
What do you think we can do about it?
Those are interesting questions to focus on. Please share your thoughts in the comments.
It is an interesting development on the internet, that about 1% will ever comment on things.
My first blog was a place for conversation — now, about 15 years later, blogging is a lonely job.
Should we maybe change that too? Actually use the tool to connect, communicate, discuss.
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