Attention is sacred.
Whatever you pay attention to is, in practice, your whole world. That makes it worth defending from the people working to capture it, and worth spending on purpose.
The obvious case is the short video feed. TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels exist to keep you watching one more, and they are very good at it. You open the app to check one thing and surface forty minutes later with nothing to show for it beyond a vague sense of having been somewhere.
Video is only the loudest version. X, Threads, Reddit, and the news run on the same loop: a stream with no bottom, refreshed by the thumb, tuned to whatever keeps you scrolling. The content is different and the mechanism is the same.
This is why the first article is about attention rather than intelligence or knowledge. Your life, hour by hour, is made of whatever you attend to. If most of those hours go to a feed, then your life is made of a feed, whatever you would have said you cared about.
What the practice looks like is less settled. "No more TikTok" is the obvious rule, and it is probably right, and we are not sure anyone can keep it. Sometimes the feed is exactly what a tired brain wants, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty. The workable version might be smaller: decide ahead of time when you will look, and notice when the decision got made for you.
II. Beliefs are tools, not trophies.