zlacker

>>bertma+(OP)
The experience of passive consumption (cable TV, tiktok, etc, pointed out in another comment here) is essentially the experience of psychological obliteration.

When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed. The same psychological phenomena happens to gambling addicts, alcoholics, or users of heroin. It has fewer physiological downsides and side-effects as those things; the only material loss you have is the loss of time.

But far more remarkable than that it's simply a waste of time, and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The destruction of the self. That echoes through a person's life, to their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is those echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass sociological scale.

By the way. "There" has a lot of upsides too. People can be creative, productive, expressive while they are "there" too. Creating, being funny, being social, etc. That's why this is so hard.

>>mlsu+IP
I think this is a very salient point, namely the danger of passive consumption is the losing the sense of oneself. We can be become so absorbed by the objects of our attention that we forget ourselves and this has very real consequences both on of physiology but also our psychology. So part of the solution is to "remember yourself" while you're consuming or directing your attention towards any object, so you are the subject and you are attending to an object. The last piece of the puzzle is that both you, the subject, and the object of your attention are located in space, so location/context is the third essential aspect of the experience to internalize for proper harmony, as far as I understand it.