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Your phone is eating your life

You’re not burnt-out. Your mental context-window is being jammed.

And this is not on you. You’re being systematically manipulated. Your attention, agency, and your wellbeing are being hijacked via abuse of the ancient dopamine-reward pathways in your brain. On a societal scale.

But your lack of understanding this is costing you so much. That is on you.

Let’s take a step back and explore how this applies to your life:

Do you still care? Like, genuinely care about what you are doing with your business, your time, your life?

You’re not lazy. Nor stupid. You might be working more than most people. But the important things are exceedingly getting lost in the noise. An amount and type of noise we are NOT adapted to as organisms.

You’re part of a society that is addicted to dopamine-based capitalism

We come from a world where there were five relevant things for us to do:

  1. Find and cultivate food
  2. Explore the world, play games and music, sharing stories with your tribe
  3. Build obviously important things like tools and shelter
  4. Procreate, socialize, share stories
  5. Play music, make art

Those were not the “good ol’ days” and today does not suck. You simply didn’t have to juggle 50 priorities and manage 200 more or less well-intended actors trying to capture your attention every day.

As a CEO, founder, leader or parent, you are responsible for the systems around you and the habits they facilitate in everyone influenced by them. Understanding the core issue beneath these devastating trends, gives you the ability to see through the fog of distractions that we are enshrouded in. You get a paradigm-shifting piece of the puzzle of human behavior. You get the chance to create systems that shift behavior massively — in your life, in your business, in society. You can finally have the influence on yourself and create the life that you are seeking.

You will notice this isn’t an isolated phenomenon, if you look at current mega trends:

What’s the common thread between all of this?

And why does it even matter to understand this?

When I figured out the common thread between all of these developments, it rebuilt my understanding of self and society from scratch. It had me finally do all these things I used to understand as important but didn’t treat as important.

Your phone is eating your life.

You wake up in the morning and your phone beckons you to check Instagram, respond to 20 new messages. TikTok wants you to watch it on the toilet.

You get to the desk, open your laptop and have 30 cc’d emails waiting for you, all seemingly important, 47 tabs in your browser open, five different projects you are actively managing — and since we finally got AI, that’s now 15 projects.

Since we have now arrived in the glorious age of self-organizing information, every 5–15 minutes — just before you get to that important email — you hear a new sound:

ding

Your agent got his job done and needs to know what to do next — and that gets priority because who doesn’t want to get work done automatically in the background?! Right!? While you are writing that email… Or while you pay the toilet a visit just to get stuck on TikTok for a few minutes longer than would be good.

When using LLMs you probably notice that at some point the quality degrades when using the same chat — more specifically the context window fills up.

Especially when you talk about a random mix of things that aren’t task relevant, it simply can’t understand what really matters anymore.

And our minds are the same in that regard. We are overflowing with information so we can’t really prioritize individual signals anymore.

We are struggling in the world we’ve created and you are affected by it, too.

You’re more tired than you used to be. You somehow, unexplainably have less time, too. You’re struggling more at connecting with friends and investing in relationships that matter to you. You wake up in the morning unenthusiastic about the day ahead and in the evening you wonder how this day passed so quickly. You’re not having as much sex as you’d actually like to.

So what the hell is happening?

Your mental context-window is constantly being flooded

And you cannot build a business without subjecting yourself to the cause.

This is my attempt at first seeing the situation and then mapping a way out of its maddening noisiness. I will be talking about some concise, high-leverage moves that will make you enjoy life more and be way more effective at what you are doing today.

If we do not deal with this intentionally, it doesn’t just kill serious business progress. It grinds us down. It takes away our sensitivity to feeling ourselves and to what truly matters. And if it continues unchecked you will end up wasting a days on things you’ll look back on thinking “What the hell was I even doing?”. You know it’s true because you have these days yourself and those periods of time looking back right now. Your business is not just gonna stagnate. It’s gonna shrink. Simply because your competitor actually sat down for an afternoon and took the time to think through what really matters.

So will your relationships, by the way. They just deteriorate.

There are three main things we want to look at:

  1. The common thread in all of this: attention capture via addictive mechanics and dopamine-chasing habits.
  2. What kind of damage does that really cause to our everyday experiences, lives and success (as a species)?
  3. How can we recover from this and maybe use the dopamine mechanism for good?

The first two are what this essay covers. The third I’ll cover in the next one.

Attention Capture and its consequences

There are three main disturbing problems:

Let’s start with the basic premises: dopamine is often characterized as the “reward molecule” which is inaccurate. It’s more like the “about-to-get-a-reward molecule”. The more we feel like any moment now there will be a big payoff, the more likely we are to engage in the behavior. We are motivated. The ironic thing is that dopamine receptors are excitatory, so when you get a dopamine hit, you become more active and are more likely to seek more dopamine-inducing behaviors. Which is why gambling is an awesome and easy way to make money — at least for casinos.

Dopamine is not simply “used up” and then gone. It turns into other hormones that increase neuroplasticity in the areas that it was released in. The basic consequence: your brain is more likely to change in ways that makes associated behavior even more likely.

Dopamine receptors also have a mechanism that makes them unavailable to dopamine once they have been in use quite a bit. Which implies that the same amount of released dopamine would simply not be able to cause the same emotional effect afterwards. That creates this just a bit mean pain-pleasure balance, where we must “come down” from the excitement of impending rewards. So, at some point we end up either accepting that it’s time to fall into the dopamine-hole and accept the pain… or we continue scrolling until ignoring the accumulation of dopamine-debt becomes unbearable. We procrastinate or work highly ineffectively because we do our best to never come down off our dopamine-high for even just a bit. You know the spiral I am speaking of, don’t you?

This carries another important understanding of dopamine with it: once you’ve spent your share and your receptors go dormant… you’re done with doing work with motivation and focus. It’s an energy management mechanism. Your highly motivated attention budget is limited. You go into high-dopamine mode, focus your attention on this next task and at some point the receptors that the dopamine tie to, so they can create this motivating effect, simply shut down for a while. Then your brain needs a break. This effect accumulates and dopamine loses it’s effect.

At some point you simply have to wait that phase out instead of expecting endless energy and motivation. It’s a rather individualized thing when and how that phase hit’s you but it’s surely going to come. This is also where our ability to handle negative emotions come in, as they are absolutely unavoidable.

Might not wanna give that most valuable resource to Meta and TikTok, just to feel bad after the dopamine-high anyways. Maybe give it to your close friends or the things you actually care about and make you feel good about yourself and life.

What we’ve covered so far

Dopamine is our energy budget. The whole world around you is trying to get you to give it your energy. Doing that literally changes your brain so you want to do more of that. That’s the basic capitalist model right now. We must be willing to go through pain to relax and recover, unless we want to get stuck chasing the hits all day.

Choosing where to spend your dopamine is choosing your future self. You are handing over the shape of your brain, your future desires, your actions and major influence on the shape of your life. To algorithms, organizations, and people who just don’t care about you. All they care about is that you use the platforms, see the ad, buy that product, eat that snack. I wish I could put into words how important this is but I lack the words to convey the intensity. I hope you just get it.

Constantly being in this tight-focus attention mode also prevents big-picture and creative thinking. Which is why the shower, gym or our running shoes become the last respite of insight.

Not because those places are grandly facilitative of insight but because they are the only places left for our brain to shift into the mode of thinking that facilitates insight and creative connecting of concepts and experiences.

The immense but invisible costs

It’s not a moment. It’s a shape. Negative space — the conversations that didn’t happen, the strategies you didn’t see, the questions you never sat long enough with to actually get a clear answer.

Look at the last six months and ask, honestly:

That last one is the killer if you lead anything. If you’re the person making long-term decisions that shape other people’s lives — your team, your kids, your partner — being unable to think straight for a sustained stretch is not a personal inconvenience. It’s a leadership-grade hazard.

Like an LLM whose context is stuffed full. You still output something. You just stopped seeing the connections that mattered.

So where does this leave you?

You have less energy than you think. The energy you do have is being spent shaping a brain that wants more of exactly what’s eating you.

The part of you that could step back and notice any of this is the first to go dormant. Imagine living life without the part of you that does big-picture thinking, sees connections, asks “is this even the right life?” Sounds like a bad idea in my book.

You are giving up agency in an almost invisible but undeniably effective way.

So now that we’ve diagnosed the problem, part two is about the way out, about how to manage dopamine and your state of mind on purpose — as a deliberate practice. How to start spending that finite attention budget on the life you’d actually look back on glad you lived.

Really understanding the costs of being caught up in this small-minded cycle ultimately saved relationships with friends I truly cared about when I showed up crying on their doorstep, and made me pivot my life from Software Engineering to Coaching and Entrepreneurship.