Your brain is lying to you, and that is by design. It will take the shortest possible route towards getting a reward, and do everything in its power to facilitate that, even be dishonest. People will often times blame themselves and their own weak will for why they can't get anything done. They will write it off as being lazy, or just not enjoying certain tasks, but those assumptions are fundamentally flawed, because the origin of those assumptions lives in a different place compared to the root cause. It is once again a case of correlation not necessarily being linked to causality. I myself struggle a lot with being distracted, and I want to share my own experience here, not because I'm a scientist, but a victim, and also a perpetrator.
The Art of Software Development
The creation of software has been an exercise executed by an "elite" for a very long time. This elite was selected through, sometimes expensive, educational systems, self-taught mania, and at the very least grit to do the job. Over time, the setting in the industry has shifted away from being a profession for nerds, to being an almost mainstream job that employs millions of people all over the world. Growing economies have built up their own structures to teach the next generation of developers who would either go out and create a start-up, or aim for a job at a modern tech company, building the future. At least, that is the underlying premise that has been promised for many years in the (post) dotcom era.
Speaking as a developer who started their job in 2018, and grew up in one of the boring regions of the planet, it was always an enticing idea to become a developer at Google, or build a popular video game. Why wouldn't you want to earn 6-digit salaries, or create the next "Insert popular franchise here". But dreams don't come for free, and long hours, as well as crunch time have always pushed me away from following through on the attempt of engaging with these ideas. Looking back, I am glad that I followed my instincts, because, while building boring old enterprise Java Backends is not the most exciting exercise, it saved me from potentially becoming an even worse tool for a system that shouldn't exist.
"Human" Capital
Whether you are looking at Google, Microsoft, Meta, or playing games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, or FC (formerly FIFA), you will notice a pattern. Ads, Microtransactions, Profiling, are all mechanisms that have become so ubiquitous that they feel normal nowadays. This is a topic that is in and of itself not new. Legal battles are being fought on an ongoing basis over whether Google is allowed to set their own search engine as the default in their own browser, which is the default on their own operating system. Microsoft is doing the same things, while Meta is quietly spending millions, if not billions to push legislatures all over the world to force surveillance technology to be implemented at an operating system level.
A lot of people still remember the days where Google was proud of its guiding principle "Don't be evil". Employees would stage walk-outs if the company did something they didn't like, and magazines would aggressively report on those incidents. There was the feeling that accountability was an actual virtue that could be employed to keep these companies at bay, but that thought only lasted so long.
Capital will eventually eat up any and all resistance if they government doesn't step in to put up barriers, and capital won. Alphabet is now one of the most valuable corporations on the planet, generating unheard of amounts of money from targeted advertisments and hosting a significant percentage of the infrastructure that we use on a daily basis. Microsoft has a stranglehold on governments and other corporations relying on Windows. Meta is on its way to create a detailed profile for every human on the planet, and it will not stop until it has the largest database of personal information possible. These are but some examples of how large tech corporations have used the systems that allowed them to grow against us, because humans are the most valuable product on the planet. There is billions of us, and above every head is a price tag, a price tag for how much these companies can sell us to their customers.
The Incentive to Create Misery
Now that these companies had the power, they needed a mechanism to use it, a mechanism to optimize the revenue that they could create. The search has created some of the most sophisticated piece of technology ever conceived by human minds. The algorithms that are driving YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, are all masterfully engineered to generate as much engagement as possible. They were purpose-built to create misery, because misery is what makes us come back to get more. Our brain has developed into focusing on survival.
Thousands of years of human development were built around the fact that we are fragile, and in order to survive our brain will learn patterns and adapt to them in real-time, trying its best to make sure that we avoid doing the same mistake again. This design works well, because when we are children, and we touch the hot stove, we quickly learn that we maybe shouldn't do that again, because it hurts, a lot. But it also creates a huge loophole, one where anything the brain considers to be "safe" is something that must be repeated, right?
This is where these companies get us, because these patterns used to be us taking a stroll through a park, or us writing in a diary. Our brain designated safe-spaces that we could come back to when we weren't feeling great, or we were just looking for a change of pace. However, nowadays, new safe-spaces have been created, artifical ones that hook us and never let us go again.
Engagement algorithms were designed to make us come back for one reason or another. Either we are looking for a space where we can be ourselves and escape the horrors of daily life, or we are just interested in being outraged, because it makes us feel good to feel superior in one way or another. To go on X, the everything app, and see some dumbass who doesn't know how math works makes us feel good, because we know that they are wrong, and correcting them makes us feel better. We never stop to think on why we saw it in the first place. It doesn't provide any utility, it just pops-up, and in doing so, it creates engagement, because it causes enragement.
This variety of reasons for why people go on the internet is not an accident, it is by design, as the underlying systems were tasked with one "simple" job: "KEEP. PEOPLE. ONLINE."
The Hamster Wheel
At this point, most people have recognized that this is a problem, and some are trying their best to escape the cycle. Buying dumb phones to replace their android or iOS device; going outside and touching grass; Trying to be more actively engaged in community projects. The problem is that, at the end of the day, you are working against your own intuition, you just don't notice it, because the drive to go on X, the everything app, is not something that you do intentionally, it is something that our brain has been taught to crave, and happens subconsiously.
If you ever tried to breathe intentionally, you will quickly realize how complicated of an exercise it is to keep your focus and rhythm on something that seems mundane. That is becaues it actually isn't mundane. Our body does a lot of heavy lifting in the background to make sure that it continues to function, and given enough time, it will make the occasional visit of X, the everything app, part of its routine. This is not something we choose to do, but something that the app was designed to produce without our implicit knowledge.
The Evil in Software Development
Software development is fundamentally evil, at least it is nowadays. While there were humble beginnings present decades ago, major shifts over time have created an atmosphere where accountability is lost. If Meta is responsible for killing thousands in a civil war, whose fault is that? The CEO just provided a vision, the middle management simply delegated tasks, and the developers just implemented individual features. The company as a whole has committed mass murder, but the individuals all have a clean vest.
This is Plausible Deniability in action, something that has been used since the beginnings of time to absolve individuals of their own fault in a larger, procedural failing. Software Development has optimized this process, not only for itself, but the entire global economy. An insurance company denying coverage? Chances are that an algorithm determined it would be feasible to do so, and worst case its cheaper to pay for a single person to die than give everyone the care they need.
Casinos and Prediction Markets, Policing, and so many more parts of our society have been optimized to maximize profits while minimizing liability. We are at a point where we have to debate whether we should let companies use AI to create an even more obscure process where no human involvement is left, so even the last bit of liability is gone, and companies that were built on the back of sophisticated 1s and 0s can murder and profit without a care in the world.
What You Can Do
In the year of our lord 2026, it is easy to become a nihilist. It is easy to look at the state of things and think to yourself "Well, guess there's nothing I can do.", which to a degree is true, but it's not the complete picture. I've recently found myself in a situation where I couldn't get myself off X, the everything app, and YouTube, watching dumb react videos "for the fun of it". It didn't provide me any actual value, just stimulation for the part of my brain that was hooked.
I found myself in the spot of trying to escape these systems, and what ended up helping me was as dumb as it was simple. I unplugged my modem, cutting the WiFi in my apartment, and turning off my phone afterwards. Suddenly my brain was ready to just do things, not because it unlocked a new skill, but suddenly, the subconscious urge to go on the internet was far enough away to not be interesting anymore. I'm not saying that this is the solution for everyone, but it was a little step in the right direction for me.
The point here is that we are not helpless by design, but we were made helpless by systems that want it to be this way. The best we can do in that case is to say no, and do something that gives us back the control over our brain. Whether it is to turn off your phone, remove the batteries from your remote, or flipping the switch on the fuse responsible for power delivery to your PC. What works best in my experience are physical interactions that make your brain register that it is time to do something else. Apps or browser extensions are all abstracted by you touching a button on a screen, or waiting an arbitrary amount of minutes. These solutions can work, but our brain still does best with actual, physical objects that create a feedback loop.
It is a long process to fix the situation we are in, because corporations aren't stopping the abuse, and collective action to just drop these apps is unlikely. Right wing governments across the globe have an incentive to let these companies do their thing as long as they get access to the data so they can punish you for crimes that you didn't commit, but just thought or joked about.
Systemic solutions are far away, so the best we can do is take care of ourselves and each other, and it's worth a try, if only because every one of us is important and should be cared for.