The last few years of my life has been quite transformative, to say the least. I have been pondering a lot about attention, especially after I moved to London — my own attention. Five years ago, my attention span was bad: it’s hard for me to follow up a conversation, working without checking social media from time-to-time was impossible, and I was busy playing online gaming with my friends at night, not caring much about my well-being. I realised even back then I hard time focusing, but I thought I just needed to put in the effort to focus more, to concentrate harder. But it wasn’t that I need more effort, but less distractions.
When I moved to London, separated by 10.000 km distance from my home country, online gaming becoming too slow, and I eventually stopped playing, and paid more attention to my surrounding. There was a phase where I stopped all social media activities as well as it was already quite common how distracting were my excessive usage of social media were (but still, it was addicting).
I realised that online games and social media have been taking the bulk of my time — my attention. I feel like what I pay attention to translate directly to how I use my time, because it’s how we decide everything. Your attention basically directs you. Spending time in social media, looking at other people envious life, or looking at posts telling me that I am doing things wrong (and having doubt about my entire way of life), doomscrolling, has been very draining, yet at the same time addicting. Social media is free, but I didn’t realise that I am literally paying it with my attention.
The attention I could use to better my life, to take care of my well-being, choosing to eat better food, exercising more, writing more, reading more. I didn’t do most of that when I relinquish control of my attention to social media and online games.
After I’ve started taking control of directing my own attention, I come to the realization — even the Islamic five daily prayers are just basically a way to deliberately practice directing my attention to God. To be honest, even after 30 years of life, it is still hard. Am I present in my prayer? Do I comprehend the meaning of each word of what I say? Doing that from start to the end ritual, without remembering random worldly things for a moment is hard. It’s all deliberate attention. I feel prayer is how God teaching us the model of how life should be — intentionally directing attention towards what really, truly matters. It’s a struggle to perfect this for my entire life.
I’ve also noticed that I’ve left things broken, unkept, or neglected, and instead keep chasing that fast dopamine hit. Fixing, cleaning, or even doing anything that matters — needs attention and care, while the happiness and satisfaction does not come immediately. I want things done fast, not caring whether it’s healthy or not.
This fact hits me even harder after reading Oliver Burkeman’s **Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.** I initially thought the book was about corny time management advice which I couldn’t relate to, but since I’ve had more attention from leaving online games and social media, I thought I’d give it a chance. The result is quite eye-opening. The book wakes me up on how limited our time are (duh), the importance of focusing on the most essential thing, and being at peace at the fact that there are things I will have to ignore, and that we will always have too much to do. I feel like at this point of my life, it’s the book that rings so true.
What now? I am trying to pay more attention to what I do, to what I’m using my time — my life, trying to be present while others are talking, to care more about my health, my relationships, my religious rituals and other aspects of my life. It is a journey, one that I am late to realise, but it should be the right way to go nonetheless.
Update 22 June 2025:
I wrote this back in July 2024, and here I am reverting back to giving my attention to social media and games. These things aren’t called addicting for no reason, man. Updated the post to make it “better” and fixing some of the sentence structure as well.
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