Ping Minimalism
Musing #17 | OR: "Personal firewalls" or "Few may disturb"
Online life is a never-ending series of pings—emails, texts, group chats, Slack, Discord, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and all the not-urgent-but-pretending-to-be-urgent app notifs.1 At first, it was cool. The internet promised discovery and democratization that could make all our wildest dreams come true.
All we had to do was be available!
But not surprisingly, this isn’t efficient, specifically attention-efficient. We might not always be spending money, but we’re always spending scarce time and attention hoping for serendipitous value to come our way.
All things considered, it rarely does.
To be available is to be open to great possibility, but at the risk of great exploitation — not necessarily by individual people but rather by attention-grabbing machines that are smarter than us at laser-focusing on achieving their goals.
In 5 years, it’ll seem bizarre that we ever allowed anyone to email or text or call us AND the norm was to at least think about replying to them. Being reachable 24/7 by anyone and for anything will have been a blip in time, an absurd anomaly in the long arc of the hyperconnected digital age.
In the coming years, we’re going to aggressively revoke access to our attention.