Whether you realize it or not, someone owns you. I know. It sounds awful, doesn’t it? Your owner, to whom you have happily and willingly surrendered yourself is a billionaire somewhere in a coastal city on the west coast of the US or in Singapore. Somewhere where the weather is good all year round. They will own you for as long as you continue to willingly give all your attention to their streaming platforms, apps, and websites. And they will continue amassing insane profits that accrue from their ownership of you, and your attention. It is most likely how they will become trillionaires. They don’t know who you are – it’s not personal. It’s just the order of the Fourth Industrial Revolution – but you are familiar with who they are.

Today, most of us have been turned into products to be mined by tech and media companies. I am not talking about a healthy, well-controlled routine of a movie every weekend, for instance. We are living, breathing media/entertainment consumption machines of technologies that have been engineered to be highly addictive. Some have called this the attention economy, but really, what it means is that there is a certain class of people who own the tech infrastructure and products that have been designed to make us binge-watch TV shows, random TikTok and YouTube videos, or compulsively surf the internet. And then there’s you (and me), the owned. You can call this whatever you want. I prefer to see it for what it essentially is: attention economy slavery. Think plantation economy, but voluntary. And it gets worse - as I write this, Artificial Intelligence is already supercharging this slavery to make it even more profitable for your owners. Combine this with the fact that most of us know very little about our abilities to make our own choices (free will), and you get a very unsettling situation.

If all this sounds like a nightmare, that is because it is. There is only one thing you can do about this: stopping it before your tech and media masters completely and irreparably rewire your brain, making it nearly impossible for you to escape their so-called metaverses. But here is the thing. No one and nothing is coming to save you. Not another app, not your “life coach”, not your psychologist, or therapist, especially your therapist. You have to save yourself. Your only job now should be to get out of this toxic situation and stop being owned. You can make it as easy or as hard as you wish, but you must do it. Here are a few places to start.

Re-connect with the natural word.

One of the things that happen with modern life is that it disconnects you from nature, and alters your relationship with it. The more disconnected you are from the natural world, the more susceptible you become to today’s modern addictive technologies and everything that comes with them. Most of us now live in urban environments, and we spend a lot of time commuting to so-called work. By the time you get home, it’s over. If you have kids and are not so protective of your time, the weekend can easily slip by without going outside. There is an unbelievable number of people whose main “connection” with the natural world is through a digital device, seated on their couches. You need to get out (ideally without your phone) and be in the natural world. Take a walk in the woods, go to a natural body of water if you can, or just sit quietly in a meadow and spend however much time you can afford there. Whatever it takes - it doesn’t matter if all you can manage is to touch a tree, do it. While outside in nature, make a fire if possible, and have a cup of tea. Fires are healing, and so is drinking tea slowly. Relax. Repeat until it becomes a habit.

Learn how to be alone and do nothing

If you cannot spend an extended period of time alone, just being, without distracting yourself with something, you must learn how to do it. You need to block off two hours every week and find a quiet space, with no gadgets, no books, no pens, no music, nothing - just you seated still with your mind. Now, two hours is arbitrary - I have no explanation for it other than it being a long enough time to do nothing. Some of us are naturally solitary, so this is easy. But if you happen to be in the majority of humans, it’s going to take some work. This is not meditation, so you can let your mind wander, but try as much as you can to bring it back to a calm place. You can take deep breaths if that helps. The idea is to train yourself and your mind to be without external stimuli and to just do nothing. You are also learning how to be bored. Try not to sleep. If it seems daunting, begin with 30 minutes and work your way to an hour. After you have successfully done this several times for at least a couple of months, you are ready to move on. Mastering this is especially important for the next step

Good old Introspection

What you need is Solitude, it’s essential.^[1] Now that you are getting time outside, enjoying all that Mother Nature has blessed us with, and now that you can sit still for at least two hours alone with no external stuff, it’s time to sit down and do some work. Block off some two or more hours, grab a notebook/journal, and a pen, and find a quiet space alone. Again, no technology, no music, no noise.

The first thing you have to realize is that the need to numb, to distract ourselves, giving away huge swaths of our time and lives to addictive technologies and entertainment is a symptom of bigger underlying issues. So, understating what causes this can help us to properly connect with our emotions, and recognize that our system is trying to send us signals. We have to sit with this long enough to get to the heart of those problems if we want to solve them in healthy ways. Identify these issues and write them down. Everyone’s underlying issues are going to be different. I know what mine are – figure out yours, attack them head-on, and slay them. This is the first part of a two-part article. In the next one, I will share what I am learning about overcoming my own internet technologies and media addiction.

Notes

1. I learned early on that I cannot function without solitude. It's like oxygen to me.