Joshes and Joshettes, lately I’ve been thinking about how strange modern life has become. The internet allows me to create, it allows me to publish podcasts, write posts like this, interact with people, research topics and honestly, I don’t think I could go a full day without using it anymore. Most of us probably couldn’t. That’s not necessarily a bad thing because the internet has changed the world in incredible ways. We have access to information instantly, we can communicate with people across the globe in seconds and we can learn almost anything with a few searches. But while sitting there thinking about all of this, I realized something else. The internet didn’t just make life easier, it made everything feel urgent. Once I noticed that feeling, I started seeing it everywhere.

I started thinking about short form content because I catch myself doomscrolling sometimes just like everyone else. You open an app for a few minutes and suddenly an hour disappears. One video becomes another, then another and eventually you are just swiping automatically without even thinking about it anymore. The strange thing is that scrolling feels active because your brain thinks you are participating. You are choosing the next video, reacting to it, deciding if it deserves another few seconds of your attention or not. But in reality, you are just trapped inside an endless feed that never actually stops. Older entertainment wasn’t really designed like that. Television used to operate on schedules. If you missed an episode of a show, you waited until next week. Even movie rentals required effort because you physically had to go somewhere to rent them. Streaming slowly changed all of that. Entire seasons started releasing at once, autoplay became normal and patience quietly disappeared from entertainment. Now people watch television while scrolling on their phones and sometimes even have another video playing in the background while doing both.

The weird part about all of this is that the internet itself isn’t bad. Technology isn’t bad either. Streaming is convenient, AI tools can genuinely help workflows and social media allows people to connect with each other in ways that weren’t possible years ago. I use these tools myself all the time. My podcasts exist because of the internet and a lot of my workflows depend on technology. The issue isn’t the existence of these tools, it’s what constant immediacy slowly does to people over time. Social media especially changed the way people look at themselves because now everyone is constantly exposed to curated versions of other people’s lives. Someone posts a vacation photo, a luxury watch, a new car, a business success story or some huge milestone and suddenly people start comparing their own lives against what they see online. The internet puts everyone into the same visual space even though people come from completely different backgrounds, opportunities and circumstances. Someone can start feeling behind in life without ever stopping to ask if the comparison even makes sense in the first place.

The problem is that online life removes context. A person may appear successful online while privately struggling financially, mentally or emotionally. Luxury can be rented, followers can be purchased and entire lifestyles can be manufactured for appearances. Yet despite knowing this, people still compare their actual lives to carefully edited fragments posted by strangers online. That pressure eventually spreads into productivity itself because modern culture constantly pushes the idea that everyone should be optimizing every second of their day. AI tools promise faster workflows, apps promise better habits and social media constantly shows people who appear to be building multiple businesses while somehow having their entire life together. After a while people begin asking themselves why they aren’t doing more. Why am I not more productive? Why am I not more successful? Why am I not further ahead by now? The internet quietly trains people to expect accelerated growth in every part of life.

But the reality is that most meaningful things still move slowly. Real creativity takes time, real growth takes time, financial stability takes time and improving yourself physically or mentally takes time too. Delayed gratification still matters even if modern culture tries to convince people that everything should happen instantly. Maybe that’s part of why so many people feel mentally exhausted now. Attention itself has become fragmented into thousands of tiny interruptions every single day. Notifications constantly pull people away from their thoughts, entertainment never stops and even moments of silence now feel uncomfortable because the brain has become so used to stimulation. At some point, a lot of people stopped sitting quietly with their own thoughts and that may be one of the biggest changes the internet created.

I think that’s the real challenge now. The internet made life faster, easier and more connected than ever before but it also created a world where everything feels urgent all the time. Maybe the answer isn’t disconnecting completely from technology because realistically most people won’t do that. Maybe the answer is learning how to slow down enough to think clearly again while still living inside the modern world that the internet created. Thanks, Josh.