Monday Focus Check
If it’s too much for a 12-year-old’s brain, what’s it doing to yours
France just became the first country in the EU to ban social media for kids under 15. Australia already did it for under-16s. Whether you read that as government overreach or as long overdue, set that argument down for a second, because it’s not the part that grabbed me. The part that grabbed me is that whole countries looked at what these apps do to a developing brain’s attention and decided it rises to a public health problem.
If a feed is corrosive enough to a 12-year-old’s focus that a government steps in, what do we figure it’s doing to ours? There’s no law coming to protect my attention. I’m a grown man. The only regulator I’ve got is me, and … he’s not great at it!
The apps aren’t built gentler for adults. Same infinite scroll, same engineers whose entire job is keeping you tapping.
So Monday is the day I regulate the one attention I’m in charge of. One thing named before I open anything. Phone across the room for the first block of real work. I still use the feed, I just refuse to let it be the first voice in my head.
I lose this plenty. Caught myself in a scroll hole before coffee this very morning, which is an embarrassing thing to admit in a piece about attention. Give yourself grace, then get back to the one thing.
So if you had to protect your own attention the way France is trying to protect a kid’s, what’s the first rule you’d write for yourself?
Wanna know how you’re doing with your awareness and focus?