Thread by @pablomuralo

I've been doomscrolling a lot on Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin.

This has affected my mental health a lot perpetuating two key human fears: FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and FOBO (Fear of Being Ordinary)

2/n The Web 2.0 has been consciously designed this way.

The time has long passed when we used to use the internet to 'search' for something. Now it is all 'social'. The media corp literally comes home and delivers an all-you-can-eat-buffet.

The feed comes to you.

3/n This has led to the reinforcement of destructive behaviour such as doomscrolling.

We keep traversing the vast stretches of this social media land, doomscrolling our way to destruction.

This is not a bug, it's a feature. And we are the lab rats.

4/n Our attention is our most pristine resource in this attention economy of knowledge workers.

We need to guard it with a shield and prevent social media from taking control over us.

5/n Information is a lot like our diet.

Just like how you have all kinds of junk food, you have all kinds of junk information.

News, social media are at the top apex of this information pyramid with the most noise. You have to dig really deep to get some signal. Source: Ken

5/n I've been thinking about developing a digital solution to tackle this doomscrolling behavior through data-based storytelling.

6/n Most of the solutions out there are having a more cold-turkey approach towards this problem. You really cant avoid social media!

There should be a way to be in the middle of a house on fire, and yet not get burnt by it.

7/n I was inspired by this 'nutritional label' of information shared on one of @balajis tweets along the similar lines of information diet, and would be exploring these ideas over the coming few weeks.

8/n Objective would be to build this as a side project and see how we could reclaim our attention. We are literally drinking water from a hosepipe!

9/n Some future possibilities of this idea: Continuous Dopamine Monitor (IoT wearable)

Just like how your blood pressure spikes up when you eat a cookie, you could now consciously track your dopamine hits when you consume polarised information.

Ideas borrowed from @Mehdiyac

10/n We need more 'prognostic' ways to deal with information, and the existing 'diagnostic' interventions aren't impacting much.

The short term vision is to develop a 'diagnostic' concept and then proceed to make it 'prognostic' through a continuous dopamine/serotonin monitor

11/n Monitoring dopamine (reward system) and serotonin (stress) could allow us to discover so much about our true selves.

12/n Currently, we have information on the other side of the world, but not something that is half a foot away.

We don't know what's going on subcutaneously. It's actually this amazing blank spot on the map. - @balajis

13/n This exploration would be to fill this blank spot, step by step.

If you're interested in this vision and would like to join hands, let me know. I would be building-in-public and making this happen.