The Dopamine Era: What Distraction Is Costing You

Part 3 — What You’ve Already Lost

A few weeks ago, I had a bit of an epiphany.

I’d been posting on X for over a year. It was largely an experiment to see if I could stick with writing every day. I also hoped to rediscover my writing voice long lost to corporate speak.

What I love most about posting on X is that it’s low-friction. The platform doesn’t offer a lot of crazy options to add to your post. So it doesn’t take much to post, and it’s easy to attach an image or a video if you want to enhance it.

Publishing the post makes it visible, and that requires some courage. The ease of posting takes away my excuses not to write and publish something every day.

I’m proud of this accomplishment because it has reintroduced a daily craving to write about something. And the part I didn’t expect is that I’ve met some amazing people all working on some version of this for themselves, too.

But now that doesn’t feel like enough.

X moves fast, so after 48 hours, my work essentially disappears.

My posts don’t rank prominently in search engines because I’m not a high-engagement account.

And they’re not easily searchable on the platform itself without using advanced skills.

So someone looking for answers I’ve already given will probably never find them on X.

While I’ve been cranking up my own writing machine, I’ve also been contributing my best thinking to a machine that processes millions of pieces of content every second.

None of it compounds.

Meanwhile, my website sits dormant. It’s the one digital place where I can actually decide how it works. There’s no algorithm to please. I post it, you see it.

Any work I put there lives there as long as I leave it up.

But for the past 15 years, the platforms tried to convince me that their space were where the work should happen. I gave my website short shrift, and until recently, it’s largely been a static brochure for myself and my business.

It felt like a huge missed opportunity.

After writing Part 2 of The Dopamine Era series last week, I started looking at my own costs.

The cost of all this for me isn’t just distraction or wasted time scrolling. That’s definitely something I’m working on improving.

This attention economy has fundamentally changed what I perceive as my work.

My work is not social media. I’m an author, a therapist, and a business owner. I’ve been in ministry for 25 years. My focus has to start in those places first, building something that people may want to know more about.

But the bait-and-switch of the platforms has had me believing my work should be on their soil. That if I’m not visible on the feed, I’m not building. And worse, I may not exist at all.

The stops and starts in this space that I’ve shamed myself about through the years were brought on by the frustration of not being seen. That line of thinking usually ended up in, so what’s the point?

That has cost me quite a few years.

In Part 1, we diagnosed the problem: your focus has been engineered away from you, across your mind, body, and spirit.

In Part 2, we looked at the machine — how the attention economy actually works on you.

Now comes the harder part to own. What has all this fragmented attention actually cost you?

Like me, you may see some areas of your life that have gone undeveloped in the attention land rush for your eyeballs.

The Spiritual Cost: We’ve Outsourced Our Souls

We don’t give much credence to the spirit that’s inside us. We’ve relegated spirit to a kind of feeling. So it’s hard to see the cost to our spiritual lives.

Yes, there are spiritual activities we’ve been distracted from in The Dopamine Era:

• Bible reading,
• Prayer,
• Time with God,
• Reaching for your phone before your feet hit the floor in the morning.

The world very easily gets to you before God does.

But there’s a deeper loss here.

As we discussed in Part 1, we are body, mind, and spirit.

We can touch the body, and we can engage the mind. But the spirit is invisible. You can’t measure it or optimize it. It’s not a feeling. It’s the God-breathed part of us that’s even more real because it’s eternal.

And we’ve learned to simply ignore it in favor of what we can touch and think about.

The last sixty years have trained us to downplay the existence of our spiritual selves. If you can’t quantify it, it isn’t real. The attention economy accelerated this.

It has no category for spirit, only for engagement. And engagement is a dopamine game, not a depth game.

The distraction has been so great, you stopped believing your spiritual self even needed attention.

The mystical became irrelevant.

In this climate, we get statements like those coming most recently from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in an interview with the New York Times about the AI model Claude:

“We’ve taken a generally precautionary approach here. We don’t know if the models are conscious. We are not even sure that we know what it would mean for a model to be conscious or whether a model can be conscious. But we’re open to the idea that it could be.”

In a world that puts priority on spirit, how do you even entertain the idea of machine consciousness? AI might be able to index all human intelligence as expressed through words and images, but how does it begin to have a spiritual consciousness?

It can’t, because human consciousness started with God, and only He can create it.

The whole discussion about what AI is capable of hinges on this one thing.

You can’t collapse spirit into intelligence.

Consciousness isn’t a computation fueled by code. In previous generations that upheld the spiritual, that would’ve sounded silly.

When we neglect our spirits, we’re left with only our own cognitive resources to make sense of our lives and fight our way forward. So that’s what we look toward to solve our problems.

That’s an exhausting way to live. And we weren’t designed to live this way, hitting little levers looking for the next hit.

The Creative Cost: The Body of Work You’re Not Building

Like me, maybe you look back on the work you left hanging in your life. Books and businesses that never got off the starting block. Artistic projects that got drowned out by the lazy scroll.

The platforms have fragmented your capacity for the sustained depth that creating something requires.

It’s not just that you pick scrolling over creating. You’re now conditioned to call fragmentation “creating.”

A thread on X, or a carousel on Instagram. A video with text overlays (that takes a hot minute to make, by the way).

These feel like output and work.

What body of work are you actually building, though?

The platforms serve you small chunks of content constantly. And you’ve internalized that rhythm for your own output.

So you post quick takes instead of deep exploration because TL;DR, who’s going to read that?

You need the quick takes to drive eyeballs to your deep work, but we make the quick take the work.

You react to what’s trending instead of pursuing depth to find truth.

The short stuff is choking us out.

Research from Economist Impact found that knowledge workers lose an estimated 157 hours a year to unproductive workplace chat messages alone. Add in social media scrolling, email checking, notification responding, and the math gets wild (you’ll have to do that, though, I don’t do math).

Here are some other stats. The Insightful Lost Focus Report found that:

• 79% of workers can’t go a full hour without getting distracted from work.
• 59% can’t go 30 minutes.
• Employers estimate that up to 25% of the typical workweek — so six to ten hours — is lost to distractions.

Trained and conditioned incapacity at work where you’re supposed to be paying attention.

What could you build in six to ten hours a week, 40 hours over a month, where your attention isn’t dragged across multiple platforms?

You measure this cost in what you never bring into existence.

The Creator’s Trap: When Building Becomes Performing

Let’s move beyond passive consumption. There’s a version of this trap designed specifically for people who ARE creating.

You started a business to build a product or service. But somewhere along the way, the metrics for your marketing became the product.

Marketing is important, and it will make or break your product. But business owners are easily caught up in a more sinister version.

Call it “creator dopamine.” You’re working, but you’re not building. You’re posting on social without a strategy, checking analytics compulsively, chasing engagement instead of creating value.

The platforms have hijacked entrepreneurship itself.

Many business owners have found themselves unwittingly becoming digital content creators. Some enjoy this, but many don’t, especially when it comes in a social media wrapper. It comes with some costs to building your vision.

A Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health study found that digital content creators experience high rates of anxiety, depression, and burnout, with 10% reporting suicidal thoughts related to their work. This is nearly double the rate of the broader U.S. population.

Once you start making money from your content, there’s enormous financial pressure to keep it going. The algorithms are unforgiving and constantly changing, and don’t allow for time off without impacting your reach.

Creation time requires isolation and it starts to feel a bit whack-a-mole. This obsessive attention is a recipe for burnout, anxiety, mood swings, and even worse, dependency on digital affirmation.

And it’s not just YouTube and Instagram influencers. It affects everyone trying to build something that has an online component.

You end up knowing more about algorithms than your actual customers. If you’re not careful, you end up building a personal brand that looks like a business.

Your attention ends up focused on capturing engagement over creating value.

This is marketing, yes. But it’s easy to confuse engagement activity with progress.

The platforms profit when you confuse an audience with an asset.

And now, with AI, there’s a new version emerging. Will we get so caught up in planning and strategizing our businesses that we never actually pull the trigger?

So much time optimizing and automating that we forget to do the thing we’re optimizing for?

AI can help you build the business of your dreams. But the cost is the same: the capacity for depth, traded for the illusion of productivity.

The Relational Cost: Leftovers for the People Who Actually Need You

When your kids or spouse or close friends think about time with you, do they picture your face or the back of your phone?

This is probably the biggest cost because we’ve sacrificed time with those closest to us — time we can never replace or get back — in favor of the attention or stories of total strangers.

The research on this is devastating.

Researchers have a term for it: technoference. It refers to the interruptions in face-to-face interactions caused by smartphone use. And it’s now one of the most studied phenomena in relationship science.

Here’s some interesting information:

• When parents use smartphones around their children, parent-child play is cut in half, while children’s independent play doubles.
• Heavy smartphone use led to complete parental disengagement in 25% of families studied, with parents becoming physically and emotionally distant.
• Toddlers show physiological signs of stress, such as increased heart rate and changes in respiratory patterns when their parents engage in technoference.
• 70% of adults in romantic relationships report that phones “sometimes,” “often,” “very often,” or “all the time” interfere with their interactions with their partners (so, no “nevers”). Researchers call this “partner phubbing” — phone snubbing your spouse.
• Partner phubbing contributes to increased conflict and heightened feelings of jealousy about what you’re doing over there.

As psychologist David Myers puts it: “Phubbing is micro-ostracism. It leaves someone, even while with another, suddenly alone.”

The Cognitive Cost: Your Brain May Be Shrinking

You know you’re distracted. But your capacity for depth might be genuinely wasting away.

MRI studies are now showing what this looks like inside your skull. Researchers have found that people with excessive smartphone use show reduced gray matter volume in key brain regions: the anterior cingulate cortex (your impulse control), the orbitofrontal cortex (your decision-making), and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (your executive function and focus).

These are the regions you need for sustained attention and self-control.

A 2020 study found that people with smartphone addiction showed lower gray matter volumes in the insula (linked to empathy and self-awareness) and parahippocampal regions (involved in memory) compared to controls.

If you recall, 2020 was the year we all became besties with our screens. That year sent us off into the distraction ether and we’re just now digging out from it.

Correlation doesn’t prove causation. Researchers are still determining cause and effect. But either way, there’s a clear pattern here: heavy users have measurably different brains than those who aren’t caught in the loop.

And you don’t even have to be on the phone.

A 2023 study published in Scientific Reports found that the mere presence of a smartphone — even when turned off — reduces our cognitive performance. The device doesn’t need to ring, buzz, or light up. It just needs to exist in our peripheral awareness.

Your “too long, didn’t read” response to a long article isn’t laziness or a lack of willpower. It’s now a trained incapacity.

But you do have a choice.

Blaming Platforms Won’t Save You

I don’t think this is conspiracy theory engineering.

The platforms are businesses. Their goal is to make money. And if they lack ethics, as I mentioned with Facebook’s emotional contagion study in Part 2, that makes things worse. But they’re optimizing for engagement because that’s what drives revenue.

The cry to “hold platforms accountable” for our time and attention is understandable. But it’s also misplaced.

At the end of the day, you’re the only one who can decide to retrain your attention. The platforms will never voluntarily become less engaging. That’s not their job.

Their job is to make money, and your eyeballs are the product.

Every scroll is a choice. Every phone pickup is a choice. What makes you feel so helpless is that the platforms have used complex behavioral science principles to make those choices feel automatic. But they don’t have to be.

The legal system and government oversight will continue to churn out decisions on appropriate content, censorship, and advertising monopolies.

No one but you can decide to tackle the attention cost. There’s simply no incentive for the attention industries or the government to do so.

It has to be you.

What I Want You to Do This Week

Last week, I asked you to spend a day tracking every time you picked up your phone and what triggered it. You recorded the time, the trigger, what you actually did, how long you stayed with it, and how you felt after.

That exercise gave you data. This week, we’re going to use it.

Step 1: Identify your actual costs

Write down the three things you SAY matter most to you. Think about areas in your faith, your family, or your health. Maybe it’s building your business, finishing your book, deepening your marriage. Whatever, write them down and be specific.

Step 2: Calculate the gap

Look at your tracking data from last week. Now answer honestly:

• How many hours did you give to those three things last week?
• How many hours did you give to screens (scrolling, checking, reacting)?
• What does the gap tell you about what you actually believe?

Step 3: Label what you haven’t built

Write down one specific thing you would have completed by now, or made significant progress on, if you’d had sustained, undistracted attention over the past year.

• If it was a book you haven’t written yet, give the book a title.
• If it’s a business, give your product a name or write down the problem your product will solve.
• Write down the names of the people most important to you.
• Write down the things God has done for you in the past and what you’ve been believing Him for.

When you give something a name or a label, you personalize it. It becomes real to you.

This isn’t about shaming yourself, but this will give you clarity. And you can’t count the cost of something until you can name what you’re losing.

What Comes Next

The cost is now visible. But here’s the harder confrontation: you’ve probably told yourself that what you’re doing IS working.

That staying informed makes you effective. That consuming content equals growth. That watching someone else build is preparation for building yourself.

Part 4 will challenge those assumptions. Because the lie isn’t that these things are bad.
The lie is that they’re enough.

Read Part 1 – The Dopamine Era: How Your Brain, Body, and Spirit Got Hijacked

Read Part 2 – The Dopamine Era: How the Attention Economy Actually Works On You

Sources

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Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health / Creators 4 Mental Health (2025). Creator mental health study

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