What the Internet Is Doing to Our Minds – Part 2: The Shimmer Effect
Part 2: The Shimmer Effect—Why We Can’t Focus Anymore
The most powerful corporations in the world are hiring the highest-quality experts and skills to create the most addictive, pleasure-hitting, keeps-us-coming-back-for-more algorithms.
Let’s break it down.
Massive tech companies with enormous influence, resources, and capital hire the best engineers, neuroscientists, behavioral psychologists, and AI specialists to come up with algorithms that optimize user engagement.
Why would they do that? Because they profit from user attention, primarily through advertising revenue and data collection.
They use vast datasets and machine learning to predict and influence human behavior, often in ways that increase time spent on their platforms.
Social media, streaming, and gaming platforms use psychological and behavioral triggers similar to those in gambling. They trigger the dopamine system, which governs pleasure and reward in the brain. Features like:
Infinite scrolling (no stopping point)
Personalized recommendations (content you’re more likely to enjoy)
Rewards (likes, comments, notifications—similar to slot machines in casinos)
AI-driven content selection (keeps showing what you "might" like next)
These mechanisms encourage compulsive usage and make it difficult to stop.
Since these platforms thrive on engagement (more time spent = more ad revenue), they are designed to become habit-forming, to keep you hooked.
Social validation, fear of missing out (FOMO), and carefully timed notifications create a cycle of craving > consumption > satisfaction > craving again.
I’ll give you an example—I deleted Instagram from my phone because I was spending too much time on it, just scrolling. So I got rid of it, but then I put it back because I’m in Bali, attending all these workshops for research, and at the end of the workshops, most of the coaches and teachers had their QR codes up with their Instagram accounts, saying, ‘If you want to connect, if you want more information, just DM me on Instagram.’ So I put it back on my phone to make that process easier. But after just two days, I realized I was back to scrolling again. So I deleted it again—because I was hooked again. Not because I’m weak or lame, but because that’s what it’s designed to do.
Ok, so the above means, they keep us hooked and addicted, making it easy for us to get lost in the shimmer and find ourselves mindlessly scrolling.
But is it bad that we do that? What happens when we spend so much time on it? What does that do to our brains and attention abilities? Our self-worth? How is it affecting us and our state of mind?
Studies show that social media can lead to compulsive behavior patterns, increased anxiety, and reduced attention spans.
Reduced attention spans means we can’t concentrate.
So when we endlessly scroll online, it makes our brain and nervous system task-switch so often that we become ‘mentally injured’—and we don’t even notice it. The injury is to our attentional system, which basically means we can’t concentrate or stay focused on a single idea for hours, days, months, or years.
Why is that important?
If we can’t concentrate → we can’t finish a task → this messes with our results in life → we feel like we’re failing, incompetent, or useless → that messes with our self-worth, self-belief, and self-confidence.
We start a lot of things but hardly ever finish them. We lose trust and faith in ourselves. This makes us feel like we’re failing, like we can’t finish anything or get anywhere in life. And that is not good.
"The average employee will check their email, Slack, or text messages every 3–5 minutes. The average television commercial happens every 7 minutes."
— Erick Godsey, Have You Noticed the New World: An Intro to the Shimmer
"The average person checks their phone between 120 and 220 times a day. If you check your phone 200 times a day and you sleep for eight hours, that means you check your phone, on average, every 4.9 minutes. It takes us about 15 minutes to drop into focus on any given task.
And so the average person is statistically constantly distracted. What happens is we do something that we call multitasking. But guys, multitasking with your conscious mind is not possible." …
"People who multitask are significantly less effective at completing whatever task they're trying to do. People who multitask, on average, take twice as long to complete a task compared to people who don't multitask."
— Erick Godsey, How to Surf The Shimmer Like a Focused Artist
“Multitasking isn’t real—it’s just constant task-switching. And it’s fucking up your brain.”
Our brains need long stretches of deep, meaningful work to feel happy and healthy. It’s satisfying. It gives us a sense of completion and success. But right now, it’s quite obvious that most of us can’t do it because we are mentally injured. Our attentional system is hurt, and we just can’t sit still or stay focused on anything for longer than a short while.
“I believe that deep focus, which means to keep our attention on a single thing for multiple hours, is akin to working out, that we have evolved to require it, and that if we don’t get it, it makes us feel sick. ”
To be continued…
👉 Read Part 3: Breaking Free—Reclaiming Our Focus and Sanity