Jun 5 • General discussion
Your Attention (and your peace) Has Been Hijacked
Poor Time Management Isn’t What’s Holding You Back - It’s Psychological Engineering.
Seriously, productivity isn't the problem.
I know you think it is. I know you've bought the planners, tried the apps, done the morning routines. I know you've wondered what's wrong with you… why you can't seem to get it together when you used to be so sharp, so focused, so on it.
Your attention and focus has been hijacked.
I don't mean that metaphorically. Ephesians 6:12 says “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world." This is not new. The enemy has always wanted to steal your focus, fragment your mind, drain your energy. What's new is the delivery system.
There are people—smart people, well-funded people—who have studied exactly how to capture your attention and keep it. They know what they're doing. They've seen the research on what it does to the human mind, to our children, to our ability to think and connect and be present with the people we love. They've seen it... and they keep doing it anyway.
Every time you pick up your phone and lose 45 minutes you didn't plan to lose, that's not a character flaw. That's engineering. Every time you sit down to do important work and feel a pull to check, to scroll, to just see real quick—that's not weakness. That's billions of dollars of research working exactly as designed.
The enemy isn't you, your lack of discipline or organization or even your phone. The enemy is a highly engineered system built to extract your attention because your attention is worth money to people who don't care what it costs you.
In January 2012, Facebook ran an experiment on nearly 700,000 people. Without telling them. They manipulated what showed up in people's feeds—more negative content for some, more positive for others—and they proved they could shift people's emotional states without anyone knowing it was happening.
Not just influence… Shift. They discovered that they could make you sadder, more anxious, angry, and even excited… and you’d never even notice it was a pattern, and it was on purpose.
This was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014. You can look it up yourself—search "Facebook emotional contagion study PNAS 2014." They admitted it. They documented it. They were proud of it. Evil doesn’t bother trying to hide its face anymore because a few scrolls later, no one even remembers. AND THIS IS WHY.
Its not a new strategy. The KNOWN science of engineering public emotion and consent goes back nearly a hundred years. If you want to understand where all of this started, read Edward Bernays—he's considered the father of public relations. His 1947 essay "The Engineering of Consent" lays out exactly how public opinion can be shaped and directed through psychology and mass media. He was Sigmund Freud's nephew, and he used his uncle's theories about the unconscious mind to move entire populations without them knowing they were being moved.
What Facebook discovered in 2012 was just Bernays at scale, automated, and optimized by … you guessed it… algorithms.
What they learned about emotional sequencing… the way to move you from one state to another in a way that makes you more likely to engage, click and then buy… that knowledge became the foundation of everything that followed.
I'm going to go deeper on exactly how that sequence works tomorrow. Because once you see it, you can't unsee it. And THAT is how you get your power back. THAT is how you get your PEACE back.
As long as you believe the problem is YOU… your lack discipline/willpower or work ethic… you will keep trying new things to fix YOU and you will keep failing because you're fighting the wrong battle.
You cannot out-discipline a system designed by thousands of engineers to override your discipline.
The good news is, you don't have to.
Once you see the game, you can stop playing it. Here's how you start:
For the next three days, I want you to notice the feelings when you scroll. Notice the patterns of what you’re watching. What is the emotional hook of the first thing, second thing, third thing? How often does an ad show up? What do you see right before the ad?
Just… notice.
And when you're standing in line and your hand goes to your pocket to pull out your phone… notice.When you're waiting for something to load and you feel the itch… just… notice. When you finish one task and before you start the next, something says check, scroll, look… just… notice.
Don’t worry about trying to CHANGE the behavior yet. Just start to see how it shows up. The truth is it's been trained into you so gradually that you don't even recognize external.
By the way, when I first really started marketing in 2008 I remember being warned that I’d never see the world the same again. Ignorance might have been bliss in the olden days. Now it’s anxiety.
But you can change that. And I’ll show you how. Yes… I’ve broken the trap myself and kept it at bay for a few years. Only NOW I understand the engineering behind what I was feeling, and I want to make sure you do too.
Next time, we're going to look at exactly how they engineer your emotions in a specific sequence to get you to do what they want. It takes them less than 90 seconds. Ninety. Seconds.
Your mama never warned you about THIS.
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Your Attention (and your peace) Has Been Hijacked
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