Crowded with content – The Hindu

Have you ever opened social media, started watching or reading something shared by a sensible, well-meaning person — and found yourself unable to continue beyond a few seconds?

I have. Often.

This is not about frivolous content. It happens even with serious, thoughtful material — issues that matter, arguments worth considering. I begin to read or watch, and then I stop. Not in protest. Just tired. For a while, I wondered if this was about age-related attention span. Then I realised it was something else. It was saturation.

Social media today feels like being spoken to continuously. Every post asks for attention, agreement, reaction, validation. Even when ideas are important, they arrive with an insistence that leaves little room to pause or think. I notice this most with videos. However careful or well-produced they may be, they demand an immediacy I no longer seem to have. Within moments, my mind feels crowded, and I look away.

This does not mean I care less. I still follow the news. I still read long articles. I still think about the same social and cultural questions I always have. But I now prefer encountering them in forms that allow continuity — a newspaper, a book, a conversation. What unsettles me about social media is not any single post, but the accumulation. One subject replaces another without transition. Tragedy, opinion, humour, outrage — all appear side by side, bombard you with no beginning or end. Over time, I have stopped scrolling. I open these platforms now only for a purpose — to share something I have written or to look up something specific. I don’t linger lazily.

I do not see this as withdrawal. It feels more like a transition — a realisation that attention is limited, and that engagement does not have to be constant to be real. It is not disinterest or disengagement — just exercising the choice to decide what I engage with, how much, and when.

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