This morning, I woke up to bright sunlight refracting rainbows through the prisms hanging in my bedroom window. Early spring birds were chirping. I sleepily moved through my morning yoga, then opened social media.
I scrolled for ten minutes and cried.
It’s Monday. I spent the entire weekend at home. And yet I am exhausted. Emotionally depleted.
I drank my quart of hot water and sat down at my desk, staring at the 800 tabs I have open. What was I working on again?
I open my inbox and remember the seven bills I have to pay, the tickets I have to buy, the subscriptions I need to renew. I feel the pull to put all of it aside and instead doomscroll through the day’s disasters brought on by our corrupt and evil government. I feel less like a person directing my life and more like a caged animal reacting to stimuli.
What is even the point of anything anymore?
Intellectually, I understand what is happening. Would-be fascists use terrible spectacle in rapid succession to numb us to violence and consolidate power. They operate inside social media platforms engineered for engagement, outrage, and velocity. These systems reward reaction, not reflection. They extract our attention and leave us scattered, depleted, fragmented.
I understand all of this.
And yet, here I am, still being pulled into it.
I’m writing this for anyone who has felt that same sinking recognition that none of this is sustainable. If you’re spiraling and looking for a shred of meaning or even a small spark of joy right now, consider inserting a segment of deep work into your day.
This is not productivity advice.
Making space for deep work is a balm for disconnection. It is a way to create meaning again. And more than that, it is a quiet rebellion against the dystopia being constructed by billionaires and tech bros.
Deep work is not just about output. It is about recovering the self and carrying the light forward.
Deep Work Restores Identity
Back when I worked in early stage tech, even before the age of the influencer, there was a flood of books and blogs about developing habits that promised ultra performance, extreme productivity, and ultimate success. It was a highly competitive environment filled with high achievers grinding toward ambitious goals. It was the birthplace of hustle culture.
I consumed all of it. I adopted habits from across the spectrum. Over time, I began noticing the same ideas resurfacing in different forms. Common themes presented through different lenses. Deep work was one of them.
It was framed as a productivity hack. A method for generating flow. A focus enhancer. A competitive edge. A way to cultivate thought leadership, creativity, and unique ideas.
I tried nearly everything. Drinking celery juice every morning. Waking up at 5 a.m. Buying multiple sets of the same clothes to reduce fashion decision fatigue. Setting mindset tuning alarms on my phone every hour. Most of it proved empty and tedious.
My deep work habit, however, endured. It has become one of the most valuable lifestyle changes I have ever made. Cal Newport, in his book ‘Deep Work,’ argues that the ability to focus without distraction is becoming increasingly rare in modern society and therefore valuable. I would add something else. It is becoming necessary for psychological survival.
Yes, scheduling a daily deep work session every morning has made me more productive. It has generated flow states. It has improved my ability to focus, especially alongside a reading habit. It has helped me articulate my own ideas more clearly. But that is not why it matters most.
Deep work pushes my cognitive abilities to their limit and helps me find myself amid the storm of present day life.
Working without distraction each morning, first for 30 minutes, then 60, and now often two hours, has restored my continuity of thought and my internal coherence. It gives me a sense of agency. A felt sense of authorship over my own mind. Identity requires sustained attention. Without continuity of thought, the self begins to dissolve into reaction.
Deep work is the antidote to the fragmentation of society, community, and self that is driven by social media.
Most importantly, it has pulled me back from the brink of the emotional depletion and exhaustion I described earlier. Deep work restores my identity. It renews my resolve. It supplies my day with a deeper sense of meaning. And sometimes, during a deep work session, I’ll feel a little bit of joy, hope, a sense of accomplishment in my work that has become so rare.
When you work deeply, you stop being a consumer of reality and become a participant in shaping it. At least that is how it feels. Fragmentation produces passivity. Depth produces self trust. In that sense, pursuing deep work is not only healing. It is a rebellion against the extraction machine of our larger society. Deep work does not remove chaos from the world. It restores your ability to face it while staying grounded and true to yourself.
Depth as an Act of Resistance
When I first worked in tech during the explosion of Web 2.0 and big data, the extraction machine of the attention economy was still in its early stages. Platforms like Meta, Google, and Twitter had already shifted away from earning revenue through software alone. Their real business was behavioral data. They farmed human attention and engagement, refined user data sets, and sold targeted access to advertisers.
At the time, there was little public awareness of this economic model or its long term consequences.
Today, the attention economy underpins most of the modern internet. Your time on the platform is the product. The longer you stay, the more ads you see. The more emotionally activated you are, the more likely you are to engage. Engagement produces data. Data refines the algorithm. The algorithm optimizes for what keeps you there.
As media scholar Tim Wu argues in ‘The Attention Merchants’, industries have long competed to capture and resell human attention. The difference now is scale and precision. Algorithms learn your triggers. They personalize stimulation. They adjust in real time. The result is a culture engineered for interruption. When attention becomes the commodity, distraction becomes the default condition.
We are now more aware of this structure and are living with its fallout. We live inside an economy where focus is monetized and reactivity is rewarded. Platforms profit when we stay stressed out and fearful. Outrage spreads faster than reflection because outrage keeps us scrolling. In this system, distraction is the business model.
If your attention is continuously fragmented, you are easier to manipulate. When you turn off notifications, close the newsfeed, stay with one difficult paragraph, or wrestle with one idea for ninety uninterrupted minutes, you are practicing noncompliance with that system.
Deep work strengthens your ability to focus. It grounds your sense of identity. It builds intellectual stamina and sharpens discernment. These are civic virtues, not just career skills. In a time of rising authoritarianism, they aid you in your personal resistance.
Authoritarian movements thrive on emotional reactivity, simplified narratives, perpetual outrage, and short attention cycles. Social media ecosystems amplify these tendencies by design. Deep work interrupts that cycle. It is the counterspell.
Grounded Invitation: One Practice
If you want to feel less scattered, less reactive, less small in a chaotic world, reclaim one hour. I know from many years of building habits and reshaping my lifestyle that this is not easy. It requires commitment. It may require sacrificing some other part of your day. That is the cost.
The ultimate goal is two hours of uninterrupted time focused on one clearly defined problem. No phone. No task switching. No researching on the internet unless it was planned in advance. Stop when the time ends. Repeat the next day.
In Deep Work, Cal Newport explains that most people cannot immediately sustain deep focus for long periods, especially if they are stressed and conditioned to constant stimulation. Even high performers rarely exceed four hours per day, usually split into two sessions.
So begin with thirty minutes. Even fifteen. Start small and gradually increase your time. Years ago, when I first tried to build a yoga practice, all I could manage was four minutes. I made it so easy it felt trivial. Capacity grows through repetition, not intensity.
When I first developed my deep work habit, I used those early sessions for structured journaling. I wanted to understand my childhood trauma and personal limitations that hindered my success, so I bought a book of prompts and wrote about one question each morning for thirty minutes. Then I began my workday.
You might use the time to build your business, write, study, or strengthen a skill that improves your job performance. If your schedule is tight, choose one meaningful problem inside your existing work and give it undivided attention.
Be experimental. Try to implement a deep work session at different times of the day. I protect my mornings because that is when my mind is clearest. I schedule meetings in the afternoon. I try to put in my deep work before any external inputs. I do not wake up at 5 a.m. That does not work for me. Although I am always trying to go to sleep earlier so maybe someday I’ll get there.
Be forgiving with yourself. Deep work is a practice, not a rigid rule. I began cultivating this habit nearly fifteen years ago, and it has ebbed and flowed. I have found it particularly challenging to focus on my deep work, and not doomscroll through this entire presidency. I have struggled to stay focused. I still feel the pull to scroll. It is not effortless.
I also no longer hold myself to a grind culture schedule. After 4 p.m., my focus is gone. Deep work requires a lot of energy. So I leave the office and read in a coffeeshop that I walk to each afternoon. I have had to accept my own limitations and be kind to myself.
But when I am at my lowest, engaging with deep work pulls me back from the brink and allows me to keep moving forward. It allows me to carry the light. It restores coherence. It gives me something solid to stand on.
We are living in a moment of high stress and extreme uncertainty. Corporations profit from your distraction. Political actors benefit from your reactivity. Their business model is designed to break you down, manipulate your behavior to suit their ends, and extract meaning from every corner of your life.
In a world trying to fragment you, choosing depth is how you stay whole. Engaging in deep work is a quiet, daily act of sovereignty. And it is my strongest recommendation for a small personal rebellion.
If this resonated, consider subscribing to Still Processing. I write about focus, meaning, power, technology, and how to remain intact inside systems designed to fracture us.
