This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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Dinging. Buzzing. Notifications. Alerts. Reminders. These punctuate modern life, ruining our attention spans and leaving us feeling tired, burned out, and depleted of our energy. We watch our screens, wishing we weren’t, and it seems like we’re powerless to look away from the constant swirl of content. But there’s a better way of living if we were willing to fight for it.

In a world of six-second videos, most of us don’t have the attention span to read the books we want or write the stories that float around in our heads, but it’s possible to restore the focus and creativity we’ve lost.

Based on my own experience before and after getting rid of my smartphone, the question isn’t how to do it. We all know we’re unhappy spending hours a day looking at the bright pixels of social media and Netflix, mindlessly consuming. The question is whether we have the strength to make our lives harder on purpose, to be bored sometimes, and to experience the doldrums of life. Then we can become creative and curious again.

As a homeschooled kid, I’d get my schoolwork done early, usually by lunch. That way, I’d have hours before the other kids got home from school to play with my siblings on the empty neighborhood streets. Eventually, we got bored of our scooters and bikes. We craved something new and exciting, so we lashed a bowl-shaped bamboo chair someone had thrown in the trash to wheelie boards we’d gotten for Christmas the previous year. The resulting vehicle allowed one kid to be pulled behind another by a rope — like a street tube that could be flung down the driveway and pulled around and around.

It was dangerous. It was janky. It was extremely fun.

One day while we were playing with it on the street, a pedestrian stopped. She must not have seen all the DIY flourishes because she had the audacity to ask, “Where can I get one of those for my kids?”

You couldn’t buy that death trap anywhere. It was concocted out of toys, trash, and duct tape using a creative streak born out of sheer boredom and a zero-dollar budget.

Our best ideas come during times of silence, reflection, and nothingness. When we’re consuming content, whether social media or streaming services, we’re thinking about how to get what we want, to get a dopamine fix, to feel something. Sometimes, we don’t even want what we’re getting, but we’re too locked into the cycle to break out of it.

You can’t read that book you’ve been wanting to crack open for years when you’re used to short videos riddled with ASMR and horse hoof cleaning.

When I was working as an editor of a daily newspaper, I’d get emails constantly. I had an Apple Watch that would let me know about new notifications. I’d get texts throughout the day, Facebook notifications, beeps, pings, and warnings about new OS updates. I wrote for my job, but I never wrote for fun. I never read magazines or books. Who had the time or the mental willpower? At the end of a long day, it was just easier to put on “The Office” again or watch a new show on Apple TV.

Then my wife and I got rid of our TV in hopes that we and our children would spend less time in front of it. We saw how even a few minutes of screen time affected our daughter’s behavior and our own.

But it wasn’t until after I traded my iPhone for a Light Phone, which has only the most basic apps and an e-ink screen, that I started seeing changes in how I was able to focus. I also made a point not to use my computer after normal work hours, barring job-related emergencies.

Suddenly, it was possible to read magazine articles at night, even if it took several days to get through one. It was easy to listen to albums all the way through. I started calling people more to connect with them and hear their voices. Without all the noise of modernity, the constant distractions, I also started finding time to write fun stories, to build a novel in my head and start to write it on paper. Our deepest thoughts thrive in the quietness of our minds, I have found.

By filling our heads with endless streams of videos, podcasts, songs, clips, reels, streamers, edits, and movies on demand, we leave no room for ideas to flourish. We don’t spend time thinking because we don’t have to anymore.

When we’re addicted to the feeds and the algorithms, we’re the pedestrian who walks by a good idea and says, “How can I have that?”

It’s not technically difficult to start your new life. Get rid of your TV or hide the power cord, get a dumb phone or severely limit the capacity of your smartphone, stop filling your head with other people’s stuff, and wait for your mind to reset itself.

The transition from consumer to one who is creative and curious takes time. It’s not an easy switch to flip, and the fight is difficult to maintain. I can actually feel my attention span being sapped after using certain sites. It turns out that switching topics every five seconds isn’t good for us.

The intellectual costs of our age are staggering: How many poems will never be written? How many songs will never be sung? How many great books will go unread? How many short stories will go unpublished?

With AI use increasing, our collective creative slump is only going to get worse. Thankfully, we hold the power to take back our ability to create and build our focus back. We just need to work for it. And that’s harder than it has ever been.

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Brendan Clarey is the deputy editor of Michigan Enjoyer.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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