KeithHave you ever sat down with someone who cannot stop looking at their phone? You’re trying to have a decent conversation with them, but every “bing” and “bong” from their phone pulls them farther and farther away from you.
It’s as if we have found a new way of making people even more compliant and stupid.
One of the main culprits is social media, especially when the subject is politics. The politics of late are especially dark.
A lethal cocktail of social media, which some might say is run by people with dubious intentions, and populist politicians who appear on it, demanding an almost cult-like following, is producing a disturbing trend of zombie-like people addicted to online abuse and gullible enough to think that any of these politicians makes any difference at all.
Are you really any better off? Is your country great again? It’s the people that make a nation great, tolerant people, not politicians. They are just noise.
Here’s a hard truth that very few people want to hear.
Arguing about politics online is expensive. Not emotionally expensive, financially expensive.
And most people have no idea how much it is really costing them.
Every day, millions of intelligent, capable people wake up with potential sitting quietly inside them. Ideas. Energy. Focus. Creativity. The raw ingredients of opportunity. Then, before their feet even touch the floor, they pick up their phone.
Notifications. Headlines. Outrage. Opinions. Arguments disguised as discussions. Endless scrolling that feels like you’re staying informed but behaves more like mental quicksand.
What starts as “just checking the news” becomes a steady drip feed of noise that hijacks attention and fractures thinking. The mind never settles. It never deepens. It never builds momentum.
And momentum is everything if you want to create something meaningful, profitable, or lasting.
Let’s talk about the actual cost of that noise.
The illusion of importance
Online political arguments feel important. They’re framed as moral battles, intellectual sparring matches, or civic duties. But here’s the uncomfortable question most people never ask themselves.
What has this actually changed in my life?
Did that comment you typed shift policy? Did that argument convert anyone? Did that hour spent reading threads move you closer to your goals?
In most cases, the answer is no.
What it did do was steal attention. Attention that could have been invested elsewhere. Attention that could have been turned into value.
Entrepreneurs understand something instinctively. Attention is currency. Where it flows, outcomes follow.
Spending it arguing with strangers who are emotionally invested in being right is one of the worst investments available.
Cognitive residue and mental fragmentation
There’s a concept in psychology called cognitive residue. When you switch tasks frequently, a part of your mind stays attached to the previous task. It doesn’t reset cleanly. It lingers.
Now consider what happens when your day looks like this.
A political headline. A notification. A short video. A comment thread. A reply. A counter reply. A meme. Another headline.
Your mind never fully returns to neutral. It stays fragmented, reactive, and slightly agitated. That state is poison for creative work, strategic thinking, or business building.
You can’t spot opportunities when your nervous system is busy defending opinions.
You can’t think long-term when your brain is trapped in short-term outrage cycles.
This is why so many people feel busy all day yet accomplish very little that actually moves the needle.
The entrepreneurial mindset hates noise
Entrepreneurial thinking requires space. Quiet. Depth.
Ideas don’t usually arrive when your mind is overstimulated. They come when there’s room for them to land.
Noise crowds that space out.
Scrolling trains your brain to expect constant novelty. Every swipe delivers something new. This rewires attention toward shallow consumption instead of sustained focus. Over time, deep work feels uncomfortable. Silence feels boring. Stillness feels wrong.
But stillness is where clarity lives.
The irony is brutal. The very platforms people use to “stay informed” are actively sabotaging their ability to build anything of value.
If you’re serious about creating income, impact, or independence, you need a mind that can sit with a problem long enough to solve it. Not one that requires a hit of stimulation every thirty seconds.
The hidden revenue leak
Let’s talk numbers.
Imagine you lose just one hour a day to pointless scrolling and political arguments—one hour where your attention is fragmented, emotionally drained, and mentally scattered.
Over a year, that’s more than 350 hours.
What could 350 focused hours produce for you?
A new product. A book. A course. A business system. A side income that compounds. Skills that pay dividends for decades.
Instead, that time dissolves into noise—nothing to show for it. No asset created. No leverage built.
This is how thousands in lost revenue disappear without anyone noticing. Not through one big mistake, but through small daily leaks of attention.
Most people don’t fail because they lack ability. They fail because they allow their minds to be hijacked by things that don’t pay them back.
Emotional energy is a finite resource.
Arguing online isn’t just mentally distracting; it’s emotionally taxing.
Outrage drains energy. Frustration drains energy. Feeling misunderstood drains energy.
That energy has to come from somewhere. And when it’s spent on things you can’t control, it’s not available for things you can.
Entrepreneurship demands emotional resilience. You need energy to persist, to test ideas, to fail, to adapt. Wasting that energy on online battles leaves you depleted before you even start your own work.
This is why so many people feel exhausted without knowing why. They haven’t done anything physically demanding, yet they feel mentally drained.
Their energy has been siphoned off all day by noise.
Information addiction disguised as awareness
One of the clever tricks of the modern attention economy is convincing people that constant consumption equals intelligence.
It doesn’t.
Knowing more headlines doesn’t make you wiser. It often makes you more anxious, more reactive, and less effective.
Accurate intelligence is selective. It knows what to ignore.
Entrepreneurs aren’t uninformed. They’re disciplined. They choose inputs that help them build, not inputs designed to provoke emotional reactions.
When you curate what enters your mind, you regain control over your internal state. And your internal state determines your external results.
Reclaiming your attention is an act of self-respect
This isn’t about politics. It’s about ownership of your mind.
Every minute you spend in a pointless argument is a minute you hand over to someone else’s agenda. Algorithms don’t care about your goals. Outrage keeps you scrolling. Calm doesn’t.
Reclaiming your attention isn’t selfish. It’s responsible.
When you reduce noise, clarity returns. When clarity returns, focus strengthens. When focus strengthens, opportunities become visible again.
The question isn’t whether the noise will exist. It always will.
The real question is whether you’ll continue to rent your attention out to it for free.
Because attention, once lost, rarely returns with interest.
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Have a great day.
Keith
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Arguing about politics online is like knocking your head against the wall – over and over and over. Might as well just do that instead. It’s a bad idea. You’re not going to change anyone’s mind, and you will spark tempers – theirs and yours, and you’ll just end up feeling frustrated and bad after all that. No point.
100% agree. Thanks for the comment.