This entry is part of a series on “The Pull”: Preface. The Pull. Intro. Overcome The Pull. 1. The Road. 2. The Fronts. 3. The Tools. 4. The Practice. Conclusion. Beyond The Pull.
It no longer feels like we are in a culture war but rather a spiritual one—an “unseen war,” as my Orthodox brothers and sisters call it. For secular-minded readers, an unseen war can be understood as a conflict in which one force seeks to capture attention and pull it away from what is most important—a.k.a., what’s most sacred.
To borrow Émile Durkheim’s secular-friendly notion of the term, the sacred can be understood as that which binds people together, fostering social cohesion through shared reverence. The Pull does the opposite—it creates social fragmentation through shared distraction.
An “attentional martial art” is needed to overcome The Pull, a phenomenon that fosters shared distraction by compulsively drawing people toward the screen—and then into it—ultimately reducing their agency. As a recent inquiry partner told me, The Pull is something that “eats your agency.”
In unseen warfare, there are battlefronts—or fronts—and I suggest viewing them as physical, relational, and spectacle. Or, to make it more tangible: screens, correspondence, and entertainment.
Screens: Phone and computer
Correspondence: Emails, messengers, and social media
Entertainment: YouTube, gaming, streaming, and porn
Regardless of how they are conceptualized, it’s helpful to see these as distinct fronts. While all share the unconscious pulling sensation, each requires its own specific tactics in response.
Front 1: Physical / Screens
The best place to start is with something physical, something you can touch and put aside.
Screens, whether on phones or computers, are the physical source of The Pull. Regardless of the device, creating personal protocols is necessary. You can use the “condition-action rule” framework to design them: a specific condition that triggers a certain action. For example:
After waking up (condition), engage in a workout before looking at any device (action).
Before looking at your phone or turning on the computer for the day (condition), say a prayer to align your will with what is good (action).
When 6 PM arrives (condition), put phones in a box (action).
Use the “slow discipline” approach—start with one condition-action rule and add more once it becomes habitual. However, such rules alone will not be enough; further tactics will be needed.
Phones, especially “smart” ones, are enemy number one when it comes to The Pull.
Phones
The main approaches to responding to smartphones are:
Get rid of it and switch to a dumbphone.
Keep it, but minimize its use.
For #1, I recommend
’s wonderful zine guide, You Don't Need a Smartphone: A Practical Guide to Downgrading & Reclaiming Your Life. For #2, I recommend the AIR Method.The former provides a simple guide to becoming smartphone-free, while the latter uses the slow discipline approach—allowing you to keep your smartphone while reestablishing agency and using it minimally.
I personally use a combination of both approaches, which I will discuss further in the next entry on tools.
Computers
Most tactics for the phone also apply to the computer (including tablets). For example:
Grayscale your screen—this is commonly recommended for phones but can be done for computers as well.
Turn off notifications from various messengers and apps. The red notification is not your friend.
Use web blockers to block everything—uBlock Origin is the best all-purpose blocker. See how my friend
uses it to lock down his Substack.
The Center for Humane Technology offers a “Take Control Toolkit” with more tactics for both phones and computers.
Front 2: Relational / Correspondence
The strongest aspect of The Pull—one that cannot be completely eliminated unless you become a monk—is digital correspondence with people you know or are getting to know. Many people are polite and experience anxiety about not responding promptly, even when it is not professionally required. This needs to change; we must reestablish the unspoken rules of how available we should be to others.
There is an automatic correspondence loop many fall into when turning on their device—checking messages, email, and social media (which serves as a correspondence tool if they have a profile). The problem arises when this loop becomes compulsive, and there are no new messages to check. This can quickly start to feel sad, pathetic, and low-status.1
The easier-said-than-done move—assuming your work allows for it—is to “time block” your correspondence times. I aim to check and (maybe) respond to new emails and messages three times a week—Monday, Wednesday, and Friday—within a focused hour. Later in the day is better than earlier because emails and texts can be distracting; a single message can hijack your attention.
If I can’t respond to everything, then tough titties—it’ll have to wait for the next time-blocked session. I have a dumbphone for responding to my wife and family only, at all times. Texting on it is beyond annoying, so we exchange brief messages if needed and prefer phone calls—or, even better, talking in person.
Before shifting to a more regimented approach to digital correspondence, let your family and close friends know you’ll be available more selectively. If your friends get upset by this, they’re not real friends.
Use the “five sentences” (or two, three, or four) policy:
The Problem: E-mail takes too long to respond to, resulting in continuous inbox overflow for those who receive a lot of it.
The Solution: Treat all email responses like SMS text messages, using a set number of letters per response. Since it’s too hard to count letters, we count sentences instead.
five.sentenc.es is a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be five sentences or less. It’s that simple.
You can mention that you’re using this policy and the days you check emails in your footer, like this:
If you use Gmail, get Inbox When Ready, which hides your inbox and allows you to send emails without getting distracted by new ones—saving them for your time-blocked sessions.
If you get a lot of emails, triage will naturally occur, and you’ll end up forgoing responses to some altogether. This was hard for me at first since some people get butthurt easily. Yet, no communication is a form of communication: Your message is not relevant enough in my life right now to warrant a response. Have the courage to convey this truth—which does not mean they are not relevant as a human being.
The way I see it now, ignoring the easily butthurt gives them an opportunity to disambiguate the two forms of relevance, allowing them to individuate—something that excessive politeness would deny.
Messengers
The most popular messengers are WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal. Consider scaling down to just one. I recommend Signal for its privacy focus. Turn off all notifications on your phone and computer, and apply the time-blocking protocol for when you're ready to check for new messages.
Social Media
Just delete it. It’s evil—status anxiety, culture war, doomscrolling, self-blackmailing, and now, the AI-induced slop apocalypse.
If you insist on playing the “I must get more attention” game (don’t), apply the condition-action and time-blocking protocols mentioned above.
There are specific Substacks for this subfront, such as
.Front 3: Spectacle / Entertainment
An important concept is French philosopher Guy Debord’s “spectacle,” which he wrote about in his most famous work, The Society of the Spectacle (1967). The spectacle, crudely understood, is mass entertainment, but Debord saw it as social relationships being mediated by images. Real life gets replaced by representations (shadows on the cave wall), turning all of us into passive spectators.
The trajectory of the spectacle is “the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing.” The art is to reverse this trend—to move from appearing back to being. Think of the spectacle as a prison (or the Platonic cave) you need to escape from, and The Pull as your chains. Remove them, and you’re free.
Besides, a great spectacle exodus is occurring. You don’t want to be left behind, wasting life as a stupefied spectator.
YouTube
uBlock is your friend—or use YouTube-specific blockers like Unhook to hide everything. Your YouTube landing page should look like this:
Unsubscribe from every channel except the most essential (like The Stoa—just joking, consider unfollowing that too if you’re not into impenetrable video titles. And yes, never crush the like button.)
Gaming
Just stop. You’re not a child anymore. Use this time to invest in your body, and take up a sport instead.
Streaming
It’s amazing how many video streaming services exist: Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, etc. If you’re paying for multiple subscriptions, narrow them down to just one.
I highly recommend MUBI—a curated streaming service specializing in indie and foreign films you wouldn’t find on the slop streamers. Slower, artsy films are good for the soul. Yes, they are more demanding to watch, but ultimately more rewarding, as they don’t leave you with simple answers or spectacle-feed you ready-made narratives.
Porn
I was an occasional porn watcher but managed to shake this demonic habit. If you're a guy, here’s my step-by-step plan to stop:
Stop masturbating—go on a slow-discipline NoFap plan.
Keep watching porn without masturbating. This builds willpower.
For a whole week, watch documentaries on how messed up the porn industry is (Hot Girls Wanted, Money Shot, I Slept With 100 Men in One Day). You’ll see young, already traumatized women being further abused, falling into addiction, and being consumed by a hyper-predatory industry. It’s disgusting.
The following week, watch The Entity Pill series at The Stoa and realize that you risk being possessed by literal demons by watching this stuff.
Stop watching.
This is the most obviously evil aspect of The Pull. Being “porn-brained” not only juvenilizes a mind neurologically but also darkens the male gaze and further exacerbates the alienation between the sexes.
Bonus Front: Comments
Similar to my opinion on podcasts, my stance on comment sections is definitely not the majority view—which either means I am a great fool or on the less foolish path.
Removing the comment section, especially on my YouTube channel, is where I receive the most criticism. To be charitable, the main arguments go something like this:
You will fail to grow your channel.
You miss out on feedback and criticism.
You are reducing user experience.
My general responses:
One does not need to grow their channel to be financially well off, offer value, and be happy.
One can receive good—if not better—feedback and criticism by other means (e.g., directly asking for it at the end of Substack posts).
One should not encourage lazy viewer entitlement or make mimetic desire (unconsciously copying the opinions of others) too easy.
Nobody stops to ask what the internet would be like if enabling comment sections were not the default setting, which has become the unquestioned norm. I suspect it would be a much better place: more peaceful, artful, and human.
If one is a “content creator,” the pull of the comments is very strong, perhaps the strongest, for understandable reasons. People will be talking about you publicly for the world to see, keeping you on the screen more than off it. Beyond this, it serves as the main place for “audience capture,” which I previously defined as:
Audience capture is the proposed phenomenon where an online creator gets shaped by chasing their audience's approval, and their personality contorts in ways that pull them out of their integrity. The canonical example of audience capture comes from Gurwinder, discussing how internet celebrity Nicholas Perry went from skinny vegan to obese “mukbang” eater because he chased approval from his audience, who cruelly encouraged him to keep eating.
To varying degrees, all content creators2 who enable comments become like Perry3, not visually but internally. They turn into caricatures of themselves, trapped in a vibe and a parasocial “community” they no longer want to be part of. A Faustian bargain not worth the likes and subscribers.
Additionally, comment sections serve as an “attack vector” for the culture war and for any anonymous sociopath looking to inflict reputational damage at zero cost to themselves. For further arguments against comment sections, read Bram Adams’ piece, “Comment Sections are Bad For You.”
That being said, it may be wise for me to play “the game” and enable comments at a later date. But for now, it is wonderfully freeing to be comment-free. And yes, I am aware of how much people love comment sections. Given that I am a generous soul, I created this video with enabled comments for all comment lovers to express themselves.
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This part of the series on overcoming The Pull will be the most difficult because there are multiple fronts pulling you in different ways. The above is simply a sketch of what has worked for me through trial and error, considered thought, and haphazardly falling in and out of The Pull over the years.
I am definitely not the only one endeavouring to overcome this. An attentional martial art will be created. And we will begin to push back together.
If you have any recommendations, questions, insights, feedback, or criticism on this entry or more generally, message me below (I read and respond on Saturdays) …
“Checking my phone was something I needed to actively deny myself all day and night. Otherwise, I might be on it constantly. I always had a reason to check it. I always needed to know something. Is it going to rain later? What year did that historical event happen? How much money do I have? Who directed that movie? What’s that guy’s last name? When is that project due? Did I reply to that email? I needed to know these things, and I needed to know them immediately, and every time I activated the screen a secret flame of hope rose up within me, letting me know that my needs were beside the point: all I really cared about was whether someone had written to me, whether I’d received attention or praise or recognition, whether I was beloved, whether I had won. Because I was checking so often—every few minutes or so—I rarely found such evidence of my own importance, which left me feeling unimportant, which left me desperate for affirmation, which made me check even more.” - August Lamm, You Don't Need a Smartphone: A Practical Guide to Downgrading & Reclaiming Your Life
A rare example of someone who has not succumbed to audience capture is Nassim Taleb, probably due to his protocol of blocking everyone on X.
Perry escaped the health-harming effects of audience capture by uploading pre-recorded videos of himself obese while secretly losing weight. After two years of this, he released a video, surprising his audience by revealing that he had lost 250 pounds “overnight.”