It’s never pleasant to confront something unflattering about yourself, particularly when you catch yourself in the act. Recently I was mid-conversation with a stranger at a party, when I suddenly became conscious of my internal monologue: yes, hurry up, get to the point, you’re going to say this, then that, and what is the takeaway here?

This wasn’t the first time I had noticed a shift in my real-life interactions. Over the preceding months, I had felt tired, even irritated, when loved ones so much as veered close to an anecdote or detail about their lives that I thought I had already heard. During interviews I conducted as a journalist, it sometimes took a heroic effort to concentrate on conversations once they failed to be truly stimulating. Ordinarily I am endlessly curious about people, but I couldn’t ignore a creeping feeling that my attention was waning.

The source of the problem was clear to me. At the beginning of the year, I became freelance and started working from home full-time, and I found myself constantly scrolling social media. I hadn’t noticed before how much Instagram aggressively forces short-form video into our........

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