'fine, just five more minutes' -- the language of concession and distraction
As a student in university, I struggle a great deal with staying on track. I often find myself justifying one more episode of whatever Netflix show I happen to be watching, another five minutes on X (formerly twitter), and so on.
There are two, I think, really interesting things here, and upon examination they fit quite nicely together. I emphasize ‘whatever’ because it is one of them. Oftentimes, I find, it really does not matter what I am watching — I can be, for example, well aware that it is absolute crap — I continue to watch anyway.
I get the impression that this is fairly common. We all seem to be somewhat aware of the fact that each scroll on TikTok (or, for me, YouTube shorts) is a bad idea. If someone else — a friend maybe — were to ask us for advice: whether she should scroll just one more time, we would be able to respond quickly and easily. “No, you shouldn’t. It’s a bad idea. What good is it doing for you to watch a video of a robot reading a reddit post with subway surfers playing in the background? You won’t remember this video 45 seconds later, let alone in a year or two. Do something more worthwhile with your time!”
Curiously, I often find that when someone says something like that — though perhaps in a nicer way — things normally take a turn for the better. “Okay, let’s buckle down and work,” we say, in the quiet of the library. Some good productivity often follows a call to action.
We are, of course, no stranger to the fact that when it comes time for us to address such a call to ourselves, perhaps in the quiet of a dorm room, or on the couch as we scroll on a phone, it is surprisingly less effective.
I often find, for example, that when I think ‘Okay, it’s time to get it together. Let’s work!’ to myself, my thought is almost immediately followed by a response; a concession: “5 more minutes, one more video.”
My earliest experience of a concession of that form (that I can remember!) was exercise. I was a bit pudgy, and took it upon myself to start running. I would go out in the mornings of the summer (I was trying to get a six-pack before school started, obviously) and run until I couldn’t anymore, until my lungs had that burning feeling.
As I approached my limit, though, I would always try to push a little harder.
“Okay,” I said to myself. “At that tree, I’ll stop.”
The tree would come, and I would try to go a bit further.
“Too easy. I’ll take a break at the fire hydrant.”
Don’t get me wrong. I stopped at the fire hydrant. I often stopped at the tree. But what was special, and, I think, philosophically interesting, was the language of concession that, in circumstances like that, I slipped into quite easily.
It was as if I was conceding to someone, to myself maybe. “Fine,” I would think, “just a bit more, a bit further.”
In a way, I was negotiating with my goal. My body was tired, I needed to stop — but I also needed, in a different sense, to keep going. I had decided to lose weight, I had decided to run, and it was what I was going to do. When the two came into conflict, which they invariably did, I fell into the language of compromise, the language of concession. I knew my body wanted to stop, but I wanted to push forward, so I tried to make a deal with myself. “Just a bit further!”
But, of course, this language was a lie. Concession and compromise is something we do with other people. I was doing it with myself. But, we might say — no harm no foul?
We fall into a similar way of speaking, when we say to ourselves, scrolling on YouTube shorts or X (formerly Twitter), “just one more video.”
It is not, after all, as if “just one more video” expresses a decision we’ve made or a goal we’ve set. In fact it is quite the opposite. Were we to reflect on it, to give advice to ourselves, we would likely say exactly what we did to our friend: “chill with the Shorts, and maybe think about doing something productive.” But, as we well know, once we begin to say “Just one more video…” there isn’t much room left for us to decide what to do at all. Once we’ve said it, 5 minutes has already been lost.
That’s because, I think, “Just one more video” isn’t a decision, it isn’t a reason, and it isn’t even a calculation. It’s a concession, it’s not that different from my saying “Just a bit more,” as I ran down the street.
And, because it isn’t any of these things, it isn’t something we can take up as a question. We can’t ask, just as we don’t ask while we’re running, whether it is a concession we should make. Rather, we continue making it until we run out of steam — just as, for example, my fourteen-year-old self did not calculate the most effective breakdown of resting/running for weight loss, asking himself, with each step, whether he should stop and seriously entertaining the question. He pushed himself as hard as he could until he had to walk home.
In the same way, I think, the language of concession allows us to defer the decision to stop watching a YouTube Short or a TikTok indefinitely. Because we are simply conceding, saying to ourselves “one more, one more, one more!” we avoid raising the question of whether we should watch one more in a way where the answer will make a difference for us. At best, we answer the question with empty eyes, thinking to ourselves “Man, this is such a bad idea. Okay, one more video.”
It does this through telling a lie. We are led to imagine that, like in the running case, we are making a concession to someone else. Only—rather than a friend or the physical limit of our bodies—the person we are conceding to is ourselves, our desire to keep scrolling. But desires are not things to be conceded to, they are things to be evaluated, and, if we evaluate them positively, things decided on the basis of.
It is exactly this fact that is lost when we embrace the language of concession. The fact that, in reality, there is no concession to be done, no other person to concede to: just ourselves and a desire to watch another video. But that desire is one among many, and it must be treated as such. We will have to, for ourselves, decide whether scrolling is the right move — and drop the pretense that it is an impulse to simply be ‘bargained’ with.
So, from here on out, I’m just going to try and notice my use of the language of concession. To call it out to myself. Hopefully, with the shade down, it will grow to have a weaker hold on me.