10/26/2025

Thoughts on daydreaming.

I used to love daydreaming. It’s a wonderful way to escape the harsh reality of the world by indulging in a mind-fabricated paradise of incredible situations and fulfilled dreams. Recently, though, I started worrying about this. Doesn’t daydreaming just replace "life" with "thoughts"? If we consider life our most valuable asset, why should we even enjoy escaping from it?

Coincidentally, though it had nothing to do with this, I stumbled upon a somewhat interesting discovery that led me toward a probably very wrong answer to the question in the title.

Two months ago, I decided to download an app blocker to restrict my social media usage. Initially, it had little to no effect, but as soon as I enabled stricter protections (i.e., harder challenges to unlock the apps again), everything changed. Against all my predictions, app blocking essentially halved my screen time. The reason is that we tend to overestimate the power of willpower. Instead, we must acknowledge that willpower is a losing battle, even though it's not our fault—our brains are programmed to crave dopamine. That's why I think app blockers are a must for anyone worried about wasting their time.

But it’s another realization that I want to talk about. After all my dopamine-generating apps’ allowed time had elapsed, I stood for ten to fifteen seconds just staring at my phone, thinking, “There must be something else I can do with this thing,” but, of course, to no avail. Then I went, “Well, I’ll just have to study a bit or work on some side project,” which already sounds like a kind of success. Nevertheless, I decided to ignore my impulses and just sit there. Automatically, my mind started wandering.

My conclusion about what happened in those two minutes is that there’s no way to tell the brain to stop thinking. Our minds crave stimuli of any kind. If not instantaneous dopamine, they’ll resort to a more arduous source. But if no external stimuli are provided, the brain will simply create them itself. This is why meditation is so hard—we’re programmed to be doing or thinking.