top of page

By:

Prithvi Asthana

20 August 2025 at 5:20:30 pm

The Cost of Constant Consumption

As we curate our content, the deeper question is whether content is quietly curating us. Few can manage a 90-hour workweek, but most would easily go beyond a 90-hour social media week. With our growing appetite for social media and instant commerce, the real question is no longer just how we consume, but how much. In an age where every swipe, click and scroll is engineered to hold attention, overconsumption is becoming less a habit and more a way of life. What once felt private is now...

The Cost of Constant Consumption

As we curate our content, the deeper question is whether content is quietly curating us. Few can manage a 90-hour workweek, but most would easily go beyond a 90-hour social media week. With our growing appetite for social media and instant commerce, the real question is no longer just how we consume, but how much. In an age where every swipe, click and scroll is engineered to hold attention, overconsumption is becoming less a habit and more a way of life. What once felt private is now constantly translated into data, tracked, analysed and fed back to us as personalised content. Our chat topics increasingly shape what appears on our feeds, drawing us deeper into social media and blurring the line between private thought and public consumption. Shopping apps track our preferences and know exactly what to show us, when to show it, and how to keep us engaged. As we curate our content, is content curating us too? In India, this influence is amplified by scale: the country has over 820 million internet users, more than half from rural India. And because creating content now requires little more than a smartphone, production has exploded, feeding an endless supply of content to consume. We are no longer just seeking information online; we are constantly being served information we never asked for. The Attention Trap Urban youth face intense pressure to keep pace with the latest memes and trends, consuming more content in pursuit of social validation. For many, especially the young, staying updated has become a form of cultural currency — a way to belong, be seen and stay relevant. Across the world, users spend an average of more than two hours a day on social media, while reels lasting just 30 to 90 seconds are steadily reshaping attention spans. What begins as constant engagement online does not stay there. With everything at our fingertips, people are becoming less tolerant of delay, boredom and inconvenience. The speed of the internet is not just shrinking our attention spans — it is eroding our patience in everyday life. Convenience Culture Quick commerce platforms have turned this impatience into a business model. Ten-minute deliveries, constant offers and endless discounts encourage impulsive buying, from groceries to stationery, while quietly raising our expectations for speed. Convenience now drives not just what we buy but how we behave — leaving users less tolerant of delays and delivery workers under relentless pressure. A 2018 Pew Research Centre survey of 743 teens found that 31% lost focus in class while checking their phones. Increased internet use also disrupts sleep, as young adults scroll through reels late into the night, leaving many sleep-deprived. The endless scroll is designed to make stopping difficult, and reduced sleep worsens mood, irritability and concentration. Late Gen Z and Gen Alpha differ sharply from earlier generations. Raised on algorithms and personalised feeds, their worldview is shifting, while teachers increasingly struggle with shrinking attention spans and worsening classroom behaviour. Rising loneliness and excessive screen time have also blurred the line between online and offline life. As screen time rises, the warmth of community and unstructured human interaction is giving way to more mediated and transactional forms of connection. Algorithms & Intimacy Artificial intelligence has rapidly integrated into our routines, making tasks easier and more convenient. Large language models are trained on human interactions, and the more we use them, the more they adapt to our habits, perceptions and preferences — deepening their influence on our lives. As with social media, what feels intuitive or personalised is often the result of systems learning us faster than we realise. The more seamless these systems become, the easier it is to mistake convenience for connection and prediction for understanding. In the 21st century, data has become central to our existence. Social media and AI exploit our psychology, trapping attention in a cycle of constant content exchange. Sharing even small details updates our feeds almost instantly, sometimes making algorithms seem to understand us better than the people around us. Users remain deeply engaged in this digital world, often believing their content is curated just for them. In reality, companies profit from these interactions, growing richer while shaping consumer behaviour. What feels personal is, at scale, a business model designed to monetise attention. As digitisation rewires our brains and lifestyles, living offline has become increasingly difficult. New technologies promise convenience, but they are also reshaping how we consume content and experience the world. As we consume technology, the unsettling truth is that we may also be consuming ourselves.

Selective Outrage

India’s left-liberal media has long prided itself on being the torchbearer of secularism, dissent and moral rectitude. In the aftermath of ‘Operation Sindoor,’ the precision military strike launched by the Modi government against Pakistan-based terror camps, it has revealed its not a principled commitment to peace or truth, but a disturbing penchant for ideological prejudice, performative sanctimony and selective outrage.


The operation itself was a textbook display of calibrated force and geopolitical prudence. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, often caricatured as ‘authoritarian’ by the ‘liberal’ English-language commentariat, chose patience over provocation. He consulted opposition leaders, held detailed discussions with defence chiefs and took key international stakeholders, notably the United States and Russia, into confidence before authorising limited military action. The symbolism of ‘Operation Sindoor’ was also carefully crafted: a pointed reminder that the attack’s real victims were Hindu women widowed by Pakistan-sponsored militants in Kashmir. The government’s briefings were also strategic and symbolic as two ranking female officers, one of them Muslim, were made the public face of the mission, underlining a new Indian confidence that blends military muscle with democratic pluralism.


But this was unacceptable for India’s entrenched ‘left-liberal’ press, steeped in academic jargon, Western validation and a knee-jerk hostility to anything remotely ‘Hindutva.’ That a Muslim officer briefed the nation on ‘Operation Sindoor’ was branded ‘tokenism’ by such commentators. Others crudely alleged that the April 22 Pahalgam massacre was the logical culmination of reported atrocities against Muslims since Modi came to power in 2014.


The semantic nitpicking over ‘Operation Sindoor’ was maddening. An editor of a prominent magazine dubbed the operation’s name as ‘patriarchal’ and coded in Hindutva tropes. In a bizarre case of moral inversion, sindoor was likened to symbols of ‘honour killings’ and gender oppression, ignoring both its cultural resonance and the cruel reality that these women had lost their husbands in cold blood. For years, India’s ‘secular’ commentariat nurtured a preordained binary: the Congress may be flawed but was at least ‘secular’ while the BJP was an inveterate ‘fascist.’ Thus, the 2002 Gujarat riots are always focused upon but the Congress-backed pogrom of the Sikhs in 1984 is either downplayed or rationalised. Terrorism in Kashmir is tragic, but state retaliation is ‘jingoism.’ A strong Muslim voice in government is ‘tokenism’ but its absence is ‘exclusion.’ Even journalistic rigour is selectively applied. When Pakistan claimed to have downed Indian jets, some Indian outlets rushed to amplify the story before verification, inadvertently echoing enemy propaganda.


Dissent is vital in any democracy. But when its becomes indistinguishable from disdain, when editorial choices are dictated by ideological conformity, then the press becomes a caricature of itself. Ironically, many of these journalists enjoy robust free speech and loudly lament India’s supposed slide into ‘fascism’ from the safety of their X handles. Yet they turn a blind eye to Putin’s repression, Erdogan’s purges or Xi Jinping’s camps. In their eyes, Modi remains the greatest threat to democracy even as they broadcast their outrage freely, without fear of censorship or reprisal. ‘Operation Sindoor’ was a statement of cultural self-confidence. That confidence has rattled those who have spent their careers gatekeeping Indian discourse. Today, their monopoly is over. The people are watching and they no longer believe that the emperor has clothes.

Comments

bottom of page