Digital Herd Mentality

Your phone buzzes during dinner with your friends.

Email, Slack, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, text messages—each one demanding immediate attention, each one whispering that this might be the important one.

Deep down, you know that notification isn't urgent, that email can wait, that whatever just pinged is probably going to be nothing more than a distraction.

But you check anyway. Why?

Because everyone else seems to be playing the game of instant response, and what if you're the only one who doesn't play?

Will you disappoint your boss? Will you lose a customer? Will you seem uncooperative? Will you be missing out?

This is how the urgent becomes normal. Not because those notifications are actually urgent, but because everyone else treats them that way.

Stop following the herd to digital exhaustion.

Next time you get a notification, pause. Ask yourself: Is this actually urgent, or am I just afraid of being left behind? That pause is where you learn to choose differently when everyone else is choosing poorly.