Try to remember the very first thing you did this morning. How were the first five to ten waking minutes of your day spent?

I’ll be the first to admit that I wake up every morning to the sound of the “signal” ringtone blaring through the tiny speakers of my iPhone. My first few moments of consciousness are usually spent stumbling around my apartment, locating and eventually neutralizing the offending device — which I then clutch as I groggily retreat back to my warm cocoon of blankets.

Depending on how busy I am that day, I’m likely to spend anywhere from the next five to fifteen, and sometimes more than fifty minutes on my phone.

I often slip into a trance while scrolling through my Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram feed then suddenly catch myself, realizing I’m no longer even attempting to skim the posts — they are reduced to nothing but a steady stream of images, text, and advertisements rolling past my eyes, barely being consciously processed. What I want to believe is a choice proves itself time and time again to be a compulsion, an addiction.

Maybe I’m just being a “grandpa”, which is what all of Kyle’s friends on South Park called him when he complained about their addiction to smartphones. Fine, I’ll allow for that possibility, I could be nothing more than a stick in the mud stuck in the past. But I don’t think that’s the case.

There are only twenty-four hours in a day — many of which we have to waste sleeping as a precondition of being human. The fact that such a significant portion of my day can slip through my fingers so quickly, that my mind can become such an empty, non-thinking vessel so passively, and that I can abandon my perception of time so easily genuinely scares the shit out of me.

It’s hard to deny the astonishing rate at which humanity is racing full speed ahead towards our brave new world when you consider that Mark Zuckerberg’s walled gardens continue to grow every year, with the companies he owns profiting off of the personal data of over 2.32 billion people a month.

Despite now owning less than a quarter of Facebook’s actual stocks and having promised to sell almost all of his shares before his death, Zuckerberg has taken care to make sure that he’s retained 60% of the voting rights on the board of directors. It’s clear that he recognizes how inconsequential any amount of personal wealth is relative to the power inherent in essentially controlling the attention of billions.

A degree of agenda-setting power that dwarfs the influence possessed by ABC, CBS, and NBC combined at their peak as the “big-three” U.S. corporate news outlets decades ago, is now effectively wielded by one man.

This concern is compounded by the fact that Facebook employees leaked information to the New York Times about the company’s work on a censorship tool laying the groundwork for an attempt to re-enter the Chinese market with the blessing of their single-party authoritarian regime.

Forget the idea of the President of the United States as “the most powerful man in the world”, forget the smoke screen that is Donald Trump for just a minute, and reflect on the absurd amount of power Zuckerberg has managed to consolidate in the private sector.

No wonder some professors got together to create a database of literally everything Mark Zuckerberg says.

Now you might be expecting me to propose some dramatic, absolutist, “this is where you either take the red-pill or blue-pill” solution. I see how it could seem like that’s where I was going with all this. But I’m not Morpheus and that’s not what I’m going to say — mainly because I don’t think we’re quite there yet.

Instead, I think right now the most we can ask of our fellow humans without risking hypocrisy is to start by adopting a new paradigm — one of awareness. You don’t have to quit social media cold turkey, but maybe sign up for a newsletter from a reputable media source, or contribute to your local public radio station. Venture outside of your usual filter bubbles.