Streaming content killed executive function skills, gardening brings it back

We’ve designed the modern world to remove friction. Shows autoplay. Videos are cut in microseconds so you only need to see the good stuff and none of the mundanities of life in between. Algorithms shave down every second of lag, buffering or narrative buildup. Even the frame rate we watch — especially on YouTube and TikTok — is faster, tighter, flashier. It’s designed to hold attention like the worst of addictions.

Consuming screen-based entertainment wasn’t always like this. It had natural breaks. You know, those things called commercials that you can now pay your way out of. The pauses were more than opportunities to sell cereal and Campbell’s soup, they were built-in to get a snack or go to the bathroom or to simply wait, because there was nothing else to do. 

Those simple acts of waiting for commercials and weeklong breaks between episodes to pass were actually unintentional minipractice sessions for building executive function skills. They helped us improve and stress our working memory, and trained our brains’ prefrontal cortexes to activate again and again. Even as TV hours ballooned, the number of forced breaks stayed the same. The days between the next episode remained unchanged. People had no choice but to wait, remember and recall the storyline — and learn to be OK with that.

Today, all of that forced waiting that’s so good for our brains and humanity’s much-lauded executive functioning skills has been engineered out of existence. If a show doesn’t drop all at once, people revolt. If the next video doesn’t autoplay, it feels like a bug in the software. We’ve taught ourselves (and our kids) that life should unfold in a smooth, uninterrupted stream. That gratification should be seamless or discomfort is a design flaw.

Which brings me back to the garden. 

Gardening is one of the few things left that absolutely refuses to be rushed. It doesn’t care about your timeline, your to-do list or your dopamine loop. It obeys nature’s clock, not your calendar or your expectations. And in that slowness, there’s something radical, restorative and urgently important. 

When I hand my kids a seed and tell them we’re going to grow peas or carrots or tomatoes, their first question is always, “How long will it take?” And when I say, “Maybe a few months,” it’s almost as if they’ve already lost interest — simply because it will take that long.

But then it begins — the checking, the waiting, the constant asking. Then they start to notice things — where the bees hang out and which plants the hummingbirds visit every day. Maybe they notice here and there that the blueberries are purple today instead of green yesterday. Or, like earlier last week, my son noticed the mulberries were finally starting to come ripe. It is the act of accepting time instead of escaping it or attempting to rule it that turns gardening into a powerful antidote for the internet age. 

Gardening isn’t just about food, it’s about working out our attention muscles, exercising all our bodies’ senses simultaneously, building executive function and patience, and expanding ones’ working memory. All things that are feeling scarcer by the day in our glorious modern society. 

No, gardening won’t teach your kids how to code or raise their SAT scores. But, it will teach them resilience, humility and grace, extreme flexibility (because weather), and expand their working memory to weeks, months and seasons. Maybe most importantly, it will teach your kids what real food tastes like — food that is not a product of our industrial food system, but harvested by their own two hands. 

And not like so much content online, a garden never pretends to be something it’s not. It’s real, tangible, rooted in progress that you can see slowly, over time. 

Let your kids be bored. Then give them a seed. Let them water it. Let them wait. Let them feel what it’s like to grow something real. In a world speeding up, maybe the most important thing we can do is help our loved ones slow down. Gardening teaches us as The Rolling Stones say so well, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, well, you might find, you get what you need.” 

Annie Tsai is chief operating officer at Interact (tryinteract.com), early stage investor and advisor with The House Fund (thehouse.fund), and a member of the San Mateo County Housing and Community Development Committee. Find Annie on Twitter @meannie.