Fix Your Focus with Sabir Haque

Have you ever counted the number of friends or colleagues who are no longer in your life simply because of a midnight argument in a Facebook comment section?In this episode, Dr. Sabir Haque takes a microscopic look at the exact moment our chest tightens during an online disagreement. Moving past surface-level political anger, we dive deep into the underlying neurobiology and psychology of conviction.Using Leon Festinger’s theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Ziva Kunda’s framework of Motivated Reasoning, and Jonathan Haidt’s famous Elephant and the Rider metaphor, we uncover a uncomfortable truth: when we argue online, we are rarely pursuing truth. Instead, we are deploying our intellect as a defense lawyer to protect our own ego and emotional survival.Tune in to discover why the digital public square is engineered to feed our worst defensive instincts—and how we can begin leaving an "inch of light" between our identities and our opinions.

Why do the platforms we once loved eventually become frustrating, cluttered, and difficult to leave? In the first episode of Fix Your Focus, Dr. Sabir Haque explores Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification” — the process by which digital platforms begin by serving users, then shift toward advertisers and business customers, and finally extract value from everyone once dependence has been built.The episode looks at Instagram, Facebook, Amazon, X, platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism, network effects, switching costs, and the deeper reason we stay on platforms we no longer enjoy. It also asks whether generative AI is currently in its own early “honeymoon phase,” and what might happen when our workflows, memories, and creative habits become locked into AI systems.This is an episode about platform decay, digital dependency, and the need for exit rights, interoperability, portability, and open systems.