Educating When Everything Feels Lost

About four years ago, I opened my phone settings to see how much I was using it. I knew it was a lot, but I did not know I was unlocking my phone once every eleven minutes.

Eleven minutes seemed outrageous for someone who was already working and finishing his studies, until you remember that the average also included the eight hours I slept every night. If I counted all those unlocks only during the hours when I was actually awake, the real frequency was much closer to once every seven minutes...

What worried me most, beyond the amount of time I ended up spending in front of a screen, was discovering that often there was not even a specific reason why I had picked up my phone.

I was not waiting for an important message. I had nothing to look up or check, and I certainly did not need to speak to someone every seven minutes. A small empty space would simply appear in the day, and my almost automatic response was to unlock my phone: when I was bored, when I went to the bathroom, during a break at work or between classes at university.

Four years later, I have managed to reduce that behaviour considerably, although I still catch myself doing it sometimes. I finish a task and look at my phone. There is even that fairly absurd moment when you close an app and, just a few seconds later, open exactly the same one again without really knowing what you expected to find there that was different. I think this unconscious impulse is becoming increasingly common among young people: reaching for the phone in a pocket, bag, briefcase or wherever it happens to be and turning it so the screen faces us.

Young people do not just move our thumbs faster to type than any previous generation; we also make our posture worse by hunching over to look at our phones. Will smartphones change our evolutionary genetics? Or will spending so much time sitting down from Monday to Friday do it? I think they will, and not for the better.

This subject interests me because I think the problem goes far beyond the amount of time we spend in front of a screen. Something else will become increasingly important: our ability to decide consciously where we place our attention.

When distraction stops coming from outside

Our relationship with our phones has so far been shaped by notifications, algorithms and platforms competing to keep us inside them. Calls, the very thing the telephone was invented for, probably account for less than 10% of how we use it in our personal lives.

Research into digital behaviour points to an even more interesting reality: often it is not the phone that initiates the interruption. We do.

Studies of everyday smartphone use have found that many interactions begin as a learned response to moments of waiting, boredom, discomfort or simply a lack of stimulation.

I emphasise that last point because those are often the very moments when our best ideas, clearest thoughts and most important decisions emerge. If we become slaves to a device, we waste precisely what can distinguish us from the automatisms and repetitive mechanisms of machines.

That changes the nature of the problem we are facing. If notifications were solely responsible, turning them off would probably be enough.

This is why I am especially interested in the idea of attention literacy. In the same way that we learn to read, interpret information or use particular tools, perhaps we also need to learn how our attention works, what is trying to capture it and how to take it back when we keep giving it away without ever consciously deciding to do so.

Soon enough, we will also need to learn how to think for ourselves: both because of AI and to avoid being swept up in fanaticism.

Education has much more to say about all this than we tend to assume.

Educating for a different world

The debate about education has always interested me because I think we are living through a profound transition between the abilities we have traditionally rewarded and those that will probably matter most over the next few decades.

For a long time, it made sense for a significant part of education to focus on acquiring, memorising and later reproducing information. Access to knowledge was limited, and finding a particular piece of information again could demand considerable time and resources, or even physical access to certain books or people.

The internet began to change that reality radically, and artificial intelligence is accelerating the change even further. Today, students can ask for a concept to be explained in five different ways, generate exercises adapted to their level, compare theories, receive feedback on a piece of writing, analyse information or build a small project without necessarily having to wait for someone to provide every answer.

From my point of view, this does not mean that memorisation has stopped mattering. In fact, I think we could make a serious mistake if we interpreted the arrival of artificial intelligence as a reason to stop acquiring information. What matters is being able to turn that information into knowledge.

To think, we need internal reference points that allow us to question arguments, connect ideas and develop judgment.

The problem comes when memorising becomes the ultimate goal of learning, alongside passing the exam, rather than one of the tools that helps us think better.

Spending several weeks learning a huge amount of information, reproducing it in an exam and forgetting much of it shortly afterwards makes less and less sense as the main measure of readiness for a world in which answers are permanently available.

I believe an education that teaches someone to understand something deeply, connect it to other knowledge, question it, apply it in a different context and use it to build an answer of their own is more valuable than simply earning top marks. Both have merit; the first also creates impact. And inside both processes lies an ability that I think we have started to treat almost as if it were a bad thing: effort.

Effort does not guarantee the result, but it changes the person making it

I have never been entirely convinced by the way we use the idea of meritocracy. At first, I was a firm believer in it. Reality showed me something different. It seems too abstract to assume there is a clean relationship between the effort we put into something and the reward we receive afterwards.

Two people can work with the same intensity and end up with completely different results because too many variables lie beyond our control: family background, opportunities, economic circumstances, relationships, the historical moment, health, luck or simply being in the right place at a particular time.

I do not believe there is a simple equation in which the person who works hardest necessarily ends up earning more money, reaching a better position or receiving more recognition.

Nor do I believe that acknowledging this reality should lead us to undervalue or discredit effort.

When someone finds something that genuinely interests them and devotes many hours to studying it, applying it, testing it, getting it wrong and trying again, there is one thing that is difficult to deny on probability alone: that person ends up better prepared in that field than they were before.

The market may not reward them immediately. Their project may fail, or they may never achieve exactly what they imagined when they began. Even so, throughout the process they will have accumulated knowledge, judgment, the ability to execute, reference points, mistakes they have already made and probably a greater ability to recognise opportunities they did not even know existed before.

But Feli, what we want is to work and live in peace. How do we achieve that as well as everything above? I find that difficult today. I always try to be very positive and see the good in every crisis. Yet right now I can see that complete peace and growth cannot go hand in hand, especially when we are young. I believe in flexibility, mental health, self-care and personal development, just as I believe in education, taking the initiative to pursue ideas and going through pain in search of improvement. My life moves between these two spaces, and I think it is important neither to become too comfortable nor to become the person who bets their entire savings on a single number at the roulette table.

I also think everything comes back around, the good and the bad. When I think that life eventually compensates that effort somehow, I do not really understand it in terms of karma or some celestial justice that balances everything out. I understand it in a way that feels much closer to science.

When someone devotes hundreds or thousands of hours to understanding a particular field deeply, they inevitably increase the number of connections they can make and the kinds of problems they can solve. The more abilities we develop, the more places appear where those abilities can be useful.

Not all learning delivers an immediate return, but that does not mean it disappears.

Competition can also be a way to learn

I was recently talking to a friend about his job, and he told me something I found interesting. He was quite happy because he felt that people on his team listened to his ideas and that what he said could bring real value to their projects.

That alone feels rarer than it should.

Then he explained something that interested me even more: there is competition within the team, but they do not experience it as something negative. People are trying to do their jobs well, propose better ideas and stand out, but that desire to grow does not necessarily mean wanting a colleague to do worse.

Thinking about it, I believe we can react in several ways when we see someone who works well, contributes good ideas or excels at a particular skill:

1. We can feel threatened and try to diminish what they do.

2. We can simply ignore it.

3. We can recognise that there is something this person does especially well and use it as an opportunity to learn.

My friend was in the third kind of environment, and I was genuinely glad to hear it. I think we have come to associate competition far too easily with a permanent war in which one person can win only if someone else loses.

Watching someone do something exceptionally well can make us uncomfortable because it forces us to compare ourselves, but it can also reveal a possibility we had not considered before. It can make us ask how they achieved it, what process they followed or what we could incorporate ourselves.

There is also a fairly obvious reality that we sometimes struggle to accept:

We are very good at certain things and quite bad at others, and that should not be treated as a problem.

Nobody is good at everything, which is precisely why multidisciplinary teams exist. When we bring together people with different experiences, abilities, ways of thinking and ways of working, results emerge that probably none of them could have produced alone.

The value of learning to stay with something

We live at a time when we have access to more knowledge than any previous generation, while also building environments in which it is becoming increasingly difficult to stay with anything for very long.

If a piece of content does not interest us quickly, we move on to the next one. If an app takes too long, we close it. If an explanation seems complicated, we look for another.

Artificial intelligence adds another fascinating layer because it can remove enormous amounts of friction from the learning process, which in many cases will be extraordinarily positive. The problem will come if we start confusing the removal of unnecessary friction with the removal of all intellectual effort.

Sometimes learning means staying in front of something we do not yet understand for a while.

Reading well takes time. Learning a language takes time. Understanding a technology takes time. Working on a project takes time and a huge number of attempts that do not always work.

I do not think we should glorify suffering or assume that working more hours necessarily means working better. But I also do not believe that every difficulty is a flaw in the process.

Sometimes difficulty is exactly what causes us to develop a new ability.

What remains when the result disappears

Perhaps one reason learning matters so much to me is that it remains even when external results disappear.

Someone can lose a job. A project can fail. A company can close, or an entire sector can change until certain abilities no longer carry the same value they once did. Many things we think of as ours can disappear.

But something is much harder to take away: what we learned while building them.

The mistakes we have already made, the relationships we have created, the processes we understand, the questions we now know how to ask and the confidence that comes from having learned something we once knew nothing about all remain.

A company can disappear, but if it built something meaningful during its existence, not everything disappears with it. Memories, associations, stories and experiences remain in the people who worked there, used its products or had some emotional connection with the brand. As long as the memory exists, part of its legacy and its branding remains too.

Something similar happens with people. A project can fail without all the effort invested in it automatically becoming wasted time.

When we try again, we do not return to exactly the same point where we began. We return with more reference points, more judgment, more information about what did not work and, with luck, a much clearer idea of what to try differently.

To me, that is one of the most interesting ways to understand resilience.

A project that never made it to the hackathon

Recently, I was working on a small personal project that I wanted to submit to one of the hackathons I had included in my resource on available hackathons.

Because of the deadline, I did not manage to submit it in the end.

I could have interpreted that as the end of the project and left it sitting in a folder. But while writing this reflection, I realised it actually fitted everything I had been saying.

The solution is built, and I am thinking about sharing it for three main reasons.

The first is that it could serve as a practical example of how to develop an application using artificial intelligence, showing the process step by step, the tools involved, the decisions I made and the mistakes that appeared along the way.

The second is much simpler: I want other people to try it and tell me whether they genuinely find it useful. Building something without putting it in front of real users lets you learn only up to a point; beyond that, you need outside feedback.

The third has to do with a feeling that keeps growing stronger. We have never had so much information, so many tools and so many learning resources available for free: complete courses, technical documentation, videos, communities, repositories, artificial intelligence capable of helping us answer questions and people publicly explaining how they build almost anything.

But those of us who do have some spare time, internet access and tools available should perhaps ask ourselves a slightly uncomfortable question: what are we doing with all that knowledge in front of us?

At some point, learning depends on our willingness to search, experiment, devote time, make mistakes and remain curious enough to keep trying.

Perhaps this is education too

Four years ago, my phone told me I was unlocking it once every eleven minutes. Today, I probably depend far more on technology than I did then because I use it to work, learn, create, research and build projects. Precisely because of that, however, I try to be much more conscious of my relationship with it.

I do not think the challenge is simply to use less technology. It would be strange to reject tools that expand our possibilities in such extraordinary ways.

I think the challenge is to use them with greater intention.

To be able to decide when we need our phone and when we are simply reacting to a habit. To understand effort not as a guarantee of success, but as one of the processes through which we build abilities that nobody can acquire on our behalf.

Perhaps the education we need will have less and less to do with accumulating answers and much more to do with learning to manage everything that happens before we find them: sustaining attention, tolerating uncertainty, asking good questions, learning from others, experimenting, making mistakes and continuing to try.

Because if tomorrow someone lost much of what they considered theirs, there would still be things nobody could take away: everything they had learned and the ability they had developed to build again.

And the faster the world changes, the more important I think that will become.

By the way, that hackathon project is still finished. If at least three people comment that they want to see it, I will share the solution along with the process I followed to develop it with AI, the decisions I made and the mistakes that appeared along the way.

Thanks for reading.

Sources and further reading

• Spain's education disaster, with its worst-ever PISA results, El Mundo, 8 September 2026. Article in Spanish.
• Habits make smartphone use more pervasive, Antti Oulasvirta et al.
• The attentional cost of receiving a cell phone notification, Cary Stothart, Ainsley Mitchum and Courtney Yehnert.
• Smartphones and Cognition: A Review of Research Exploring the Links between Mobile Technology Habits and Cognitive Functioning, Henry Wilmer, Lauren Sherman and Jason Chein.