Why are we addicted to our screens?
In the modern age of Western society, we have so much to indulge in instantly in our day-to-day lives. Constant stimulation is ingrained in our culture. Yet, we don’t even realise how much we consume and how detrimental it can be to leading a happy and fulfilling life, argues Finn Pridmore
Want to play the latest videogame? Simple. Just a few clicks to buy it online and you can start playing within minutes. Want to catch up with the latest season of the Netflix series you’ve heard about all over social media? Just turn on the TV and press play.
Yet, this is only the tip of the huge iceberg that is called instant gratification. We may think we’re lucky to live so securely in the modern world, with everything easily available with the click of a few buttons, but the truth is that it’s much deeper than we may think.
According to App Annie, an app monitoring firm, in 2021 the average person spends around 4.8 hours per day on their mobile phone.
Why is this? Because of instant gratification.
Instant gratification is a huge cause of addiction, and it’s not just our phones that are a source of this. Due to globalisation and more efficient technology, mass produced junk food like crisps, sweets and chocolate are easily available to snack on whenever people feel like it. This shows how easy it is to fixate on the immediate release of dopamine, known as the motivation molecule, rather than choose to experience the long-term benefits of a healthy and balanced diet.
This is also an example of how motivation can drop significantly when instant gratification is a consistent part of your lifestyle. If we crave the constant, instantaneous stimulation that we receive from these habits all the time, we find it much easier to lose motivation to achieve goals that don’t give constant, instantaneous results. This means that instant gratification and the amount we rely on it canwill become a huge barrier to achieving long-term goals.
To make things worse, the big tech and social media companies like Apple, Facebook, Google are constantly finding new ways to exploit the average person. You and me.
But they must care about the average user, as the new updates and features that are brought to phones and apps are to make things easier for us, right?
While they may make things easier and more comfortable, they also serve another purpose. To make it easier for us to become addicted. To make it easier to receive that instant gratification.
Scientists all around the world have careers that involve making you more addicted, more chained to this instantaneous source of false gratification. Nutritionists that design food to make it more addictive, app designers that use your data to employ tactics that keep you hooked so that they make more money, product designers that choose the most appealing colours and slogans and advertisements to make you want to keep consuming, and consuming, and consuming.
Ever wondered why there’s an infinite scroll feature on almost every single social media platform? Why there are flashy lights and high wins almost promised to the player on slot machines? Why many video games have endless tasks and quests to keep you playing?
It’s all designed. So much technology around you is designed to keep you as a slave to it.
So how do we escape? How do we think freely and escape from the mindless scrolling and button-pressing and binge-eating when everything around us is designed to make us fail?
A popular way to counter this is the ‘dopamine detox’, which suggests cutting out or decreasing the amount of addictive, instantly gratifying stimuli like binge eating instant food, binge watching, surfing the internet mindlessly etc.
But decreasing these harmful activities isn’t enough, simply because when our brains aren’t occupied with anything, we start to crave instant gratification again, which becomes harmful.
Instead, the general consensus is to replace the constant instant gratification with constructive activities that create, rather than consume. Examples of these activities include exercise, art, or building something. Anything that lets you create, grow as a person, or build things, whether it be physical or social, like relationships with other people. Humans are a social species after all, and often, the concentration of instantaneous rewards can lead to social avoidance if left unregulated.
This is why it’s so important that even in the modern age of rampant consumerism, to think about what’s really good for us, rather than what’s designed to addict us.
Finn Pridmore, Year 12
Want to play the latest videogame? Simple. Just a few clicks to buy it online and you can start playing within minutes. Want to catch up with the latest season of the Netflix series you’ve heard about all over social media? Just turn on the TV and press play.
Yet, this is only the tip of the huge iceberg that is called instant gratification. We may think we’re lucky to live so securely in the modern world, with everything easily available with the click of a few buttons, but the truth is that it’s much deeper than we may think.
According to App Annie, an app monitoring firm, in 2021 the average person spends around 4.8 hours per day on their mobile phone.
Why is this? Because of instant gratification.
Instant gratification is a huge cause of addiction, and it’s not just our phones that are a source of this. Due to globalisation and more efficient technology, mass produced junk food like crisps, sweets and chocolate are easily available to snack on whenever people feel like it. This shows how easy it is to fixate on the immediate release of dopamine, known as the motivation molecule, rather than choose to experience the long-term benefits of a healthy and balanced diet.
This is also an example of how motivation can drop significantly when instant gratification is a consistent part of your lifestyle. If we crave the constant, instantaneous stimulation that we receive from these habits all the time, we find it much easier to lose motivation to achieve goals that don’t give constant, instantaneous results. This means that instant gratification and the amount we rely on it canwill become a huge barrier to achieving long-term goals.
To make things worse, the big tech and social media companies like Apple, Facebook, Google are constantly finding new ways to exploit the average person. You and me.
But they must care about the average user, as the new updates and features that are brought to phones and apps are to make things easier for us, right?
While they may make things easier and more comfortable, they also serve another purpose. To make it easier for us to become addicted. To make it easier to receive that instant gratification.
Scientists all around the world have careers that involve making you more addicted, more chained to this instantaneous source of false gratification. Nutritionists that design food to make it more addictive, app designers that use your data to employ tactics that keep you hooked so that they make more money, product designers that choose the most appealing colours and slogans and advertisements to make you want to keep consuming, and consuming, and consuming.
Ever wondered why there’s an infinite scroll feature on almost every single social media platform? Why there are flashy lights and high wins almost promised to the player on slot machines? Why many video games have endless tasks and quests to keep you playing?
It’s all designed. So much technology around you is designed to keep you as a slave to it.
So how do we escape? How do we think freely and escape from the mindless scrolling and button-pressing and binge-eating when everything around us is designed to make us fail?
A popular way to counter this is the ‘dopamine detox’, which suggests cutting out or decreasing the amount of addictive, instantly gratifying stimuli like binge eating instant food, binge watching, surfing the internet mindlessly etc.
But decreasing these harmful activities isn’t enough, simply because when our brains aren’t occupied with anything, we start to crave instant gratification again, which becomes harmful.
Instead, the general consensus is to replace the constant instant gratification with constructive activities that create, rather than consume. Examples of these activities include exercise, art, or building something. Anything that lets you create, grow as a person, or build things, whether it be physical or social, like relationships with other people. Humans are a social species after all, and often, the concentration of instantaneous rewards can lead to social avoidance if left unregulated.
This is why it’s so important that even in the modern age of rampant consumerism, to think about what’s really good for us, rather than what’s designed to addict us.
Finn Pridmore, Year 12