Originally posted here on 31/12/2017. It's unedited.
Let’s see if I remember how to write. Happy new years, everybody!
Our generation is the first not to know boredom. Or rather, to be so sensitive to it, to have boredom be such a foreign concept, that we panic at the sight of it.
We use our mobile phones as a panacea for the existential crises we must overcome in the 2 minute wait between bus and train, the pause in a painful social interaction.
Perish the thought that we could let our minds wander for even a moment. We numb ourselves with a constant drip-feed of more information per unit time than we can even process. Most of it pointless shit like social media.
I want to make it clear — I’m not distancing myself from the problem, or stepping into a pedestal from which I cannot possibly participate in the epidemic. Rather, I’m the living embodiment of the problem at hand. Over the years, my attention span has atrophied to the point where I’ll be scrolling Facebook — get bored, or worse, disgusted at myself for doing it for so long, that I open a new tab. Muscle memory tells me to type f, and within a few seconds, I’m habitually back where I was.
But we live in a time where the greatest commodity available is the attention of the masses. Conversations and physical billboards just don’t scale in the same way that algorithmic targeted ads based off your search history do.
It’s quite in vogue nowadays to blame the social media giants — to paint a violent mural of these abstract corporations polluting our minds and controlling what we see, when we see it, and public opinion as a whole.
But we are always in control, no matter how you spin it. Social media is opt-in. Staring at your phone and ingesting everything it’s proffering is something you choose to do. But it seems more and more subconscious that we’re furthering the human evolution of a thumb made exclusively for swiping in four directions on a capacitive touch screen. (Horizontally for Tinder, vertically for social media.) The choice to engage with what’s on your screen and scroll for more should, in theory, be a conscious decision made every time you take your phone out of your pocket. But it isn’t. And there’s enough science out there to explain why.
In an attempt to avoid derailing the topic of this post, I’ll put it briefly. Humans are creatures of habit. All the tasks you do daily, without thinking, almost on autopilot — these are habits. The way we tie our shoelaces, our morning routine when you get into the office — even sometimes how we make love — these are habits.
Habits allow humans to spin off another thread, complete the task as a background process, whilst keeping the main thread free and most of the processing power available for dealing with new tasks. Simply put, without habits, life would be a whole lot more difficult. Imagine having to figure out how to tie your shoes every day from scratch. No muscle memory, no habitual action. It would suck.
But subconsciously or otherwise, we’ve allowed our behaviors and interactions with mobile phones to manifest themselves into deeply ingrained habits that most of the time we’re not even cognizant of! How many times did you look at your phone today? Every time you unlocked it and did something important , was it a conscious act? Did you actively decide that you should take your phone out and do something — each and every time? No. Your brain received the cue, you opened your phone and jumped on the dopamine train. It seems to me that a large number of ideas pertaining to how the human brain relates to porn can be paralleled during the analysis of social media’s effect too. See Your Brain on Porn.
Some wide range of cues, be it boredom, stepping into an elevator, getting out of the car/off the bike/into the office/your friend goes to the bathroom during a lunch date — these all trigger an automatic response which culminates in you pressing some buttons and staring at some LEDs for a bit.
I’m not trying to demonize mobile phone usage. These devices are fucking incredible. You have instant access to the entirety of human knowledge universally attained up until this point in your damn pocket, but most of the time you use this power to scroll mindlessly — habitually — through the highlight reel of high school friends you’re not even in touch with anymore!
The timeless Arthur. C. Clarke quip comes to mind here:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
And magic gives you power, right? Moving on, we have another smart human bestowing wisdom upon us:
“With great power comes great responsibility.”— Uncle Ben
Let’s review the chain of logic that got us here. Mobiles phones are a sufficiently advanced technology. Therefore they are indistinguishable from magic. Ergo, phones = magic. Furthermore, magic confers power. So:
Phones = power
But Uncle Ben teaches us that you get something extra with all this power. You get responsibility. So I’ll abruptly end this old-man-shouting-from-a-soapbox diatribe with a call to action.
Use your damn phone responsibly. Use it to create original content. Use it to better yourself, to know more, to understand. To learn, explore and uncover the secrets of the universe. Read up more about habits and why we as humans abuse the very mechanism and end up shooting ourselves in the foot, over and over again. Be a conscious user of your mobile phone rather than a slave to a system vying for every scrap of your available attention.
Stop mindlessly scrolling social media!