Everybody wants to get things immediately. Nobody has patience.
So don’t get panic. This is a short blog.
We practice meditation in 5 minutes, set drive-thrus to get food faster, and scroll down quickly to get the best part.
What the heck is going on with our goddamn life?
I’m not a psych nerd, but let’s spend a minute here.
Dopamine is released when we “take a bite of delicious food, when we have sex, after we exercise, and, importantly, when we have successful social interactions,” according to Harvard’s Science in the News.
Think about the time you posted something on Instagram. You’d check your phone thousands of times because it feels nice; of course, there’s dopamine-releasing.
Gradually, we open apps at any time and reasonably expect to be rewarded.
“On average, Americans check their phones 344 times per day. (That’s once every 4 minutes!)” Trevor Wheel made the statistics.
You feel guilty, but it should be something worse.
Dopamine is released when your brain is expecting a reward. That’s human nature, granted.
Then we get addicted. But remember, technology isn’t “natural.”
When you’re browsing tabs, your brain is generating more activity in the prefrontal region, which is active in response to distractive stimuli.
Technology has developed to constantly stimulate and instantly reward us.
Little by little, it destroys your patience by requiring cognitive effort to concentrate.
Harold Schweizer, an English professor at Bucknell University, said that the “promise of technology was that it would make us masters of time … It has, ironically, made us into time’s slaves.”
Why don’t we dump phones for a while? Mind your “real” business. After all, we won’t die without a phone.