(2/3) How we spend our time — is our bar too low?
We’ve been living in the age of the internet for some time now. Simply put, more things are possible.
Unprecedented innovation, an explosion in connectivity, and accessibility to information have fundamentally changed our lives. As a result, we are experiencing an entirely new set of challenges.
This is the second part in a three-part series about how we spend our time. In this part, we’re talking about some of the excuses we make and the barriers we build, that prevent us from living our most fulfilling lives. If you missed the intro, you can read it here.
The way that we consume content has changed
The internet has enabled businesses to hyper-optimize the ways that they deliver the content we consume. This is our new normal, and as a result, we have developed an expectation of efficiency in our lives.
Our desire for instant gratification is the manifestation of this shift — you’ve probably experienced it recently too. Have you ever been watching a show and during a lull, you reach for your phone?
Everyone talks about our two-week news cycle, but I don’t hear a lot of people talking about why it exists. The information age has trained us to constantly expect and crave new information.
If you’ve ever watched someone scroll through TikTok (or Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, whatever) you can see it in action. Our lives are filled with services that goal themselves around their ability to interface information with our brains (and take advantage of its chemistry) as efficiently as possible.
These services are with us at literally every moment, and they have something for everyone. They serve as a delivery network for new addictions, often based on vanity, anger, or gratification. The business of information is very profitable and likely not going anywhere anytime soon.
And there is more content than you could ever consume
Infinite available content is a relatively new concept. If you chose, you could spend your entire lifetime consuming the content produced by Netflix.
I believe as humans, we have difficulty extrapolating when infinity is involved. We can rationalize daily choices to watch a movie, or scroll a social feed, but fail to connect how our actions could lead to a lifetime of passive consumption.
How do you feel after a long TikTok binge? If you could carefully arrange every aspect of your life, what proportion of your time would you dedicate to passive content consumption?
I’ve been wrestling with an idea that I call pre-satisfaction
The idea comes from that feeling we get when we make plans to do something and feel satisfaction from the act of making plans. At that moment, it doesn’t matter if we follow through with our plans or not, we’ve already enjoyed a small reward: we get to feel good about ourselves.
I worry that in an age of instant gratification, we’ve trained ourselves to be ok with lesser rewards, to anticipate more rewards soon, and to follow through less. It doesn’t matter that the satisfaction from following through is much greater — we are accustomed to plentiful, low-effort payoffs.
I wonder if the content we consume, and the way we consume it, is causing us to follow through less on our goals.
I have no psychiatric training and have done no research to back up these claims, but I have seen this effect in my own life. The two questions I’m forced to ask myself are how did I get in this position, and how would I feel if this pattern was left unchecked.
In the next and final part of this series, we’ll talk about how we might counter these new challenges, and reclaim our time. You can read about it here.
