Update Latency
Updates are a frustrating reality of our new digital lives. In past decades people could live their entire lives without updating a single element of their daily schema. They would wake up at the same time, drive the same route to the same job, come home at the same time, and go to bed. Everything all at the same time. After all, our brains are looking for patterns in everything. They try to form habits that will allow us to conserve energy and brainpower. Our brains are tools, finely tuned and optimized for an array of tasks. But the hardest tasks for our brains to compute are new tasks.
New tasks require an immense amount of brainpower to complete. The number of factors your brain is taking in and analyzing are exponentially related to the difficulty of the task. For example, let’s just say that you are driving a manual car for the first time. Something many of us have done. You get behind the wheel, and you are already familiar with with most of the components, but you aren’t familiar with this new pedal that you are required to interact with. During new activities like this, your brain is taking in a series of inputs that it then has to organize and make sense of.
Continuing with our example of driving a manual car for the first time, let’s just take a look at the process of stopping at a stop sign. Normally, your brain is looking for a series of cues that tell it when to take your foot off the gas, and put it on to the brake. Your brain is also computing how long you need to keep your foot on the brake, and how much pressure you need to apply in order to stop at the stop sign. When we add a third pedal to the equation things only get more complicated. When we go to stop a manual car at a stop sign we have to feather our foot off the gas, depress the clutch pedal all the way down, shift the car into neutral, begin to feather the brake in as we feather off the clutch, eventually bringing the car to a complete stop. And none of that even takes into account all of the obstacles on the road that your brain has to decipher and make sense of.
It’s a simple and irrevocable truth that our brains develop habits in order to lessen the processing of brainpower. And until we evolve beyond that, I know that I won’t be the only person who decides against updating devices to the newest operating system right away. I usually wait until I’m beyond annoyed with the iOS and macOS update notifications before I actually install it. Because I don’t want to relearn how to do something. My brain already has an existing habit loop for an action, and then after each update I have to develop a new pattern. I updated to the newest iOS about a week ago, and I still swipe my thumb to the right to key in the code on the unlock screen. Then I just get frustrated with the new notification center, and continually press my thumb into the home button until the phone unlocks.
But yesterday, I decided to delve into the new update more to better understand how the features worked, and what they had to offer. That way I could train my brain to develop a new habit that would alleviate my frustrations with updates. There will always be certain features I find useful with an update, and others that I find obnoxious. Ultimately, I just have to train my brain to learn a new habit, and in the process I’ll understand the values of a new operating system.
