It’s quite clear that we live in an age of overconsumption. We are blasted with content in every part, corner, side, and crevasse of our life. Our phones/TVs/computers are so deeply integrated into our lives, for things like email, directions, news and messaging, yet they also provide the door to overwhelming amount of information.
For the past few days, I’ve been scrolling on apps like YouTube and Instagram far too much. Hours at a time, I get sucked into scrolling. Despite downloading screen blocking apps in an effort to provide a buffer between myself and the apps, the monkey brain in me still finds a way to endlessly scroll. The time waste is an obvious detriment to using these apps, but the more insidious side effect, at least for me, is the guilt that comes after wasting time with shallow and superficial short form content. This feeling might come from different actions for different people, and I think its important to look at.
On the surface, its an easy thing to reason about. We are doing something we don’t want to be doing, something that maybe drags us further away from our goals or makes us a worse person, so we feel guilty about it. But why? The action is already done, and we can’t really change it. The issue, here, is lack of compassion. We are not faulty/incompetent human beings for doing things that you deem to be negative. Humans are not wired to be existing in todays age. You could argue that we live in an “addiction economy”. Where large conglomerates hire the worlds best nueroscientists to take advantage of our human nature and get us addicted to their product. These companies business models are to abuse your attention/senses to get you addicited, all for their own profits. This happened with physical products like tobacco, alcohol, and unhealthy food, and now the digital space is following the same playbook.
How then, do we compete against the worlds best experts capitilizing trying to get us addicted? Well, we all know humans are perfect. We have a limited amount of will power each day. And to constantly be in an environemnt with endless distractions, its hard resist everything thats