Instant Gratification Loops and How We're Losing our Minds
A semi-serious review of the state of things.
The title of this blog post honestly sounds a bit corny to me and almost click-bait-y? That's not really what I'm going for but this is what my brain came up with right before falling asleep after tossing and turning for two hours the other night (of course). I don't think anyone will be completely surprised by much of anything I write in this post, I think we all know all of this deep down even if we choose to ignore the fact most days of our lives, but hey it's not completely our faults we were born into an age that made it almost impossible to escape social media and instant gratification with it. For me at least, I've started to notice the real detriment that it can have, and honestly why it's important to be aware of what we do with our brains every day.
Instant Gratification
Okay I tried to find a good ASAP Science-type video to give a good empirical explanation of what instant gratification is, but there really aren't any from what I can tell. So you're left with me to explain, and I think it's pretty obvious so I'm gonna explain it in the simplest way.
Instant gratification is when we do something that instantly gives us a good feeling, even if that feeling is not guaranteed to last long at all. Some examples of instant gratification could be eating when you're sad (guilty), getting likes on social media posts or going out for drinks with your friends even though you know you have work to do. Delayed gratification on the other hand is when we do something that may not feel very good to us in the moment but will ultimately benefit us like eating healthy foods or staying in to work (I know it's a lot more boring). Instant gratification is a necessary part of life, we need some things to make us feel good immediately or we probably wouldn't have the patience to wait for the long-term stuff. But now it's kind of taken over and there's a lot less patience for delayed gratification from what I can tell.
Social Media
Yes I know it's funny and ironic that you most likely are only even reading this post through Instagram, and I did actually delete the app and had to use my laptop to post on my story (isn't that sad).
TikTok
Don't get me wrong, it's like I hate TikTok. I know that it has redeeming qualities but that's not the point.
TikTok is the epitome of instant gratification, we see a bunch of videos that make us feel good for a lil while but ultimately it hardly leads to anything really gratifying. Personally the amount of times I actually went off the app feeling gratified and satisfied compared to the amount of time I spent on the app essentially getting nothing out of it but some mindless entertainment was scary. I decided to delete it because I felt like the negative time I spent on it and the way that it started to make me feel so mindless wasn't worth it. I ended up deleting the Instagram app off of my phone as well because of the stupid reels. The reels weren't even as good as TikToks but I still found myself watching them for long. A lack in attention span and fear of boredom were most likely what kept those apps on my phone for so long. It was comfortable. I'm not saying that you also need to delete these apps off your phone, this isn't a self-help 12-step program it's just me sharing my own experiences, but I definitely find that I feel a lot better without access to those apps and the less I spend relying on my phone to make me feel better.
A YouTuber I watch on occasion also mentioned that TikToks algorithm is meant to show you content that is very close to what they know that you like, but not quite it. That way you keep coming back because you never see exactly what you're looking for, but it's close enough that we really don't care (it's honestly really scary how much we use the information we've learned about ourselves against ourselves...).
Fast Fashion/Trends upon Trends
From plastic surgery, to dance/music trends, to the kind of "aethetic" you should have to SheIn and Zaful the trends are moving at a fastttt rate. I have a whole blog post partially dedicated to the trend cycles in my drafts so I'm not going to go crazy into it. Fast fashion is something that I think we can all acknowledge is huge right now, and when I use the word "fashion" I'm not just referring to clothing I just mean what is "in" right now.
Sex and Dating Apps
With the rise of online dating apps we getting to see people in a snap-shot version like never before. I could probably write a post solely dedicated to this topic, but I’ll just kinda gloss over it for now. All aspects of online dating is so transactional, people hardly put any effort into actually getting to know anyone online. And I don’t mean to say that you need to have a deed-rooted connected with every person you decide to hook up with, but I think that at least when we were meeting these people exclusively in person they were more human to us. Online dating apps feel absent of humanity and real people, not to mention have too many options that it’s a lot easier to be pickier and not really give people a chance. I read somewhere and have been hearing for a while now that our generation is actually having less sex than the generations before. I think at least some of that can be attributed to these transactional relationships that have taken the place of meeting people and the influx of “fish in our sea”. I also felt this way with TikTok. It made me worried that I stopped seeing people as people on that app and as characitures.
How we're Losing our Minds
Liking Vs. Wanting
I first learned about Liking Vs. Wanting in my Abnormal Psychology class, but it wasn't until I took Learning the next semester that it really clicked (I found it takes me a lil while to be able to understand things fully, and I can't really understand something unless I completely understand it, so yeah little fun fact lol). It was presented to us in the context of addiction. When someone first tries a drug, they usually like it (I mean drugs are supposed to feel good right, at least most drugs). Most people who have done a decent amount of drugs in their time can say that their first time is usually one of the best (assuming they took a relatively pure version of the drug, first times on cut-drugs would not be as fun). After someone takes a drug they go like "hey, that was pretty awesome. I want to do/feel that again. I'm gonna do it again." When someone continues to use a drug, especially those who do it quite a bit, will actually cease to feel that "liking" towards a drug. Instead they are wanting it, as the liking feeling is very hard to reproduce.
Let me put this in a contextual example:
When I first went on TikTok, I was probably like "wow this is so awesome, what quick and varied entertainment. I get to see so many different things in such a short amount of time I like this." After a while though I felt almost like a need to go on the app, I wanted to scroll, but in reality I didn't really get a lot out of it except for a few laughs and some wasted time.
Like I said earlier, I don't hate TikTok. The app obviously has loads of redeeming qualities or no one would stay on it, and I do miss it sometimes. Overall I just don't think that it's worth it, and I don't think that the hours of my life I used to scroll on there were really validated by the enjoyment I would receive from it.
The point is, do we really even like the things that we consume and the comfort that comes with scrolling on TikTok before we go to bed or do we just want it. I mean, there were few times that I found myself going off of TikTok satisfied. Sure, sometimes I felt fine after going on it but I don't think I really felt that it had been an even remotely good use of my time.
One of the big things that I noticed when I started to get off of fast-paced socials like TikTok and Instagram (now) is that I did actually like a lot of the content, I mean that's kinda what made it so hard for me to get off of the apps in the first place, but I never really had enough time to actually absorb almost any of it. Instead I felt kind of cheated, because I knew that there were cool things that I found online that felt inspiring or even just mildly exciting but they would leave my brain almost as quickly as they came. I didn't have enough time to actually use most of the "knowledge" I was "cultivating" online, and it was annoying.
Now that I'm off, I try to find these same things in less short-form medias. YouTube has been pretty good for that, but I think the best way was finding cool things that surround hobbies or interests I already have. Of course finding new content is kind of hard if you're only searching for the stuff you know but I wasn't even building good foundations for my interests when they were sooo spread out.
Eventual Disconnection and How to Reconnect
The immediate result from taking this aspect of instant gratification out of my life was boredom. I honestly found myself with so much more time in the real world than I think I've had in a long time. Boredom can be really scary, like what am I supposed to do now?
After the initial panic of the boredom I started to become a lot more interested in being present in my life, something that had made me very frustrated in the last year. I picked up a couple of new hobbies and didn't feel like I was cruising through the years of life in a dream like state.
Something that I used to do a lot in high school, which may sound a bit weird but I promise there's context, is look at myself in the mirror. My room at my home in Toronto has a lot of mirrors in it, and sometimes when I would feel really overwhelmed it would help me ground myself by just sitting in front of my mirror and really looking at myself. At first it felt really uncomfortable and a bit awkward to just kind of look at myself. But overall i think that it really helped to connect me to myself and realize like this is me, this person in front of me is me. I've been trying to start to do this now because of disconnected I felt from my own body, I don't know if it will really work for anyone else but it worked for me so I figured it was worth mentioning.
Other weird things that make me feel more in tune with myself is talking to myself, I love talking to myself it really helps me organize and better understand my thoughts.
I really just try and realize how many of these instantly gratifying actions I take part in, and while it’s unrealistic to get rid of all of these habits it’s important to try and minimize them and be aware of the ones you can’t minimize.
Try and be a bit mindful (honestly I started to almost get triggered when I would read the word "mindful". Like shut up, but it is honestly so important to be present.).
It's a really slippery slope and I still find myself feeling a bit more like a zombie than I would on some days, but it's honestly a choice that has bettered my life in many ways. I feel a lot more present overall, I feel a lot more mobile and I feel like I have a lot more control over what I do in my days. My life didn't magically change and I honestly don'y think I'm quite where I want to be just yet but I definitely felt more a connection between my mind and my body, which is what I feel like gets lost when I get lost in the loops.
I wanted to throw in a quick disclaimer. I know that I make a couple of "claims" in this post about "how fast the trends are moving" and "instant gratification and social media" and others and I know that I don't link research articles or provide stats to back them up. I'm making these statements off of my own observation, and I don't think any of them are that out there that I really need to provide proof. Plus, I look at enough research articles for school and I don't want to do that for this right now or have this blog ever feel like work, PLUS this post is already long enough (sorry, if you're even reading this yay! I hope you actually enjoyed and didn't just scroll to the bottom but I'll never know anyway) and I didn't want to add a crazy amount of more information onto it. If you think I'm wrong and want to send proof that I am feel free. If you want to learn more I'm sure the research wouldn't be too crazy hard to find and I may make an updated post about this since most of this info is the intersection between my own observations and stuff I’ve learned in class that has solidified it.
See you next time, and leave a comment! Because you can do that now!