Episode 51: Breaking the Screen Addiction

Transcript

This video was great. I'm going to link to it. This guy, I guess that guy, I'll talk
about that. Anyway, uh, uh, this guy put together, I, there's a whole bunch of things that I've
been thinking about over the last several years in particular, and he distilled it down
really into, I don't know, seven minutes or so of a YouTube video. Really worth watching.
Um, this is on the topic of social media addiction to like phones and phone content.
And that idea, you know, of, of you're sitting, sitting around in a line or whatever. And it's
almost like you can't even, you can't even sit, stand there for a moment and just be, you have
to grab your phone and distract yourself kind of thing. We all, we're all going through this,
right. To some degree or another, essentially everyone on the planet, practically at this
point, I think, but certainly in America is going through this sort of thing right now
where, and they had, we had been for a long time, uh, where the phone has become such an
addiction to us that, that it, it, we, we can't be bored. We can't sit and think we can't be
alone. We can't, you know, and we're all here, right. And in some cases, sometimes you feel
pretty good about it. You know, you're standing in the line, you think to yourself, if you've
been around long enough, you think to yourself, Oh man, like 20, 30 years ago, I couldn't have
just pulled out my phone, entertain myself while I stood in the line. This sure made the
last 30 minutes of standing in the DMV line or whatever, a lot more tolerable, but it's not
just there, right? It's, it's everywhere. So anyway, that's what this video is on the topic
of. He sort of starts the video by talking about drawing a parallel between cocaine addiction
and social media phone content addiction kind of thing. I'm not sure I buy into this. I get
his point. His point is really that the same chemicals in your brain that get released through
an activity like cocaine are the same chemicals that get released essentially as you're scrolling
through social media and other such things. That's true. However, I would argue that it's
a little bit of like, uh, I'm not sure what the logical fallacy is. I'm not sure if it's
a straw man or something else, but, um, a little bit off where sure that might be, but I think
that one activity is a lot more dangerous than the other. So drawing direct parallel is a little
disingenuous, but that's okay. We'll just put that aside for a second. The overall point
of this video is that all of this is intentional, right? If you've ever felt, if you've ever felt
that thing where you're like, ah, I just wasted 30 minutes, 60 minutes, two hours, whatever,
scrolling through your phone. Part of the point of this video is to say, and I think this is one of
the best points that he makes in this, in this thing. Well, let me back up a second. If you've ever
tried to go through a quote unquote digital detox, or maybe you've quit social media only to go back to it,
or whatever, like a lot of us have done this sort of thing where it's like, oh, I'm done with,
you know, pick your service Instagram. And then a week later you're back. Right. And you, you justify
that to yourself or whatever. And you say, well, it's, it's to do this or keep in touch with that
or, you know, whatever. It's not, it's not actually your fault. You, you, you're probably trying to
willpower your way through it. I'm just going to put it down and not look at it and not touch it.
Right. Here's the problem. You're one person trying to exhibit willpower and try to make that
change your behavior on the other end of that service, whatever that service is, or those
services, or whatever it is that you find is difficult to break away from. There are thousands
of people who have studied behavior and behavioral manipulation and behavioral tactics and all sorts
of things whose entire job, probably their six figure job is to find ways to keep you on that
thing. Now, this is one of the best points that he makes along the way here. And actually this piece
of things, I may be part of why I thought this was so interesting was that this is one thing I just,
I hadn't thought of just as idea that it's, it's you, you're, you're placing a bet that your willpower
is stronger than thousands of people whose job it is to break your willpower. Think about that in
different light, right? How long do you think you would hold up to torture? Like you get cap,
you're, you're, I don't know, you're a spy and you get captured and you're being held and they're
trying to get information from you or whatever, you know, whatever movie scene you want to think
about. How long do you think realistically it would be before you break and tell them whatever they
want to hear to make the pain stop or whatever? This isn't that far off from that. There are thousands
of people who are trained at finding ways to break you and make sure that you stay on their platform
because they need your attention in order to make money. That's at the end of the day,
all of these things that are quote unquote free. And even a lot of the ones these days that aren't
you need to, yeah, they need your attention. You need to not go outside. You need to not put your
phone down. You need to not ever forget your phone. Oh God forbid you go for an errand and don't
have your phone on you. You need to make sure that any line you stand on, it's close by. You need to
make sure that every time you go to the bathroom, you're on your phone. Just, just all of the
attention all the time. Never, never put it down. It's never far from reach. It's never far from your
grasp. They need that. They need all that time from you in order to make money. I don't know.
I always kind of said to myself, it's one of the reasons I don't trust, um, you know,
car salesman or really any kind of salesman. If your job is directly related, it is directly
dependent on me buying a thing from you. Your motivation is already slanted in a direction
that I'm not comfortable with. And that's exactly how this is, except it's vying for your attention.
But he makes a whole bunch of really good points. And what I like about this video is he doesn't just
go through all of the wrongs and, oh my God, and make you feel helpless. There is a solution in
here. He presents a solution. Um, and it's, I think it's a pretty solid one.
Essentially the, the, the general idea is that next time you're going to go and grab for your phone
and scroll for half an hour or whatever, why don't you try making something instead?
Some sort of creativity, some sort of creative exercise, whatever that means to you. And I,
and I could make a pretty broad definition of that, right? Go, I don't know. If you're a tech
guy, go, go code something. Or, uh, if you like to, to cook, maybe you go cook something. Uh, I don't
know. Make something you like to draw, pick a pad and paper, draw something like whatever. But the idea
is, and he kind of puts a challenge out there for the next 90 days for, for three months, essentially.
And every time you're about to grab your phone to just kind of distract yourself or look at things
or veer into apps or whatever, instead do something creative, make something, produce something.
It doesn't matter what it is, anything picks, I don't know, knit, like whatever, whatever it is that
you like to make or do, or you find creative, do that instead. And the idea is that over the course
of 90 days, it's one of the few things that can, that can kind of break this routine. Uh, he does go
into some of the psychology about it. Anyway, I found it was to be really interesting video. Uh, it both
presents the problem well and suggests a solution in a very accessible way. And I think, I think content
like that is pretty scarce these days, a lot of videos either preventive, I'm sorry, present a very
thin argument of a problem or the solutions quote unquote are pretty superficial and really just doled
out over the course of a 20 minute video to once again, keep your eyeballs on the video. Um, this was
succinct. It made a lot of sense. It presented a solution. It doesn't pull any punches. It doesn't
waste your time. So I'll link to it in description. Um, I, it's definitely worth a watch. I would say
the last thing I want to mention is that when you study psychology, uh, you end up studying behavioral
psychology quite a bit along the way, particularly, uh, in the beginning of things. And one of the big
concepts that you come across is operant conditioning. So this is, this is punishments and rewards and that
kind of stuff that, you know, to, to, to change people's behavior within that sub discipline of
things. There is one type of reinforcement that's particularly strong for people. It has to do with
the schedule. So the idea is this is your slot machine. So the idea being when you receive rewards,
but you don't, you can't predict when they're going to happen, it, it tends to reinforce that
behavior very strongly. So the idea of the slot machine being you put in a quarter, you pull that
lever, you don't know if you're going to win or not. So then you're encouraged to do it again and
again and again and again. And you start playing games in your head where, well, you know, I've pulled
this a hundred times. I pulled this a 500 times. I'm bound to win to win eventually. But that,
that type of schedule is called random interval reinforcement. So the idea is that it's,
there is some interval to it, but the interval is completely random. It could, you could win twice
in a row. You could never win. You could win once and then have to wait 500 more polls. Doesn't
matter. And the infinite scroller is a particularly devious version of this. As you are scrolling
through content, I'm sure this sounds familiar as you're scrolling through, you know, think of like
a Tik TOK kind of thing. You're, you're scrolling one piece of content at a time. What do you figure?
90, 95, maybe more percent of what you see is completely useless, pointless, and you would have
been fine without seeing it. Some portion of it is probably ads, but then every now and then you do
hit something that's either particularly funny or particularly amusing or particularly interesting,
or, you know, actually does carry a decent, like, I'm not saying that nothing out there is worth
consuming. There, there are things that are worth, that are genuinely good content. The problem is
they're buried amongst a bunch of crap. And the infinite scroller is a particularly devious
implementation, in my opinion, of a random interval reinforcement system. It very much encourages
you to keep scrolling, whether you realize it or not, because you never know when you're going to
hit something good and your brain never knows. Your brain wants that. It wants the next dopamine hit,
the next hit that makes it feel good or interested or whatever. And when it doesn't, when you, when you
can't say with any kind of certainty, whether or not the almighty algorithm that sits behind any one of
these things is going to feed you something you like, you are very inclined to keep scrolling. And for those
of you who were around in the big, in the earlier days of social media, talk about like Twitter, when you
just saw everything chronologically, think about what, you know, the, the, the newest stuff was on top. Think
about how much less time you probably spent on those platforms. You know, you log into Twitter,
particularly in the early days, maybe you only had a handful of friends on there or whatever.
And you look and you see, and, and three posts down was the latest update that you saw maybe an
hour ago. So you read three quick posts and you move on with your life. You're like, well, nothing
new. You go on. These algorithms don't exist for your benefit. They, they, they, they, they exist
because it keeps you on the platform. If the new stuff is always at the top, it's very easy for you to
keep track of what you have and haven't seen. It's not because of the quantity of people's friends or
the quantity of this or making it easier or better anything. None of that. It's simply to keep you on
longer. So anyway, if any of this stuff sounds familiar or you want to just see like a succinct
summary, which is less than the length of this episode that I've been talking about it, it's only
like six or seven minutes. Um, the link is in the description, uh, or the show notes or whatever.
Um, take a look at it. Definitely was worth a watch for me. It just summed a lot of this stuff up
really again, succinctly from my, from my point of view. So check it out. Uh, if you ever are
interested in, in just thinking more about what's really going on and how to really move away from
some of this screen and content and entertainment addiction that really we've all succumbed to,
to some degree or another.