Our world compared to the one that existed 40 years ago is insanely fast.
People’s attention span has dropped dramatically since the invention of social media.
There’s many studies around dopamine and mobile devices paired with social media. Short video formats in particular are causing us to be truly addicted to our phones.
We need to be entertained immediately or we lose interest.
One shocking detail is the massive shift in how long we can focus on a task when we are in a dopamine addiction cycle. Human beings used to be able to focus for 15 minutes or more, and now we are down to a minute or two before we start looking for dopamine hits. So when you are trying to write a paper for school or work, how long can you actually focus on that task before you absolutely need to check for notifications? It can be email, instant messages, social media, a video platform, really anything online with a notification icon can give you a dopamine hit just from the anticipation of checking that message.
That unread notification icon drives people insane – and the idea that there just might be a notification keeps us looking at our phones constantly.
Now, you may be wondering what this has to do with grey areas, since cell phone addiction doesn’t seem to be that related to this problem.
The faster we see and interpret data, the faster we make snap judgement calls. Cell addiction is massively speeding up our judgement time – because we can’t focus and we immediately move on to the next dopamine hit. You got what you wanted out of 7 seconds of the video so you swipe on to the next video.
If we can only focus for a few seconds before deciding something is boring, good, bad, gross, or whatever opinion we have formed – it’s incredibly polarized.
The polarization is a problem, and the dopamine addiction drives polarization on a massive scale.
We inherently know that people are complex beings, just like ourselves.
We all make mistakes and do silly things, we all have moments we don’t feel great about later, and yet we judge people instantly.
When you make a mistake – you really want other people to empathize with you right? When you are late for work because traffic is at a standstill for miles, you want to be able to plead your case and explain why you were late. Can you do that in only a few seconds? Probably not.
So we expect empathy and understanding from others, yet we are all in the cycle of snap decisions and moving on immediately.
If you see a video of someone being rude in a store, do you immediately think that person is a bad person, condemn them, and move on to the next thing?
If you were having a bad day and someone filmed you, and posted it on the internet, wouldn’t you be a bit hurt that the whole world passed judgement on you for a tiny slice of time caught on film?
Probably.
I’m not excusing bad behavior. People make mistakes. People all have darkness and light inside them and it’s not our job to condemn each other and decide someone is all good or all bad – it’s highly unlikely that they actually are all good or all bad.
Life is complicated and so are people. Embrace the grey areas and accept them for what they are and don’t try to paint everything as good or bad immediately.