The average person spends 6 hours and 40 minutes in front of screens, which is mostly their mobile, every single day. That is 40% of our waking hours. And your poor brain has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years for an environment that is not the environment that we are in today.
Technology is being purposefully designed to control the habits that we form, which literally ends up changing how our brain functions. Tech companies are all competing for our limited attention, and this makes us the product rather than the customer.
These social media companies have thousands of ridiculously smart engineers who are all trying to work really hard to keep you on your phone. And these companies do really clever things like, for example, infinite scroll, like you can literally never run out of things to scroll.
And something that apps like Instagram even do is that they hold back the likes so that you get them when you’re least expecting it. And this is an idea called random intermittent reward, which spikes our dopamine levels.
If you wanna design something to be very addictive, you would try and add as many dopamine triggers as possible. And that is exactly what’s being done with your phone and with social media.
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