And what would "reality’’ be like if it was as exciting as a smartphone ? Almost non stop stimulation.
It’s actually the other way around. Your smart phone does not provide the kind of relational stimulation/fulfillment you actually need (to give others). Why isn’t real life as easy as a tool? Because you weren’t meant for easy.
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Why doesn’t “real life” provide the amount of non stop stimulation that my smartphone provides?
It provides more. Only a small portion of you is stimulated by your phone. You don’t move much. You’re always searching for something that is truly satisfying. Very little really makes you wonder or think.
Seeing a living woman you consider beautiful would send reactions through you no smart phone is going to manage. Your body is mostly disengaged with a smart phone. You don’t think back nostalgically about the powerful doom scrolling you did a week ago Wednesday. You don’t fantasize about scrolling on your phone. You fantasize about actually doing things in real life. Playing one real life game of soccer would show in dozens of physical metrics what stimulation looks like. Hook you up to a bunch of machines while scrolling and you would look like someone with chronic stress in some mingled state. You’re heartrate would be up, from the stress, but the muscles would be slack. Your heart rate variability would be extremely low. So, it’s like you are triggered into fight of flight, in a chronic unchanging flow, and you are not getting any parasympathetic rest periods at all. And you’re sort of half catatonic.
In the soccer game, if you cared at all, saying playing with friends on your team, would show lots of muscle engagement, shifts in emotion as the game shifts, heart variabiity, parasympathetic breaks and likely some kind of high afterwards and the ability to really relax and sleep later. The stimulation is vastly more and also allows you to move through eutress, positive stress and then relaxation, given that muscles are engaged and using the raised heart rate which does not really do anything in scrolling surfing.
Notice how there is no natural end point to surfing. Perhaps hunger. But there is always a sense that perhaps the next video, the next whatever will satisty. But everything is incomplete. You end from exhaustion or the need for food. There’s no beginning middle and end.
It’d be like an opium den where they mix some coke or meth in the opium. Lying around jittering and slack.
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While the real life stimulation is better it is much harder to get it is easier to get from the smartphone.
It’s distracting you, but it’s not really stimulating you. I mean, yes, you can look at porn and have a beginning middle end. But in general its actually numbing you by putting you in a chronic stress trance. Even a boring walk to the store is more stimulating. But in that boring walk to the store you are aware of yourself, your problems, your unfulfilled desires, etc. Scrollling, your life disappears, you disappear - it’s like taking a valium with some expresso. You’re gone, there’s less of you.
And look, I get the appeal, but it’s not really stimulation because stimulation elicits more life in you. This is shutting down, a quasi existence.
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Cause the applications on your smartphone are designed to hook into your brain’s reward system.
They exploit the happy happy drug hand out place inside your skull.
Reality is not designed to do that. Its the reverse: You were designed for reality to have fun.
greenfuse an naus
You guys hit the nail on the head. Ironically your using a nail gun instead of a hammer cuz I’m seeing your responses on my cell phone.