What’s on your phone is almost certainly more readily engaging than any person or situation in front of you. And when you’re looking at a screen, you’re elsewhere.
But at some point, you need to decide what’s worth being here for. Is it to click and tap on shit? To babysit notifications and collect digital points? To mainline an infinite drip of pleasure chemicals that dims your soul?
You may reflexively answer that no, playing on a screen isn’t a prime human endeavor. But shit… it feeds a human desire. Dicking around on screens is engaging. What makes scrolling travel photos that much different than traveling? Isn’t sampling new experiences, new food, new places, new people, etc., in real life just another form of novelty-seeking? Is the dopamine or adrenaline drip from a screen any different?
There’s a famous experiment (repeated in so, so many books, and now this one) in which rats could press a lever for a pellet of food. They would do so until they were full. When researchers took the food away and the lever delivered no pellet, the rats gave up. But then came the breakthrough. When the lever randomly issued a pellet (intermittent reinforcement), the rats became obsessed. Obsessed to the point that they stopped tidying up, stopped interacting with each other, and even stopped eating. As Peter Watts summarized it in an endnote to Blindsight, “They starved to death. They died happy, but they died, without issue.” You can connect the dots on how this relates to our attention, our addictions, our purpose. The larger questions: What are you here for? What levers, what pellets?
Maybe being alive will increasingly be about clicking and tapping on shit on screens. That’s where humanity keeps spending more of its time, choosing to receive experiences rather than create them, pressing levers for intermittent pellets.
But maybe there’s a difference in what these experiences do to your capacity for future happiness. It’s like the difference between repeatedly eating a packaged meal and learning to cook it from scratch. Both fill your stomach, but only one expands what’s possible for you to achieve tomorrow.
Decide what’s human: The easy way, or the harder, more visceral path that demands presence and effort.
“Those rats back in the sixties, the ones that learned to stimulate their own pleasure centers by pressing a lever: remember them? They pressed those levers with such addictive zeal that they forgot to eat. They starved to death. They died happy, but they died, without issue. Their fitness went to Zero.”
~Peter Watts, Blindsight (Book)
“Anything that draws attention to ourselves through pain-free or artificial means is a manifestation of Resistance.”
~Steven Pressfield, The War of Art (Book)
“We think things come for free, when in fact their price is very steep … the things we call free are those on which we spend our very selves.”
~Seneca, Letters on Ethics (Book)
