It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how compulsive our smartphones and the social media apps that reside within them are making us. Instagram, in recent years, has become the quintessential example of this. When it started off, it was a simple photo sharing app where you could see pictures posted by the people you follow and share your own photography exploits to.
Fast forward to today and it’s full of 5-15 sec video clips showing the most exciting parts of people’s lives played out to sound bites. In fact, even the music industry is being shaped by reels because artists are now looking to create a song where 10-15 seconds of it is just really good while the rest can be mediocre at best.
Recently, Instagram has even admitted that all they want to do is simply mimic TikTok because it seems to be the most effective in keeping people glued to their screens and therefore more successfully in roping in ad revenue.
And the best part? It takes nothing to watch reels – you’ve probably already watched dozens of them before you even get out of bed. There’s no end to the stream, there’s always one more and all you need to do is swipe up to see another amazing reel of someone doing something – whether ordinary or extraordinary. This, in turn, makes us feel like we’re not doing enough in our own lives.
It makes super-talented people seem like the norm and it certainly causes insecurity, anxiety and depression in younger generations that seem to be an ever-increasing issue in this world. In addition, it gets them used to instant gratification because just at the tap of a button or swipe of a finger, they’re getting to see the best cinematic footage chosen by complex algorithms to keep them interested and swiping for more.
So, it’s no wonder that some of the people of the younger generation don’t even have the patience to sit through the starting credits of movie, they just want to get into the thick of the action right away.
This applies in a variety of different ways any many aspects of our lives. Gone are the days when patience was a virtue – when people would wait to watch their TV show at the time of the week when it aired – when you would have to sift through a dictionary to find the meaning of a word or when we would have to play through a cassette album to get to the song that you liked. With the technology that we have today, we get whatever we want right when we want it – and not a second later. Millennials have grown up with such technology and are the first of the instant gratification generations.
All Industries Evolving to Adhere to ‘I Want it Now’ Generation
We can look at pretty much any industry and see how it is pandering to the “I Want it Now” generation. The internet has driven this as it has provided the means to deliver everything to everyone instantaneously. Online casinos were one of the first to offer instant play, instant pay no deposit casinos.
Many other industries took their lead and given that Millennials are currently the largest generation in the workforce, their need for quick gratification is already causing many companies to make significant adjustments to the way they conduct business. Corporations are increasingly beginning to shift away from the traditional yearly review approach and toward one that emphasizes regular performance reviews and real-time analysis. This generation has become accustomed to obtaining feedback on the spot, acting on knowledge right away, and receiving speedy responses to queries.
In the business world, this can be a really good thing. Getting feedback there and then, and making adjustments right away is perfect for improving a product or a service. However, as human beings, what instant gratification is doing to us is not so positive. Quite the contrary, really.
Depression and Loneliness: Is Instant Gratification Worth it?
According to a recent study published by the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, there’s in fact a direct relationship between social media use and its detrimental impact on wellbeing, particularly depression and isolation. According to the experts, this is the first time such a causal relationship has ever been proven in a scientific study.
In a highly curated social media feed, we only see the best moments of people’s lives. And, even those perfectly selected moments are composed of a montage of filtered snippets which more often than not, don’t actually capture the reality of the person’s life. It is this very superficially created ‘ideal’ that makes followers and regular people feel inadequate or in want of something we don’t have – even if we don’t necessarily even need it! But, it’s human nature to compare their ideals to our own lives and as a result, we feel we’re simply not good enough.
Our Attention Spans are Shrinking
Synaptic pharmacology expert Lady Greenfield contends that social media raises the risk of “infantilizing” the human mind. In a world of swift and fleeting action, brain development may become used to working on short timelines. Consequently, in response to longer-lasting tasks, like reading a book or paying attention in class, attention is relatively insufficient.
But what does the shrinking of our children’s attention spans actually cost us? Any negative impacts ought to be minor if we live in a fast-paced, information-accessible environment, right? But perhaps not. According to a 2013 study by an American research team, a child’s attention span at age 4 is a strong predictor of their arithmetic and reading abilities in later life, even as late as their early twenties. Even more so than their lower-scoring peers, children with better attention span scores were shown to be more likely to have finished a university degree by the age of 25.
In this influencer-driven world where everyone wants everything not only now, but many a time, yesterday, younger generations are failing to grasp the fact that, not everything is in fact instantaneous. Sometimes what we may see on a mobile screen may not always be the reality of what’s being portrayed under all those filtered rose-tinted lenses. Moral of the story? Sometimes it’s good to slow down, live life and do things at your own pace and wanting something now, may not always give you that instant gratification you’ve been craving so much after all.
