Is it time to drop technology?
We feel the need to broadcast and share our daily lives to the world and seem to live our lives through our cellphone screens.
Over the past decade or so, technology has changed the landscape of our daily lives to almost unrecognisable to how people lived in previous decades.
Social media and our addiction to it have left us more alone and depressed than ever.
We place our self-worth in the number of likes we get for our posts, how many people follow us and the number of friends we have.
We feel the need to broadcast and share our daily lives to the world and seem to live our lives through our cellphone screens.
Studies have linked the use of social media to rising rates of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and poor quality of sleep among adolescents.
Also see: Why a social media post can get you fired
Much of this has to do with the addictive quality of social media and technology and how it changes our brain chemistry.
Numerous studies conducted on this issue have demonstrated that with every like, follow, friend request and text message we receive, our brains release a surge of dopamine.
Dopamine is the “feel-good” chemical connected to desire, ambition, addiction and sex drive.
Dopamine is also what drives us to take rewarding actions, to work toward goals and desires.
However, when our cellphones can satisfy these desires, we feel lethargic and less driven to achieve.
Tech companies knew how this neurotransmitter works, and specifically crafted their programs to exploit this.
Columnist David Brooks wrote: “Companies understand what causes dopamine surges in the brain and they lace their products with ‘hijacking techniques’ that lure us in and create ‘compulsion loops’”.
Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice-president of User Growth at Facebook, confirmed this when he said: “I feel tremendous guilt.
“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we have created are destroying how society works.”
Sean Parker from Facebook had a similar admission of guilt when he said: “We have exploited the vulnerability in human psychology in order make people consume as much time and attention from people as possible”.
A Harvard Study found that our brains have been rewired in such a way that we feel anxiety when we haven’t interacted with our phones for longer than two hours, we even feel our phones vibrate with notifications when we haven’t received one, so strong is our brain’s craving for this surge of dopamine.
Studies have also demonstrated that social media negatively affects relationships with couples feeling more anxious and jealous.
As people become more aware of these facts and how technology has demonstrably worsened their quality of life and their relationships, there is a movement away from social media.
This trend is most prevalent among a generation of people born in the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, or Gen Z.
In a study from Origin, Hill Holliday’s in-house research arm, 34 per cent of Gen Z stated they refuse to use social media and have deleted all of their accounts, while 64 per cent are taking a break from it.
In addition, 44 per cent of people from the age of 18 to 24 said social media has made them more anxious, sad and depressed.
Although a technology detox would do us all a world of good, the rushed and unnatural nature of 21st-century life makes this almost impossible.
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