Last night, I sat down on the couch, fully intending on catching up on a favorite TV series. Netflix had emailed me earlier that day letting me know that Call the Midwife was on so I was excited. But soon after I sat down I found myself venturing to social media. “I just want to share a few recent photos,” I told myself. Well, you know where this is going. Twelve photos and five minutes somehow turned into an hour and a half on Instagram.
Unsurprisingly, the dopamine hit I got from looking at my phone before bed became a burden as I laid there, unable to fall asleep. I’ve always blamed my insomnia on my overactive brain but only after I woke up the next morning did I realize that the whole reason why I went on Instagram in the first place was to see what was going on with my family and friends. And yet, Instagram showed me none of it.
What Instagram showed me instead were content creators. People I’ve never met in real life. I know nothing about them beyond their engrossing videos and photos. I know all too well that this was due to algorithms, the behind-the-scenes technology that determines what I should see. Algorithms, as neuroscientist and writer Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in her newsletter, Hypercurious, “exploit our curiosity gaps (the space between what we know and want to know) and deliver just enough novelty to keep us scrolling.”
Somehow, we’ve become constant producers and consumers, ready to accept whatever is handed to us. We are living in the age of helicopter consumption.
The age of helicopter consumption
In late August, a writer on Substack who goes by the name Jacqueline wrote a piece about discomfort that went viral. The piece somehow landed in my feed even though I do not subscribe to her newsletter. As I browsed through her archives, I found myself wondering: “how is it possible that her previous posts, as infrequent as they were, had only double-digit likes while this particular piece garnered five-digit likes, almost 400 comments and more than 4,000 shares?”
Perhaps it’s because Jacqueline (whom we know very little about because she has written nothing in her About page and her profile on Substack only has four words: “stilettos and broken bottles”) calls out the idea of nostalgia, the way things used to be, back when our lives were less curated, when it took a little extra effort to get what we wanted.
It’s not to say that things are easier now that we have practically everything at our disposal; it’s just more complicated. More directions to focus our attention on.
I am no stranger to distraction. I feel myself being pulled in multiple directions almost every day. I float on a cloud of indecision, unable to focus on what really matters to me.
The beauty of limited choices
About a month ago, I stepped inside an Aldi’s for the first time. Aldi’s, for those who are not familiar, is a grocery chain on a mission to expand rapidly. While there are no stores in my former state of Oregon, there are plenty of Aldis’ in Florida. The chain is known for their efficiency and lack of options which ironically, has made them one of the fastest-growing grocery chains in America.
Stepping inside an Aldi’s, I couldn’t help but marvel at how clean it is. The further I go, the more I realize that there isn’t much more to go. They only have four aisles—every product category, from condiments to deli meats to breads, have less than 10 options. Some only have three brands to choose from.
Aldis seems to know what we all want, which is fewer choices. With fewer choices, you can be out of there in thirty minutes or less because the cashiers are extremely fast. Blink twice and they’ll give you a grand total. Better yet—as a discount chain, you’re unlikely to spend more than $100 on four bags of food by the time you’re done. Perhaps this is why they have developed a cult following.
Too many choices can distract us from what’s at stake. And too much content can have a similar effect as well. If we are always handed out content in a constant loop, we’ll never learn how to seek it out ourselves, how to figure out what attracts us, what makes us think deeply. In other words, how to be a real human, a good citizen of the world. The result? We become recipients of the same cycle of thought. We become the bystander where instead of taking initiative, we wait on others to make the first move.
Nostalgia vs. the future
These days, with worries about the diminishing nature of knowledge careers, there is also a shift in cultural thought. In an op-ed for The New York Times titled, “Why Gen Z Is Resurrecting the 1990s,” Dr. Clay Routledge, a social psychologist who specializes in nostalgia (I didn’t know that was a thing) referenced a 2023 survey which concluded that 80% of Gen Z adults – those born after 1997 – “were worried that their generation was too dependent on technology.”
I chuckled at this simple fact. After all, we don’t need a survey to know that we are dependent on technology. We can feel it in our bones. The way we react when something is presented to us in a regular rotation. Dr. Routledge adds, “new technologies were more likely to drive people apart than bring them together.” This I can get behind, for the evidence is right in front of my eyes. Instagram alone is driving me further and further apart from my family and friends to the point where I have no idea what’s going on with them anymore.
Routledge argues that nostalgia is “a future-oriented endeavor.” He writes, “We draw on it to resolve our dissatisfactions in the present and to move forward with hope and determination.” In other words, it’s a way of making sense of the current world by reflecting on the past.
But nostalgia isn’t necessarily a good thing. This is because, when reflecting on the past, we tend to see it with rose-colored glasses; our brains instinctively filter out all the anxieties, fears, sadness and uncertainties we might have felt at the time. Morgan Housel, best known for his book The Psychology of Money, writes, “It’s so common for people’s memories about a time to become disconnected from how they actually felt at the time.” And because none of us can see into the future, it’s hard to comprehend in the moment how things will play out.
Consciously seeking distractions
I remember back in the early to mid-2000s when blogging took off. As a twenty-something college graduate who was barely making a livable wage and filled with anxieties just like Morgan Housel, I relied on the internet to take me away from my reality. I made a conscious effort to seek out food blogs, home décor blogs, lifestyle blogs and practically anything with pretty pictures that allowed me the pleasure of looking at someone else’s life.
It’s a classic response to what Nir Eyal, the author of Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, refer to as, “The desire to escape discomfort.” I deliberately distracted myself so as to escape from my own reality. But these days, I don’t have to, because one way or another, something will come across my eyes and distract me.
The age of constant notifications
As I write this, I’m getting notifications from my son’s classroom WhatsApp group. I should turn off notifications, I think. But then, how will I know what’s going on? Obviously, I’d have to make a conscious decision to look for the messages, just as I can make a conscious decision to not check it. I chose the latter, because I know that the notifications are simply external triggers to get me to engage.
Instagram’s content used to give me inspiration, but I’ve come to the realization that all I want to see these days are the grainy, bad photos. The ones of your dinner that you tried to zoom in and edit but somehow ended up looking like a blob of butter. The selfie you took with your kid where instead of smiling at the camera, he blinked halfway through. The paintings or knitted projects you completed that didn’t look perfect by any means but you’re so damn proud of. The family photo you took in front of that museum you went to before everyone had a meltdown. These are real images from real life that I no longer see, and it makes me a little sad.
Perhaps this is what’s happening with Gen Z’s. They grew up in a time riddled with technology. By the time they started preschool, AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo! were common household names. Messaging and search engines didn’t become as advanced as they did until years after Google was founded in 1998. With a childhood filled with technology, all that’s left to do is wonder what life was like without it.
Thanks for reading! If you feel like having a conversation about this topic, feel free to like, comment or send me a DM. I always like hearing from my readers. Who are you? What are you up to? Social media is clearly not showing me what I want to see, so this is your chance ;) And if you’re not subscribed yet, let me help you out.
We should create a course on how to manipulate algorithms
A thought-provoking post, Hoang. As one who grew up without much technology (ok, television, but that was strictly limited in my house), I can say there were definite pluses. We learned to actually have face-to-face conversations, read physical books, make up games that involved physical movement rather than being glued to screens, wrote actual handwritten letters when away from home or friends, and generally had to use our brains and books to figure out the answers to things. I know there’s a lot of positives to technology and I am unfortunately addicted to my phone and apt to spend too much time on Facebook, Instagram, or Substack, but I do see the benefits of unplugging as often as possible. There’s really no substitute for real life experience.