Addicted

This is not a piece. It’s a note, for me to remember in future.

Why are all the forms of Entertainment, so addictive? What do we find so pleasurable in Whatsapp chats? Why are we so hooked to our Tablets/PCs as we once were to our T.V.s? Why also do we constantly groan and lament our own addictiveness to technology, and are literally helpless to just stop consuming the content, mindlessly and forever? Once in a while, we have withdrawal symptoms and we take a brief sabbatical from all forms of Entertainment – only to be lured back! Why do we behave the way we behave?

One of the reasons that I have observed in my own personal life is that – my life is quite boring. I know that’s typical of a nerd, but I do believe that this holds true for many of us. I want to feel all the high-strung emotions, all at once sometimes, only to realize that reality is quite bland and bovine. I try adventure and travelling to take care of that – but my brain is too fast to soak in all there is in the mountains and the valleys, and I do feel happy and amazed for a week maybe, or less. After that – been there, done that. My brain wants to constantly feel the headlong rush- so much so that I can be charged with substance-abuse of content. We consume content – news, videos, series, movies???! It sounds so wroooong! (P.S.: Have you noticed the upsurge in videos on Facebook? We have to play those shitty videos, right?)

But that drives me to ask the question – were our ancestors really better off? Nopes, not really. Let’s divide the time we spend into two parts: 1) Chore Time 2) Non-chore time. Our Ancestors weren’t better off – they had longer chore time – they had to travel over slower modes of transportation, wait forever for letters, had more physical work to do – things which our generation doesn’t do. We do seem to have more non-chore time, not only that: our non-chore tasks  have crept into the chore-time. How many of us use Whatsapp during office-hours? Why do we use Facebook and Whatsapp – all the time? Do we normally speak with the same set of people? No, a chance meeting – and you start chatting online with an utter stranger & what’s more entertaining than flirting with utter strangers?

All this babbling – thanks to the ‘Black Mirror S1 E2’. It’s addictive (:-p).