Consequences Aren’t Instant Anymore

Have you heard of the frog in boiling water before? Imagine this.

You are the frog. Your phone is the heat.

The frog doesn’t jump out of the water because the temperature rises slowly, one degree at a time. By the time the frog realises the water is boiling, it’s too weak and it’s too late to escape. You’re not stupid. You’re just being cooked slowly enough so you can’t feel it happening.

Instant vs Delayed

Pre-digital consequences were pretty immediate. Touch the stove, burn your hand. You got a response instantly, which taught fast.

Eat bad food, feel sick in a few hours. Stay up too late, feel tired the next day. Don’t exercise for two weeks, you feel yourself getting weaker, slower or both. You got real-time feedback on your choices.

Post-digital consequences are anything but. You can scroll for four hours today but you’ll feel fine.  Do that daily for three years and all of a sudden you can’t read a book anymore. The dots aren’t connected. The gap is too wide between the two.

Pick up your phone 100 times, this feels normal. Do it everyday for five years and all of a sudden you can’t sit still without a screen in front of you. The damage has happened so slowly you don’t even notice it. 

The temperature has been rising one degree at a time. By the time you feel the burn, you’re already boiling.

Why Delay is Dangerous

Instant consequences protect you. You touch fire once and you never do it again. The pain teaches you instantly. 

Delayed consequences do the opposite. By the time the pain has arrived, the habit has already been formed. The damage is structural and it can’t be traced back to what caused it as so much time has elapsed. 

Cigarettes didn’t cause problems immediately. They were advertised as healthy up until the 1950’s. People smoked for decades feeling fine. Once the coughs, bad skin, poor oral health and other effects started, the damage was irreversible.

Social media is the same. It won’t kill you or disease you. Social media will gut you slowly, stealing you of your attention span, deep relationships and the ability to be alone in silence. 

You won’t know what you’ve lost until it’s gone.

What You’re Losing

Attention Span: You only realise you can’t focus anymore until you sit down to concentrate and you can’t make it a minute without fidgeting to do something else. Short form content which provides stimulation every 15 seconds isn’t compatible with long stretches of work. Anything too long feels unbearable.

Health: Sitting and staring at a screen feels fine until you have chronic neck or back pain and your posture is destroyed. You can’t sleep without melatonin? Your body is 15 years older than you are.

Relationships: It becomes easier to text and delay responding rather than facing someone right in front of you. Silence (which is natural) feels unnatural. You’re training yourself to prefer interactions on a screen versus the in real life equivalent.

Mental Baseline: What does social media and technology make common? Constantly comparing yourself to others, being used to having anything at your fingertips, being emotionally provoked by what you see on your screen. This doesn’t affect you in a day. Over months and years however, your floor changes. Anxiety becomes normal. Being calm feels foreign. Depression doesn’t suddenly arrive. It integrates slowly, one scroll at a time. 

Skills and Creation: You substitute real life productivity with watching someone else do it instead. How many articles have you read about that thing you wanted to do? Then instead of doing it, you watched other people do it instead? It feels productive, sure! You aren’t wasting your time like everyone else watching other stuff. Until you realise you’ve built nothing, created nothing or learnt anything which that has stuck. You realise you’re the same person, just older and more tired. 

Why Is It This Way?

The platforms you use on a daily basis profit directly from you not realising how much using them hurts you. If scrolling made you dumber immediately, you’d stop pretty quickly. If it hurt right away, you’d quit. That’s the thing. It doesn’t. The dopamine feels familiar, warm and fuzzy. There’s no friction to load it up. The pain is delayed. This is by design.

Cigarette companies were the same. They knew their product wasn’t healthy. They knew it would kill people. They sold it because the consumers death was decades away. Tech companies know that their product will wear away at your ability to maintain your attention, relationships and mental health. They build it because the damage is years away. Why do many workers from Google, Apple and Facebook who helped design the features you’re addicted to have sworn off using them?

By the time you notice, you’re already addicted. It’s too late. They have already won.

How To See The Damage Early

You can measure and track how far gone you are. What should the yardsticks for tech addiction be?

Attention Span: Can you read for 30 minutes with no distraction?
Relationships: When was the last time you had a lengthy conversation which didn’t involve a screen?
Creativity: What have you created in the last year?
Mental state: Do you feel more anxious? More restless? More hollow?

The frog can’t feel the temperature rising. The frog can look at the thermometer to see the changes. 

Create Your Own Consequences

You need to become the taskmaster in this scenario and create consequences which resonate immediately. 

Delete your apps for a week. If you can’t last, you’re further gone than you think. Being unable to delete is the consequence being laid bare for you to see.

Set a daily limit. If you break it, the immediate consequence is that you’re admitting to yourself that you have no self-control.

Tell someone what you plan to do. When you fail, you’ll have to explain why. The social cost makes the consequence immediate.

Post your screen time publicly. Weekly. Embarrassment creates the urge to instantly change.

How This Relates to Tech Consciousness

Tech consciousness requires you to see the invisible, to measure what you can’t feel. The frog dies because it trusts what it feels. By the time it feels the heat, it can’t jump.

You are the frog. The water is starting to heat up but you aren’t dead yet. Jump while you can.