Don't compare your daily life with someone else's highlights
Haebom
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I read <The Organized Mind> before. It was a book that gave me some very interesting perspectives as I was struggling with how to organize the information in my head amidst the flood of information. There is an introduction that left the deepest impression on me. ( A summary of the book at the time )
The printing press was introduced in the mid-1400s. By replacing the laborious and error-prone copying work, it allowed for the rapid dissemination of writing. But once again, many people worried that intellectual life was coming to an end. In 1525, Erasmus launched a lengthy diatribe against the swarm of new books that he believed would seriously impede learning. He argued that the printing press was designed to make money and that it would fill the world with books that were “stupid, ignorant, full of malice, slander, profane, and mad”. Leibniz complained that the horrendous volume of books would eventually lead to a return to barbarism. Descartes famously advised us to ignore all the books that had been accumulated and rely on our own observations.
Complaints about the proliferation of books continued into the late 1600s. Intellectuals warned that people would stop talking to each other because of books, that people would become engrossed in books, polluting their minds with useless and foolish ideas. And as we all know, these warnings continue to this day. With the invention of television, and with the invention of computers, iPods, iPads, email, Twitter, and Facebook, they were all denounced as addictive, unnecessarily distracting, and reducing the ability to actually meet people and exchange ideas in real time.
<Organizing Brain> pp. 44-45
The human brain is originally bad at organizing things, and if you feed it too much information, people will be buried in information and will not be able to do anything. This scary story continues to be told in books, games, the internet, YouTube, TikTok, etc. Now, people say that if you look at books, you're outstanding, and if you look at TikTok or YouTube shorts or reels, you're addicted to dopamine. (In fact, it's not a new story and it's a meaningless story.) Humans originally live on dopamine and serotonin. When there was no short-form content, YouTube was there, when there was no YouTube, SNS was there, when there was no SNS, the internet was there, and when there was no internet, books captured our attention and continued to provide topics for conversation.
TVaddictionIsNoMereMetaphor.pdf244KB
In 2003, the term TV Addiction came up in the United States. There are various papers and research results that many people are addicted to TV, and their sleep is disturbed, their communication skills are impaired, and it has a bad effect on the brain. On average, people at that time said they watched TV for 3 hours a day, which was more than half of their free time.
At that time, there were many negative stories about TV in Korea, and there were various negative discourses such as the idiot box. If I think about it, the space where these stories were told was probably the news on TV. Was it that the news was good, but other TV shows were bad? In any case, at that time, individuals and families who wanted to control their TV viewing habits needed conscious efforts and various strategies.
If you look at the special feature article above, it says this: "Continuous TV viewing reduces creativity, problem-solving skills, and tolerance for unstructured time." Hmm, I've heard this a lot. It even says that video games are more positive than watching TV one-sidedly because they are interactive.
Naturally, the question arises. Do we not watch TV anymore because we have developed the habit of not watching TV? So do we use the Internet and watch YouTube? And do we spend more time on SNS and short-form through training to reduce the time spent on the Internet and games? We know the answer. It just happens because it is 'more' fun.
Recently, there has been a lot of talk about dopamine and reward psychology in various media, and about short-form videos. So, would it be better to quit short-form videos and watch long YouTube videos? If you search a little, there are already many stories about YouTube addiction. What about games and social media? It’s the same even if there is interaction. They have always been criticized as addictions and such. So, would we live better lives if we quit these digital devices and go back to analog? Hwa-tu, poker, hold’em… No, let’s leave this out because it’s gambling. Would it be better to go back to nature and live a life of no stimulation? As you read, you must have felt that. Isn’t this too much of a leap? So what are you trying to say?
Actually, we know the answer. Too much is as bad as too little. Anything in excess is bad, and too little is disappointing. Humans have always been wary of the infinity pool (a place where there is endless content) throughout their lives. It’s not because of dopamine or serotonin. It’s because we know that we only have a limited amount of time and that we have to do something about it. And because we live in an age where we can see what other people are doing, we feel this even more keenly. So we experience the act of getting a great reward from one action and become addicted to it, applying it to other things to try to get something quickly and easily. This isn’t the fault of short-form content, SNS, or the Internet. Humans themselves are designed that way.
I always say that you just need to throw away the thief mentality. "Getting a big reward from one action" is a thief mentality in itself. When you turn on the TV, a broadcast comes on, when you raise your finger, a stimulating video comes on, and when you turn the page, a new story unfolds. It's just a trend and a form. Content is created with a lot of effort and talent behind the scenes to make you feel like you're getting a big reward from one action. Maybe we sometimes watch someone's highlight and compare it to our daily lives.
Below is a screenshot of the first broadcast of YouTuber Tzuyang, who currently has 8.96 million subscribers. Now, she is a YouTuber who gets hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of live views when she broadcasts, but in 2018, five years ago, she was a mukbang YouTuber who couldn't even start eating because not a single person watched her broadcast.
Whether it's watching short-form videos, webtoons, reading fantasy novels, watching internet broadcasts, watching YouTube, or reading blogs, everything can be a process of us becoming something. If you set a good direction and keep going without losing yourself, you will eventually become something. I just wanted to write a long post to wrap up the week. Thank you for always reading.
📚 Welcome to Haebom's archives. --- I post articles related to IT 💻, economy 💰, and humanities 🎭. If you are curious about my thoughts, perspectives or interests, please subscribe. Would you like to be notified when new articles are posted? 🔔 Yes, that means subscribe. haebom@kakao.com
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