Or is it a clever way to keep useless people pleasantly occupied and out of trouble?

Andrew Sullivan’s longform reflection on his own struggle resisting the constant distraction of the digital age — titled “I Used To Be a Human Being” — is full of interesting arguments. Some are obvious, like the obvious pros and cons of the unending stream of info we’re all immersed in. Some are more personal, like his experience trying to battle that connectivity compulsion through meditation. All of it is recognizably relevant to our daily lives, and worth a read.

One quote I liked in particular:

Has our enslavement to dopamine — to the instant hits of validation that come with a well-crafted tweet or Snapchat streak — made us happier? I suspect it has simply made us less unhappy, or rather less aware of our unhappiness, and that our phones are merely new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety.

It may be oversimple, but worth asking:

Are you really happier when you’re more digitally connected, or is a constant stream of digital stimulation a distraction from “real life”?

“I just HAVE to know which of my weird relatives thought that dog photo was cute.”

This Medium post from a former Google “Product Philosopher” (a weirdly pretentious title to be sure, but once you get past that he has a lot of smart things to say) on “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds” is very much worth the 15 minutes it takes to read.

In it, he covers a handful of ways the web and mobile apps are designed to manipulate your choices and play on our human psychological weaknesses to keep you using them, or do what they want you to do vs what you may actually want to do, mostly without you even noticing.

A few examples: using Yelp to find a place to go after a movie will probably lead you to a bar or restaurant to spend more money, when a park bench could do perfectly fine. Notifications just vague enough to pull you back into apps for very little information, which leads to more news feed scrolling. Netflix autoplaying the next episode of a series. Even the basic principle of a menu forcing a choice between a few options they’d prefer you to take. Super interesting stuff we probably don’t think about much (*begin conspiracy voice*) because that’s exactly what they want.

Which apps or website do you think manipulates your choices or steals your time the most?

How aware are you of this as it happens?

What, if anything, do you do to combat these designed manipulations?