Issue No. 59

Over 10,000 years ago, to have meat on your plate, you had to venture into the wild, armed with primitive tools and sheer bravery, hunting game that roamed freely. Gathering berries and roots required keen knowledge of the landscape and seasons, each meal a testament to survival and resilience. Fast forward to 2,000 years ago, the bustling markets of ancient cities like Rome or Chang'an offered a variety of goods. Farmers and traders transported their produce and wares over long distances, often on foot or by animal-drawn carts, making fresh food a luxury for those within the city's reach.

In the 1950s, a significant transformation occurred. Supermarkets began to flourish, offering a wide array of packaged foods and fresh produce under one roof. The advent of household appliances like refrigerators and cars meant that shopping trips could be less frequent and more efficient. Today, in the 2020s, the speed and convenience have reached unprecedented levels. Now with a single click of a button or a tap of a finger, food can be delivered right in front of your door within minutes.

The most alarming reason for this? The smartphone. Initially invented to take calls and messages and handle a few emails, the smartphone has drastically evolved. When the iPhone 2G, the very first iPhone, was introduced on June 29, 2007, by Steve Jobs, it had limited functions. But when the iPhone 3G was released in 2008, everything changed. The App Store was invented.

The App Store transformed smartphones from tools for basic communication into platforms for nearly anything. With a few taps on a smartphone, groceries can be delivered to your doorstep within hours. The global supply chain ensures that seasonal fruits and exotic items are available year-round, reflecting a world where the distance between desire and fulfillment has nearly vanished. A few taps here, you have a new date. A few taps there, you know what's happening in your friend’s life, such as how many toothbrushes they have. A few other taps, you have access to movies, near-infinite amounts of data, information, videos, reels, podcasts, TV shows, games, news—all contained in a small device. It has only been 16 years since this happened, and we haven't evolved long enough to handle this much information. The distance between desire and reward has gone from physically and mentally demanding actions, like hunting for food, to a single tap. What is the effect of this sudden change in our behavior?

Dopamine addiction. And it’s much worse than it sounds.

Dopamine is a chemical in our brain that makes us want to do the action required to get a reward. In the presence of a reward such as food, dopamine is released in our brain to instruct it to perform all the actions necessary to get the food. Then after the reward is taken, another surge of dopamine in a smaller amount is released. In the past, when hunting for food, this meant building tools, walking, running, strategizing, and then physically subduing the animal. Many steps were involved before attaining the reward, making addiction difficult.

In a study done by Koob et al., mice were given access to cocaine via self-administration. They were implanted with chronic indwelling jugular catheters that allowed them to self-administer cocaine intravenously by pressing a lever.

Each press delivered a fixed dose of cocaine directly into their bloodstream, allowing researchers to monitor the amount and frequency of cocaine intake, and study the associated behavioral and neurochemical changes related to addiction. Whenever cocaine was released in their bloodstream, a euphoric experience occurred in their brain, releasing dopamine. Over time, the mice learned that pressing the lever meant euphoria, feeling good. They started pressing the lever excessively to the point that they wanted it every single second.

Does this sound familiar? Yes, of course. It’s no wonder; we are literally the mice, and our cocaine is our phones.

Today's smartphone is built for a new type of economy called the “attention economy." These businesses, mostly composed of social media, offer their services for free in exchange for your attention and user data. They sell this data to advertisers, and the more data points they have, the more targeted their ads will be, increasing their revenue. This is Meta’s primary business. 97.5% of Facebook and Instagram revenue comes from advertisers. The same applies to YouTube, Twitter, and others. These apps were built to become our cocaine. Engineers and psychologists were involved in building these apps. The like button and the red notification icon are prime examples. The like button was invented so that you receive a notification and check it. We are social animals and always want to know how others think about us. The likes on our posts are a good indication of whether we are accepted socially in a virtual space. It doesn't necessarily translate to the real world, but it makes us feel important in some way.

Initially, the notification icon was blue. Facebook realized people were not checking it. They changed the color to red, and people started checking their notifications up to 80% more, leading to higher engagement within the app. The reels and videos were created for infinite scrolling, like that mouse that consistently pressed the lever to get a reward. What's more alarming is that these reels are mostly 15 seconds short and are unrelated to each other. One reel makes you laugh, 15 seconds later you're crying over a Father's Day video, then another reel makes you hate someone. This means you are changing your emotional state every 15 seconds, which motivates more dopamine release. Facebook initially didn't have dark mode because they thought users would stay in the app longer because of the white light. Later, they realized people stayed in the app longer if their eyes weren't strained, so they introduced dark mode for all its apps, including Instagram. Every single feature of these apps has one purpose: to keep you engaged and stay in the app as long as possible.

To make matters worse, suicides among teenage girls are directly correlated to smartphone usage. The main reason is comparison to their peers or celebrities. Teenagers’ brain cannot handle these because their brains are in a stage of rapid development which lead to heightened emotional imbalances. Combining an angsty teenager with a smartphone and access to social media is a recipe to create an impulsive person. According to the Monitoring the Future survey, depressive symptoms among teenage girls increased by 50% from 2010 to 2015, compared to a 21% increase among boys during the same period. Depression among 20 to 35-year-olds is also highly correlated with the invention of the smartphone and the App Store. Studies have found that young adults who spent more time on new media (including smartphones and social media) were more likely to report mental health issues such as depression and anxiety.

How is it possible that these tools, these social media apps that advertise themselves as places to connect with more people, actually make us less connected to each other? How is it possible that our lives are getting less happier?

The main reason is that we are addicted to rewards that don't really matter. Are you proud you had 100 likes on your selfie? Is that something you would boast to a friend, or to someone of high authority? Are you proud you could order five sets of chicken wings in the span of two days using your phone? Are you proud that you use Instagram or Facebook for more than four hours a day?

Ask yourself, when is the last time you committed to a goal that takes a lot of time and effort? Most likely, you won’t remember. Working out and getting a nice body shape takes years and a consistent diet. Earning more money by building and trying different businesses takes a lot of trial and error and mental energy. Dating someone, getting to know them, and admiring their humanity takes a lot of mental energy, patience, and understanding. Most of us don't want these anymore. Now we can get a quick hit of dopamine by tapping a button, like a real addict. We are addicts. Literally. And we wonder why we more depresesd than ever?

This is much more dangerous than it sounds because the longer you do this to your brain and the more instantaneous you can get dopamine, the less you would want to do difficult goals which tend to be goals that really matter in life. Your brain changes physically because of this. The neural connections inside your brain can change physically, which is called neuroplasticity. After years of dopamine addiction, you can change your brain’s architecture so much that it would take years to recover and go back to its original state. That’s why so many drug addicts take months of rehab. They go to rehab to basically change their brain’s plasticity by exposing them to stimuli that are not similar to their drug behavioral patterns. Since using a smartphone is not considered a “real” addiction, and many people use it, we think it’s the normal thing to do. It’s not. You’re literally destroying your brain.

I've been addicted to social media for the last 10 years, especially Instagram. Some days, I wouldn't realize I've been scrolling for five hours. They call it doom-scrolling for a reason. There's no end to it, and it sometimes feels like you have no control. That's how addiction feels. Recently, I decided to use these apps much less. I only post for my business or if I want to upload memories of important events in my life. I unfollowed many pages, newsletters, profiles, etc. My phone has only 16 apps shown.

The apps that I use only a few times a week and the social media apps I use for business are hidden and have a daily time limit of one hour a day. I schedule when to open them. I order food only once a week. I went as far as to limit the photos I take in a week to 35, which is about five photos a day, so I can take photos of only the important things. After doing this for a while, I felt like a new person. My dopamine levels are starting to normalize, and now I want to do more strenuous activities, engage socially, and be motivated to do things that require a lot of effort and time. I find more reward in the long-term goals that I have, such as building businesses and supporting my family.

It's mind-blowing that a simple device like a phone can take so much away from us. Even though I have already achieved considerable goals, I feel I would have achieved more if I hadn't been addicted to my phone in the first place. Many of you may think you're not addicted, but take a look at your screen time and try not to use your phone for 24 hours. I guarantee that you will find it difficult, which is a good indication of addiction. We can no longer sit still. When there’s nothing to do, when we are bored, we resort to our phones. It has become a habit that’s difficult to remove from our systems.

I don’t mean you should become a hermit and never use your phone. You need it to communicate or to do business, and those should be the primary purposes for which you use it. For entertainment, find other ways that won’t make you addicted, such as watching a show or movie once a week using the television or a projector with your friends. Modern smartphones also have the ability to limit your usage per application, so make good use of this feature. Hide and schedule usage of the apps that you spend many hours on each day so that you don’t get the impulse to check them. Make it difficult for yourself to attain that quick dopamine release, so you can slowly rewire your brain to seek other goals. Read books, write a newsletter or a journal, draw, paint, dance, or find a good hobby that you enjoy and can be proud of. Choose something you can talk about with others and feel that you have worked hard on. Recognize the signs of your phone addiction and make changes while you can, before it’s too late.

PS: Now I think I know why my Grandma used to say “Kakaselpon mo ‘yan” every time I did poorly in school or when I often felt tired. That sentence, which became an iconic line from moms in the Philippines whenever their child fails at something, roughly translates to “It’s because of how often you use your phone”.

All this time, she was actually right.

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Until next week,