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| Art by Mehedi Haque - The Addiction |
1. Post everything you enjoy doing on social media: Things you enjoyed doing without everyone knowing. Where the joy came from inside you. Yes, start posting about it. Your dopamine release will start getting delayed, from the actual action, to the posting on socials and subsequent reactions that flow in. In anticipation.
This was shown in an experiment where children who drew for themselves, were given token stickers of acknowledgement. When the stickers stopped, they stopped too, even though they were drawing with no external rewards in the beginning. A regular dose of external validation can ruin your inner rewards. Be it eating healthy, going to the gym, or a meetup with friends.
Anticipating the likes while doing these will mess up your intrinsic reward algorithm. See how everyone at a wedding event today is only concerned about the photos. Not the meetup or discussion.
Add to that, the socials have an incentive to decrease the engagement you get, so that you spend more time posting in it to get the same amount of reaction. As they report on average time you spend in the platform to their shareholders, their key incentive is to grab you for longer, and not necessarily to serve you the best updates in 5 minutes so that you can return to your day all happy. That's no good for them. A dwindling amount of engagement with your posts will push you to think as if the life you are living or the content you are making is inferior to the past.
2. Leave nothing to chance: Do only the things termed trendy and guaranteed success. These are the things backed up by current consensus and market data. Take the step only when you are absolutely sure of success. However, unless you have some super secret information no one else has, the most practical things that everyone is chasing, are places where more people gather to compete away all super-normal profits.
This rule doesn't apply to positive or infinite sum games though, where everyone can make a good return without reducing others' share, e.g. personal fitness targets, reading goals etc. It is perfectly fine here to go for the most time-tested methods. In all other cases, a bit of madness mixed into practicality has the potential to bear the best fruits.
3. Let your inbox dictate your day: Check mails, messages, news-feed once every hour to be sure you are all caught up. Let your existence be a collection of reactions. Feeling active and important, feeling as if you are getting things done, just counting the number of correspondences churned through.
Never get to deep into anything, as focusing on one thing for more than 10 minutes makes you anxious these days and pushes you to pick up the phone for another scroll through reels or stories. Be the critique and not the creative. At the end of the month, you'll look back and feel like you've spent all your time gulping on lays potato chips. Mostly air and very little substance.
Corrections: Do things that you don't photograph. Photograph things you don't post. Post things you don't count the likes on. Take your own loonshots (lunatic moonshots), pander to your odd inclinations. Act more than you re-act. Plan before you execute.
Further reading: Peter Thiel (Zero to One), Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism).
Radi
24 August 2022
Dhaka
24 August 2022
Dhaka