Last night I was scrolling on Instagram at 12 am when I realized the truth about the nature of our content addiction.
I have a bad habit of staying up till 2—and sometimes—even 3 am in the morning. No matter how many times I have promised myself to fix my sleep schedule, I have never done it.
The moment my head hits the pillow (around 11:00 pm) I find myself scrolling on my phone.
Maybe I’m afraid of the next day so I try keeping myself awake for as long as I can (My life is boring because I do the same stuff without variation: I write, read, walk, and sleep).
I compensate for that boredom by indulging in social media late at night.
Or maybe I use my phone to escape my dark thoughts. When I’m trying to sleep my mind conjures images of death and thoughts of despair.
What will you do when your mother, father, brother, sister, friends die? You’re rotting away in your small town while your friends are living the best life.
Thoughts like these scare the sleep out of my eyes. Then there are the constant fantasies. I imagine myself living different lives and losing my sense of identity.
It isn’t until I get a notification and see the 3:00 am on my phone that I realize I’ve been imagining all that stuff.
For these reasons, I use my phone until I get sleepy, so I can bypass all those thoughts and images of despair, plus those fantasies.
Anyways, I’m digressing.
I was scrolling on Instagram like any other night when I came across a page with thousands of followers.
The person who owned the page did nothing but share short videos titled “Rate my lunch.”
At first I saw nothing abnormal about the videos until a question popped in my head. “Wait,” I said, “Why are people watching a grown ass man eating burgers? Hell, why am I watching this at midnight? Don’t I have better things to do?”
It was at that moment that I got an epiphany.
I learned that we watch content to experience different events and to live different lives. It’s similar to how I fantasize about living a different life when I try to sleep.
Think about it.
When we read a book, we hallucinate. We feel as if we are also a character in that book. That’s why it feels so real.
The same thing happens when we watch a movie or a vlog. When you watch a YouTuber skydiving from a tall cliff, you get to experience the thrill alongside the YouTuber.
Lately, my YouTube feed has been recommending these videos from rural Afghanistan. The videos show villagers going about their daily lives, and millions of people have watched those videos.
I think, as more and more people are becoming urbanized, they crave the simple life their ancestors lived. But they can’t go back, so they watch other villagers to feel what it’s like to be a villager.
When our ancestors lived in the wild, they experienced every emotion imaginable: grief, joy, fear, and anger.
But as their life became easier by the agricultural revolution, they felt these emotions less and less. To experience these emotions again, they turned to stories.
Now, we do the same thing with books and movies. We lack adventure, so we read a thriller novel. We lack intimacy so we watch a romance movie.
We are getting lonelier everyday, so we compensate our loneliness with content.
All of entertainment (books, movies, plays, podcasts, etc) are us watching other people do or talk about something and imagine we are partaking in their activity or conversations.
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Your friend,
Noyan
