An Age of Instant Reactions

The more time I spend doomscrolling, the more I’m faced with the severity of our generation’s obsession with online communication. While social media is an extremely useful tool, it leads us to live in an age of instant reactions, where we respond to notifications faster than to our own feelings, slowly losing the ability to notice what truly matters and to listen to ourselves.

In an era of notifications, we react to phones vibrating in our pockets faster and more efficiently than we react to our own feelings. We use filters on our faces, hiding what we consider imperfections that others often don’t even see. In doing so, we protect ourselves from external judgement.

We set high expectations for ourselves, yet often forget to set boundaries for the people around us. Bruises and pimples are hidden with concealer as we ignore the cracks spreading across our hearts and minds. 

We get mad at the internet when it’s slow or at the cashier when they make a mistake, but we suffer through our own experiences: we keep working in places we don’t want to be, surround ourselves with people we don’t like. Minor things bother us, but when our dreams die out, we don’t pay them much attention. We cry because of a broken phone, but don’t when we unconsciously betray ourselves every day. In a sense, anxiety starts working like a car alarm — it goes off at the slightest bump but stays silent when we slowly disappear into the shadows of our own lives.

This is not to suggest that we shouldn’t be quick to respond to messages — that’s what online communication is there for. We should inconvenience ourselves and make time for the people close to us whenever we can, but not for the internet as a whole. It’s ironic how we keep wishing for all these ambitious and spectacular goals in our heads, and yet are so scared of change that we just keep looking for an instant shot of dopamine through doomscrolling. Once you catch yourself in a situation where your phone is inaccessible, it becomes clear how hard it is to be alone with your own thoughts without any distractions, being forced to face your mind and all its hidden parts. 

Perhaps we just stopped recognising what’s truly important. The ‘important’ does not usually arrive through a push notification. Our hypervigilance to notifications causes our brains to function like one. Instead of observing the outside, we get trapped in a state of constant alertness. Maybe the grass is still green, birds still chirp, and kids still play outside. Maybe we are the ones who got older and stopped listening?

We take life much more seriously than it needs to be taken, as if everything we do always has to lead to something, as if there’s an endpoint we’re meant to reach. So we rush, plan and worry about the future. But what if there’s no endpoint? What if life is not about the final goal in particular, but more about the journey? We don’t listen to music for the final note - is the best part not the chorus? In the same way, life isn’t something you need to finish; it’s something you need to experience.

Don’t wait till it’s too late. Make your phone quieter so you can hear your own thoughts. Tell people exactly how you feel. There is no one correct recipe for life, so you might as well enjoy it. Start making steps in the direction that scares you, because that is where real life lies: what is worth your instant reaction. You can’t add days to your life, but you can add life to your days.

Words by Katya Keyzerova, she/her