The Tech Trap: Snap Judgements We’re Wired to Make

Over the past several decades, technology has been negotiating its position in our lives, growing ever more present to the human experience with each iteration of innovation. In time, we’ve adapted to incorporate these carefully-engineered pieces of metal (computers, MacBooks, iPhones, tablets, you name it) into our homes and hands, eventually granting them access to our minds. All we had to do was use it. This is how our technology came to know us-- our deepest inclinations, our darkest fears and how best to hijack our attention. 

Once upon a time, technology was about utility. It aimed to simplify our lives, not capitalize on them. Many apps still serve that same functional purpose: Uber takes us from point A to point B, the iPhone camera captures our most special moments, map apps tells us where to go and google voice acts as a pocket-sized translator. It protects our assets, grows our knowledge base and distills the world down into the palm of our hands. In this sense, technology is an amazing tool. It has moved the world forward at an incredible pace. That’s precisely where it becomes problematic if we’re not careful. You might have an iPhone 12 in your pocket, but you’ve got the first and only edition of a brain in your head. 

The mismatch between technology and the human being is a topic of significant interest. There are countless articles, books and podcasts dedicated to understanding the mechanisms that drive our vulnerability to screens. There are documentaries about the dark underworld of intermittent rewards that turn your bedroom into a casino that never sleeps. The crux of the issue is technology’s ability to override our rational brains by engaging our primitive impulses and tapping into our anxiety, jealousy and desire. Every time our phone dings, our fight-flight-freeze networks become activated and hijack our attention. Likes on Instagram or comments on Facebook provide fleeting hits to the brain's pleasure centers that keep us wanting more. Even those of us who don’t engage with social media can become absorbed by a similar deluge of strategically placed content designed to cater to our interests and monopolize our attention span. 

In the end, our time online often devolves into a glorified form of escapism that leaves us over-aroused, stressed and chronically dysregulated. It might feel as if we’re in the driver's seat of our lives, but technology has a way of slowly manipulating our interests, desires and curiosities into a consumer driven business that aims to profit off of our attention by getting us addicted to our devices. What’s particularly daunting about tech addiction is its ability to induce a state of autopilot, making it increasingly difficult for us to break away from the avatarian world in our hands--unable to grasp that we’re trading real moments of our life for clickbait and comparison. 

Instagram is widely known for being an app that prey’s on our desire to measure ourselves against others. The act of social comparison isn’t new, it’s actually a survival mechanism that stems from our tribal history. It was designed to help us stay aligned with and protected by the groups that we were a part of. In modern society, we often experience this same phenomenon while scrolling through social media and assessing our position relative to the status quo. Am I as good as she is? As smart as he seems? Am I making as much money as they are? We can’t possibly answer these questions by merely browsing a handful of small square images on Instagram, so we do the next best thing: assign meaning to the lives of people that we don’t know. This satisfies our curiosity, even if it’s completely baseless. The more we scroll, the clearer we understand ourselves relative to the larger group and the further we inhabit this state of autopilot--scan, assess, categorize. This isn’t a character flaw, we’re wired to make snap judgments about others based on the information that we’re given--however limited that may be. 

The reality is, our perception is often more reflective of our own internal world than that of the perfect stranger who we compare ourselves with online. If we’re grappling with a deep-seated belief that we’re not good enough, not busy enough or simply not cutting it--we’re going to seek out the Instagram accounts that reinforce those beliefs. We’ve all experienced this in some form or another. In my case, Instagram was about inspiring perfectionism. Every person who I carefully analyzed and measured myself against brought me closer to the life I desired. I wanted desperately to believe that if I could imitate the picturesque lives of the women I followed online that perhaps I, too, would be as happy as they looked. 

Chasing Rabbits Down Holes 

Sometime last Spring I sat down for lunch on a quiet, sunny patio and began scrolling aimlessly through my phone. I happened upon the Instagram account of a woman who I’d browsed once before, years ago. We had at least five degrees of separation between us and the lap of luxury that she called home was evidence of our very different lives. She worked as a senior executive at a high end fashion brand, based in Paris. The last time that I’d ventured into her world, I recall thinking to myself that she’d figured it out. She cracked the code to living a good life. She was a beautiful, enthusiastic runner who made trips around the globe in her sleep. Her golden skin looked like she’d been making a regular pitstop in Saint Tropez for the last 10 years and on her feet, she donned a different pair of Louboutin’s every single day. I wondered if she was tired, because I wonder if everyone is tired. She didn’t look like it. She looked alive.

There is a part of me that really loves chasing rabbits down holes on social media. People become one-dimensional so quickly and it’s oddly satisfying to feel like you might know a person by virtue of the tiny snippets of their lives that they curate for my consumption. I consider myself pretty good at poking holes in these stories. I thought I knew when a young woman is trying exceptionally hard to be adored, or when she wants the world to think of her a certain way—because I’ve been that young woman before and so have you. It’s the game we play, despite knowing that we cannot win or lose. We just go on playing until we’ve had enough. Like the woman in Paris, wearing Louboutin’s to breakfast. The woman I’d been dead wrong about all along.

I clicked her most recent photo. It had been posted 11 hours earlier. The caption was a lengthy story, sharp on the edges, about her unraveling. She’d been admitted to the hospital one year prior, after an exhaustive battle with demons I never expected for someone like her to have. She left her glamorous, empty life behind and escaped to a small town in Mexico to rebuild herself on the sands of a different place—literally and figuratively. This woman, who served as my bar for a life well lived, was looking for something more. She wasn’t tired, she was exhausted. If not for the red-bottomed shoes, she could have been any of us.

I followed a link in her bio and it brought me to a podcast that she’d been featured in, about coming back to herself after years in a hedonistic machine that left her cold and detached.  I assume the cheeky, charming persona that she’d created for herself on Instagram was a nice reprieve from reality, but on the inside she was grappling with the truth: that her work was not contributing to the world in a meaningful way. The hollow emptiness inside of her, finally made undeniable when her body began to fall apart. She referenced the deep-seated message that courses through every woman in the midst of becoming, you’re not enough, you’re not enough, you’re not enough, swiftly replaced with something new: this life I live is not enough. The way that she described her time in Oaxaca was more captivating than any of the high profile jaunts she’d made reference to in the past. She spoke of a new currency that she’d discovered—one that registered with her soul and not an American bank account.

I thought about this woman all day. I wondered what became of her career and whether or not she feels doubt about her choice to leave it all behind. Because I want what she has, but I don’t always believe that it’s real. It’s a bit like magic. Can we really experience a wildly fulfilling life, without the materialism that we’ve been conditioned to use as a marker for all of it? We check so many boxes that feel as if they’re going to be it. The thing that makes us fulfilled. The house, the husband, the child, the stupid Range Rover that nobody ever needed. They’re markers for success but they don’t register internally as success. We get married, we have a kid, we climb the ladder and, still we can end up feeling empty. Is this the way it has to be? I don’t know. I have no idea. I really thought I could have both, and I’m still coming to terms with the fact that I’m 30 years old and I haven’t gotten there. It’s a constant negotiation about what matters and my answer changes every day. Sometimes I’m in tune with the things I need in order to live a good, balanced life and sometimes I’m buying shoes on the internet like I might die tomorrow.

But the part of this story that boggles my mind above everything else is that I missed it. In my naivety, I was so consumed with admiration for this woman’s story that I actually believed was real. I wanted her life, while she was contemplating suicide. Why do we assume we’re the only ones on this runaway train, teetering on the edge all day long? Why do we want so badly to convince everyone else that we’re fine? And how do we keep pulling it off? 

This is how our emotional brain works. It’s an old system, with primitive instincts that don’t care about how educated we are or the Louboutin’s on our feet--they only care about establishing where we fit into the rest of society. This part of our brain thinks in black and white, good and bad. It allows us to scroll through the lives of perfect strangers and make assumptions that leap from one photo to the next, filling in the gaps in whatever way we choose. Our default is to believe that what we see is what we get, but it fails to acknowledge the looking glass we carry with us. If we want to see the truth in someone’s story, we have to know them. What lives on the internet isn’t alive at all.