As more generations of kids go through their adolescence wondering what’s their purpose in life, it seems as if they can never be fully satisfied. Today millennials spend most of the time on their phones and on social media. Whenever they feel overwhelmed, depressed, or just going through a rough time they tend to go on their phones for this temporary relief to forget their problems. Growing up vulnerable in the technology era, Millennials without a doubt have developed the addiction to instant gratification through social media. In the visual image, there is a person injecting their phone into their arm like a type of drug. It’s a visual representation of how today we have become addicted to our phones.
In an interview “ This Is Why You Don’t Succeed ” with Simon Sinek, he speaks out on millennials and describes how phones and social media have affected millennials succeeding in life by stating how “were growing up in a Facebook -Instagram world “ Evidently, we have learned how to put filters on everything because we don’t like showing people how bad our life is and crave the acceptance from our peers through likes and reacts. Let’s not deny it we love getting messages from our friends because it makes us feel wanted. That’s why whenever you post something on social media you go back and count the number of reacts every time because seeing that number go up gives you that boost of confidence that you can’t get in the real world.
According to Sinek, people love that feeling of dopamine when they receive a notification from their friends or social media, he states it’s the “ exact same chemical that makes us feel good when we smoke when we drink, and when we gamble. In other words highly addictive.” He mentions how there are age restrictions on alcohol, gambling, and smoking, but there are no restrictions on our phones. People might think that being addicted to our phone might be better than alcohol or drugs, but we are basically just replacing one drug for another. Since there are no restrictions for our devices, we tend to abuse them to satisfy our selfish needs to cope with reality reality.
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In the article “ Instant Gratification And Its Dark Side” by Ronald Alsop, he talks about how the millennial generation grew up with technology and how they suffer from this addiction to instant gratification more than previous generations. He states “Millennials tend to expect immediate responses to emails and text and find it unbearable to lose access to the internet’s rich trove of information” (Alsop), the moment the internet starts to lag or youtube goes under maintenance, we get irritated and start to panic; it’s as if we have accepted that we can’t get anything done without our phones, so we just sit there hopeless till we gain connection again. Also, the tendency to check our phones to see if anybody has texted even though there are no notifications for it is a great example of how we have become a slave to our devices.
The addiction of instant gratification on future generations will only grow worse, and will lack the skills to develop real relationships in the real world. In this case social media will take away that skill set and younger generations will rely on their phones to form meaningful connections . Certainly by the time younger kids graduate from school and thrown into the real world, they will want to quit their job not because it’s not their dream job, but because they won’t feel like their making in impact. Generations of today need to learn that social media can’t teach you how to create strong relationships or job satisfaction, those processes need a lot of patience that nobody else can teach you other than yourself by trial and error. Patience is a skill that we need to relearn to become successful or else best case scenario is that we go through life never fully satisfied about anything and still searching for that happiness through our phones till our time is up.
Bibliography
- “Instant Gratification & Its Dark Side.” Summer 2014 || Bucknell Magazine | Bucknell University, www.bucknell.edu/about-bucknell/communications/bucknell-magazine/recent-issues/summer-2014/instant-gratification-and-its-dark-side.
- Simon Sinek speech about millennials. “ This Is Why You Don’t Succeed ” video Advice, director. This Is Why You Don’t Succeed . YouTube, YouTube, 14 Sept. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ev7GXzFTPg.
- “The Smart-Phone ADDICTION EPIDEMIC.” Professor Ramos’ Blog, 26 Mar. 2017, professorramos.blog/2017/03/23/the-smart-phone-addiction-epidemic/.
