Are We Living the Dystopian Nightmare?

I woke up one morning, it was my 25th birthday and I propped myself up on my elbows and looked at the time - it was 4:30am and my alarm was about to go off. I got up and started doing my morning yoga, completed a routine by 5am and then my phone goes off. Not just that but my watch goes off. And again, that's not all - I get a notification from my bank account. Each stating that they hope I have a happy birthday. One by one: Amazon, Twitter, Apple, Facebook and even various websites where I did not even know I had an account - some I do not think I have heard off in a while. It made me aware of dystopian this nightmare really was that I was living in. The question to me was no longer 'what happens when the AI takes over?' but now it has become: 'well, it's taken over - now what do we do?'

I grew up without these devices and to be honest, I do wish I had them. There was really no such thing as a tablet when I was little and Google was still in its prime - you still had to use a dictionary to look things up. Wikipedia existed but nowhere near what it is now and nowhere near as popular as it is now. If I had these items, I think my studying life would have been a lot easier and no matter whether they were around or not and whether they were growing or not - I did not really use a computer for my homework or owned a laptop on which to complete my assignments until I was about seventeen. When I did get them, I wanted to make the most of them and thus, I went on to use them profusely when I was doing my degrees.

You can probably guess how much I am therefore on board with the idea of machine learning and AI - you're right, I'm not. I am admittedly alright at holding a conversation with my Google Assistant but apart from that, there is just so much about it that makes me uncomfortable. My devices will say happy birthday to me, my accounts will say happy birthday to me and everything else in my room seems to wish me a happy birthday before real people actually do. Then begs the question of whether these people are saying happy birthday to you because you're important or because it makes them feel better. It's that second one. It makes them feel better and it makes you feel better. A dopamine hit on both ends is a very successful dopamine hit.

So, the question is - is this good or bad?

It's bad news.

This is incredibly bad. These fleeting moments of happiness when you get a notification to the next moment when you get another one are not only reductive ways to measure happiness but they are not a good idea if your personality is already based mostly on your social media profile. It becomes, in turn an addiction and I think we have all figured this out already.

The other thing about it being all bad news is that once you get used to the idea of having these dopamine hits from social media, you are less and less likely to get joy out of anything else. Why? Dopamine, like anything in the body, requires some amount of energy. If you are constantly getting these hits from notifications and these double-ended moments then you are going to run pretty dry sooner or later - you're going to get emotionally tired. This leads to emotional exhaustion which also leads to becoming disinterested or even depressed with your own life.

It seems inconceivable to some people that there are people out there that do not live their lives online and there are people who have neither social media profiles nor do they even operate on a smart phone. There are people out there who have removed themselves from this 'matrix' or, never really chose to enter it in the first place. With that in mind, I do not believe it is a question of what they know about you - I think it is a question of how much you are going to let them know about you.

I think we forget sometimes that we are in control of these devices and the more time we spend on them, the more time they win against us, the more time we lose as a result. And therefore, if we can spend three hours on a device without feeling it we can also become more and more aware of how useless time actually is. Is it opening our eyes? Yes it is. But without the proper understanding, it can make a lot of people very depressed. I have always believed that life is, on the whole, entire meaningless. But, to learn that via spending hours on end on your phone and not feeling anything but lost time for hours and hours, or even days and years, it one of the most damaging things that the dystopian nightmare can do to you.

So what do you do about it?

You may choose to have a real-life hobby that is not transferred online.

You may choose to create something so that you do not have to spend time online.

You may purposefully mix yourself up into a commitment in which you cannot spend time on these media platforms.

But whatever you do, I do not think that anymore it is possible to stay away. It is not as simple as ignoring the effects.

It's like falling too far down a well and then not being able to climb up the walls because all the bricks are jagged and loose. It is a nasty climb filled with things that could easily knock you right back down to square one - but now the real question would be that whether it is possible to altogether, shut yourself off from this new, virtual world. Is it possible to live your life without it and if it is not then who is to blame?