Our Pursuit of Notifications

Most of us are living by motto of over-documenting our under-achievements. The desire to be wowed is getting stronger than the need to learn and need to improve. Even the philanthropist in us have become considerate of "shareability" of an act and given a choice(mostly we are) we prefer being Good Samaritan in a situation in which we can be clicked over the one in which we cannot. 

This behavior of "performing to gallery" is altering us, our lives and our self esteem. Apart from the obvious danger of choosing confirmation over morality, we are staring into the possibility of turning ourselves into data gluttons, consuming the information equivalent of junk food.

Noah Harari, in his book "Homo Deus" talks about "experiencing self" and "narrating self". Quoting him, "Experiencing self remembers nothing. It tells no stories and is seldom consulted when it comes to major decisions. Retrieving memories, telling stories and making big decision are all the monopoly of a different entity inside us: the narrating self"......

We are living in an era in which experiencing self is overfed while the narrating self has gone numb. Gone are the days when we used to repeat five movies through out the summer break, and repeat their dialogues to our cousins. Now we consume so much that we don't even remember the names of the movies, leave apart dialogues. This way, when we look back at our summer breaks, we are seeing no coherent story we can narrate. To us, our past have started looking more like attic in which random stuff is scattered rather than a living hall in which our memories are carefully arranged....It is possibly the prime reason why we all have started feeling shallow and hollow. 

To avoid this, probably the first step will be to stop sharing anything and everything. This way we will avoid, being constantly hooked to the infusions of dopamine that makes us addictive to our unhealthy pursuit of notifications. Also, this would help others by giving them one less piece of information junk food, thus one less random piece in their memory room... our daal tadka might be great, but Instagraming it would have no benefit other than hooking us to checking who all liked its pictures or creating an insignificant data point through which others have to weed through to find something useful(daal tadka might give them an experience but not memory). In this era of ease of self expression, let's all self edit to save ourselves from turning into attic......

PS: I just hope that I don't keep checking notifications about the number of reads, after sharing this article on social media..:-).....