Let’s make a bet.

I bet you can’t read this whole article without picking up or glancing at your phone once. 

Starting now, ready, set, go.

We live in a world where we can be instantly gratified and find anything within a few clicks. Want to see a video of a game recap, easy. Want to learn how to change a tire, consider it learned. All you gotta do is just pull up google, type out a few key words, and bam, instant access to a variety of resources. Pretty cool right? Our world has insanely quick access to just about anything and everything right at the moment, a blessing and a curse.

So when is it a blessing? Well it’s pretty obvious, if your tire goes flat on the way home from work and you want to change it yourself you can get a step by step tutorial on how to do so. But on the other hand, all these quick searches can become overwhelming and being bombarded with all the content can create a lot of anxiety. Like if you want to search a quick update on politics you will get an influx of a bunch of information coming from all different sides and opinions and you may find it hard to decipher what to believe and who to trust. 

By now you’re probably wondering if you have gotten any notifications or text messages, I know, me too, but just resist that urge to grab your phone, you’re almost there. 

TikTok is the worst culprit of the whole instant gratification thing. TikToks are usually less than 30 second videos that are over and done with before you know it. And you can just scroll and scroll and scroll not even watching the whole video, it’s just that quick gratification in the first few seconds, then on to the next. Our culture has become so addicted to these quick clips I bet I can guarantee you don’t remember the last time you watched a movie from start to finish without picking up your phone. Even in theatres I always catch people scrolling on their phone. 

Last night I was watching Elvis (which in all fairness is a longggg movie) but within the first couple seconds I found I was on Instagram. I tried to be conscious of this throughout the movie but honestly I just found myself back on my phone again and again.

I guess this is just the place where our world is at now. Short attention spans and addicted to instant gratification. I’m starting to think a TikTok ban wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Did you make it? If you did congrats and cheers to your attention span, if you didn’t no stress, I think I spent more time scrolling in between writing this article than actually writing it. Oops!