out of ideas

      Boredom has struck with writing blogs and i no longer know what to write about. Further more, it has dawned on me that technology is affecting the human race. We no longer know what to do, what to say, what to think, or much less how to be bored. When i was a child my father used to tell me that boredom is a good thing because it makes you think. I used to think that it was boring to be bored. But now that i am growing and understanding life with a more developed frontal cortex, i am beginning to see that boredom is disappearing entirely and it's all thinks to our technology. In the past when humans were bored it led them to the great outdoors, to the crafting table, to anywhere they could manipulate their thoughts into actions to rid of that oh so typical boredom. But now we have cell phones, laptops, televisions, endless hours upon hours of self made entertainment. But is this a good thing? What has happened to make the human race so violent, cruel, selfish, and not caring. Could it be that we are replacing our thoughts with mindless addictions to technology? Think about that the next time you pull your phone out for no apparent reason. I often notice myself mindlessly screwing around on my phone when get bored even when i am occupied with something else. I pull my phone out at doctors offices, school, driving, walking, talking to my girlfriend, talking to my parents. I practically use my phone all the time and most of the time i often catch myself in the mindless act of cell phone use and wonder why? Why am i so compelled to fill this moment of time with reading useless twitter posts and texting friends? It was when i started asking myself these questions that i also started wondering if other people do it too, so i started observing. I was astonished to see that the less time i spent on my phone, the more i noticed other people on their phones while performing easy tasks that need no phone use. I even started pointing out this behavior to some of my friends and few of them put their phones down and observed with me, only to find the astonishing scene of being engulfed in a sea of phone users. But what is wrong with this? How could something as useless as a cell phone become so overpowering to peoples everyday lifes?

   Dopamine. Dopamine is a chemical in the brain that rewards the brain when it has done something to be proud of ( to put it simply). So as you can guess our brain gives out dopamine when we check our phones because we get to interact and do all sorts of fun, crazy, and exciting things. Spending lots of time observing this odd behavior of cell phone users i noticed one thing that all shared in common. Almost everyone i watched wasn't actually texting or doing anything important, but instead was using a social media site such as twitter, Facebook, snap chat, or Instagram. It's easy to see how these sites can get addicting with how many games and pictures and fun stuff you can do. But in the long run, this is the cause of the short human attention span. Phones give us unlimited access to information and obtaining any information you want is only restricted by how far you allow your mind to go. We can have an impossible question set infront of us only to know the answer within the time it takes to type the question into the google search engine where it will almost always give you the answer at the top of the page. This seems mindless and thats because it is. It's almost as if we are replacing our brains with these rectangles of artificial intelligence. We no longer need to think to survive like we used to, We can simply type in a question and have the answer without pondering. We can easily solve boredom and we can simply search google maps to go places we may never go in our lifetime.
This is all great and exciting and cool, but that doesn't mean it is helping our brains.

I could simply go into deep detail about everything i said, but i'll summarize in my own words. Our phones are giving us ADD. Our phones have replaced our thoughts. We merely live in the world around us and spend most of our time in tune with these little devices that light up and distract us from real world problems. Centuries upon centuries ago,  we needed to survive, so we lived in a way that allowed us to adapt to where we settled. We knew nothing more than how to catch food, make food, build shelter, and drink water. We didn't have Kanye West,  Music apps, Online magazines, Or social media. We had good old fashion survival. All of these artificial things are