Why The First Chocolate Piece Is Better Than The Second

Have you ever had a delicious lunch, and after really started wanting to have a piece of chocolate? This exact feeling is because all the enjoyment you were having in the meal is now over, and your brain is trying to keep you active by trying to remember what other thing that you can do will stimulate you.

Humans always tend to do things that make them feel better. In fact, the brain quantifies "feel better" as the amount of hormones flowing in the brain, and it always guides the body into doing different things that make us feel better. In other words, the brain guides us into doing things that will increase the amount of hormones in the brain. Just like in the chocolate scenario, when the food is over, it already starts to process what other correlated thing will provide the highest amount of hormones. After thinking for a while, a bar of chocolate seems to be a very good option.

However, one might remember that having the first square of chocolate is way better than the last square in the bar. That is the way the brain can manipulate itself to send the message "Hey, that is enough, go do something else". And that is a very important behavior from an "evolutive" perspective since it would be way worse to have a homo sapiens that only enjoys building houses, versus a homo sapiens that enjoy building houses, hunting, farming, and socializing. Therefore, the brain evolved to decrease the amount of hormones deployed by one specific task after some time.

Similarly, that also happens in daily activities like doing homework, for example. First, one might be excited to start the homework so that you don't have to think about it anymore, but after a while the excitement decreases and the brain starts to think of anything else to do, like calling a friend, gardening, or eating something. All that common behavior is caused by the constant work that the brain does to keep you stimulated and with enough hormones in the brain to promote synapses.

Nowadays is a little easier for the brain to figure out what to do next. From the first time you use Instagram Reel and see the funniest cat video, the brain automatically stores that Instagram is a great source of hormones. That kind of "storing" behavior also makes sense because the brain can't afford to be without stimulus for too long, so the first thing it does is to try remembering what are the things you did in the past. In the end, that is what explains the constant desire to use any kind of entertainment app we have available. The brain feels that what you are currently doing is providing way less hormones than you could receive if you just searched for cat videos on Instagram, which is very easy to do.

Besides, one might also have experienced working on a regular day and eventually having to deal with a lot of problems that appear all at once. That is a very common feeling that we have as programmers because of eventual bugs that only show themselves way after we have written them. At this sad moment, when the code is not working as you intended, the brain can't generate hormones from sadness and is working its hardest not to find the solution to the bugs, but to figure out what can it do to increase the amount of hormones in your system. Eventually, he remembers that very funny cat video you saw a while back and instantly moves your arms and fingers to access the first social media app that your eyes recognize.

After some time receiving the notification from your phone, showing you the time usage on Entertainment Apps, you recognize that is wasting a huge amount of your time. To solve that you can try forcing yourself into only doing your work, which you might handle for a day, but on the next one, you are so tired that you will not even be able to think about how to solve your daily tasks.

Just by knowing a better way to get stimulus, your brain induces this progressively higher tiredness feeling that will eventually convince you that using the cellphone might not be such a bad option after all. Therefore, it is nonsensical to fight against your own brain that way because it would basically be trying to chop wood with the axe edge pointing backward.

A way better option would be to learn why the axe was created that way, then try to use it. In that sense, it is better to convince your brain that Instagram is not a great source of happiness before trying to uninstall it. The main problem is that usually convincing your brain of that is not so straightforward, because your neurons are now wired that way, so you have to be really convinced of that to avoid catching yourself scrolling through Instagram again. Because remember, the brain HAS to find a stimulus. So if it doesn't have any immediate source of it, it will create it out of a boring task.

As a side comment, I got the idea of writing this because I have recently heard of someone saying that he "wants" to watch TikTok videos to recharge from the tiredness he had during the day. That got me thinking about the rabbit hole entertainment apps might put us in, because the only thing that he doesn't know, is that what causes the tiredness is the TikTok itself.

How Technology Makes Humans Dumber

At first, this title makes no sense. How would something that helped humans to travel to the Moon be bad for us? And no, I will not try to sell the even dumber argument about how recording telephone numbers on a smartphone makes us less capable of recording a number ourselves. Hang on for a while, I will try to show you something.

As my high school sociology teacher used to say, technology is anything that helps a living being do something. One can think of cars as a technology that helps us with transportation, or cell phones that help us communicate. However, the dark side is that any kind of technology makes something that takes time into something fast. Even though this speed is required for us to develop more complex things, did God make us to work that fast?

Think about it, the first homo sapiens ever discovered dates 300.000 years back, but to be fair the oldest being with similar creative capabilities such as creating art, trades, ornaments, or burial rites are 30.000 years old. At a time when not even agriculture existed, I assume we had just some basic daily activities, such as standing at the side of the community to protect others, walking for ours to get food, and collecting sticks for a fire. The same brain used only for those basic activities is used today to create abstract options like algorithms or marketing strategies, even though it was never developed to do so. Evolution acted upon our brain considering that we had only to do basic reasoning and had a lot of time to plan things.

Back then we had a lot of time to use for simple tasks which created a lot of idle time that could be used to consider options, plan the future, and have ideas. But as more technology is created, the less boring tasks we have during the they, therefore less idle time to occupy our brains with planning types of thoughts. Nowadays, I argue that the peacefulness that the Church brings to its followers is another word for the sentiment of spending one week hour of boredom, which might be the only idle time the Christian might have in the whole week. All the remaining time of the week might be filled with video calls, social media interaction, and entertainment consumption. 

As time went on, we seemed to have lost the idea that spending time doing nothing, or just doing some boring manual labor, can actually be a good thing because it allows us to think of life in a more general way. That kind of feeling might also be essential to bring us a feeling of control and safety.

Right now we have so much we can do at all times, that the only moment you have to consider something is at the Sunday mass, which is probably the only time you have to spend time doing nothing. Doing nothing was basically intrinsic to human capabilities, and even though we have some of that while washing the dishes, how would a human being that lives nowadays know that it needs 7 hours of doing nothing, just like its predecessor had when spent the whole day manually farming the land.

Without it, I argue that we will have an increasing amount of psychological problems, caused by the lack of confidence and planning that being bored allows us to feel. Even though we have known about this fact since WALL-E came up, nobody seems to pay attention to it and really spend time doing nothing to help with life understanding. Because of that we essentially keep spending time on trivial/immediate decisions and never think something through.