Too long. Too boring. Too dragging. It is a world which believes in zero waiting time. It is a generation that has zilch patience. Everything has to be as of yesterday. It is almost the Arabian night tales of Alladin and the lamp.
There the doors had to be opened on a clap. Here the orders have to be entered in a click. Fast tracks are slow and fast forward is a crawl. The Gen Zee is more like the Generation Zipping that wants to flash through life. This has created what I call the Generation I, i.e., Generation Insta.
There are advantages. It has in many ways really expedited the productivity. AI (artificial intelligence) now gives you readable, reasonable information on click. This mode of intelligence has put understandable fear in the millennials and earlier generations but is actually an enabler in many ways.
The speed of work is ever speeding. The real challenge is to harness these life speedometers in such a way that human intelligence keeps ahead of artificial intelligence.
The fact that human brain needs to be scratched, stretched and stimulated to keep it growing is the challenge. The brain is an attention muscle. This muscle expands and strengthens when pushed, provoked and exercised.
The amazing ability of the brain to focus and convert impossible to possible is the real difference between man and machine. What is happening is that brain is being diverted and distracted more and more.
The attention spans are decreasing. Attention spans can range from 2 seconds to over 20 minutes. The average human attention span decreased by almost 25% from 2000 to 2015. Human beings on average have 8.25 seconds span. Humans now have shorter attention spans than goldfish (9 seconds).
This needs some consideration. That is why the “shorter form” of everything is so much more popular. Take cricket.
The Test matches are considered too long. That gave way to 50-over One Day cricket. That was then considered too long. T20 became a hit. Now there is T10 and the latest The 100.
From the time when TV used to have limited hours to now when TV, phone, buying, selling, working, dating, studying are all a scroll away.
While this has made the world more convenient it has raised questions on the human ability to concentrate, focus and develop long term approaches. The search for “asap” modes is reflected by:
1- From videos to reels— Social media has made people unsocial. Videos being shared flood your timelines and your WhatsApp. Now the videos are also overcrowding phone-space and mindshare.
The Chinese understood the need to have mini videos that every user can make, change and share.
TikTok stormed the social media world. The largest two user countries the US and India banned it. Meta then decided to make a competitive offering through Instagram by adding the reel feature. That opened the flood gates. Why? It is a no brainer. Less than a minute video is like a teaser Ad.
A heady, no effort, diversion that requires no focus and hassle. The only problem is that the pleasurable easy content makes you spend hours on it without being aware.
And it offers you a whole sumptuous bouquet of entertainment, life hacks, comedy, nostalgia rolled into one. Studies have shown that social media scrolling can be as hard to give up as a caffeine addiction. Before you stop, the content creates a dopamine-driven feedback loop, making it difficult to tear your gaze away.
It is not just the time you lose, it is the brain you overwhelm that eats up productivity causing the real loss.
2- The short circuited mind— The lottery dreams reflect the human desire. You participate in a low cost lottery and you win millions effortlessly. This used to be called the overnight fantasy.
Now it is not even the overnight 8- to12-hour interval. The generation I or Insta is used to the AI reading the mind and before you know it, it knows. How many times a thought has crossed your mind and you just click on a relevant site. The rest of the day whatever you click open will have something similar being offered to you.
This may seem so convenient. Not really. It makes your mind stagnant.
The game of growth is the game of focus. Focus is deep uninterrupted concentration on important issues. Without focus there is little development. While many may say that reels are just a harmless background while we are doing other things. The brain science defies this justification. Multitasking is possible but does not allow your mind to excel at tasks. There is a mental fee that you have to pay when you divert and distract attention from one task to another.
In psychology it is known as the switching cost. This cost can be in terms of performance, excellence, quality, etc.
3- The virtual lala lands— We all want to dream and make our dreams come true. Most of us want them without effort. The virtual world and the reel world show us fantastic dreams videographed and being lived by celebrities. The lifestyle of the rich and famous fascinates no end.
Every one follows it and drools over it. The alluring reels showing flashes of exotic vacations in Switzerland creating their own obsession.
The socio emotional variance of looking at reels and living in real life makes people unhappy, disgruntled and disengaged with reality. That has huge costs in terms of making through life coping mechanism.
The loss of self-esteem and self-worth can turn normal people into abnormal species. That is why the generations born on these virtual landscapes are increasingly withdrawn. Their ability to get along with people who are not of their own era is questionable. Such personality deformities have forced Australia to ban social media for under 18 years.
The new modes of social media are tools for promotion. They are targeting consumer behaviour based on understanding buying patterns of people surfing and clicking.
Reels are great peep shows that show and stimulate further exploration. However, their brevity also encourages inadequate and unsubstantiated facts to be given fake authenticity. Treat reels as quick, short, non-serious teasers.
Even Reality TV has its own unreality. Real life is much more rich, deep, and wholesome to be reeled and canned into random nothingness.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025