The Culture of Instant Gratification

Twenty minutes on your phone after waking up, and your brain is tuned to fast dopamine all day. Why reading and deep work stop working after that.

Why do we feel wrecked and hollowed out?

We live in a culture of instant gratification.

Many people, the moment they wake up, reach for their phone. The brain connects to the digital world. And a dependency forms.

We open the feed and the stories, we check the messengers.

In those first 15-20 minutes in front of a screen we can activate 30-40-50 different streams of information. Most of them are entertainment, something to do with some blogger’s lifestyle, a few posts that seem useful, and a few important tasks and obligations people reminded us about via Telegram and Viber.

Then we try to start our day and get into some kind of working rhythm, but our thoughts are already jumping from one thing to the next. The brain keeps switching between different informational contexts and reminding us about all sorts of things.

We got 20 minutes of fast dopamine at the start of the day, and now the brain is tuned to it.

When we sit down to read a book, the mind keeps drifting off and there’s no concentration on the text.

Later we try to focus on an important work document, but our hand keeps reaching for the phone on its own, opening one app after another.

We open Reels or TikTok and fall into 30 minutes of swiping through clips every 5-15 seconds. What that does to our concentration I think you can feel for yourself.

Some go further still and start a gaming session on the phone or at the computer.

After that we can’t do anything productive. Sure, we’re capable of handling routine tasks, but the important things that demand real mental effort are beyond us for the rest of that day.

Our phone dependency has crossed out one more day.

And it doesn’t stop at the digital world.

When the brain craves fast dopamine, a person might eat something unhealthy or sweet, smoke a cigarette, have a glass of beer, or lock themselves in the bathroom with a phone to visit an 18+ site.

The simpler and more primitive the way a person gets instant pleasure, the harder their life becomes.

With that approach to life there’s no point talking about discipline, goals, focus, planning or results. The brain simply can’t do those things when we put it on a fast-dopamine drip. We trade the life of our dreams for a small, empty pleasure here and now.

If we want our life to get better every year, we have to learn to do the important things first, and cut the fast dopamine from social media down to an absolute minimum. Things like porn, junk food, video games, alcohol and cigarettes are worth removing entirely.

Those first hours after waking up, when our brain has maximum resource, need to be aimed at the most important strategic work — the kind that can take us to a new level.

We decide for ourselves where to point the beam of our attention.

Either we get on with our own life, solve real and difficult problems, and get genuine satisfaction from the fact that our life is changing for the better and we are growing.

Or we settle for fast dopamine from watching other people’s lives on social media, from series and films where the actors earn millions and we don’t. We kill days and weeks of our life in games, clearing one digital level after another, while our real life gets harder and unhappier.

In life we get what we agree to, not what we want.

So if we agree to spend our time this way, why should our life look any different? We are the ones deciding where and how we invest our time and attention.

Do you feel a dependency on fast dopamine?

Or have you learned to hold your concentration and work on the important things in your life?