Likes, Swipes, and Fast Food

Our generation is addicted to instant gratification. 

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Fast food companies have a finger on the pulse of culture like no one else.

It’s their job to know what we want to eat, what we should be feeling, and what we’ll want to eat next. In a very real way, porn, fast food, and Instagram are practically the same thing.

… Let’s rewind a bit.

My generation grew up experiencing and learning about sex in completely new ways than generations before. We were the first to have unfettered and free access to porn on a global scale, aptly earning us the accolade, “the Porn Generation.”

Beyond erotic porn, Gen Z and millennials grew up in a world where, with (almost) everything we wanted, we could have it now.

At its core, porn takes the most arousing parts of a given interaction, namely sex, and puts those parts front and center. In that sense, McDonald’s is quite literally food porn — just the good stuff: greasy, salty, and sugary all on one tray, served piping hot and fast. Once you’ve gotten your fix, you move on with your day, though perhaps feeling slightly guilty about what you’ve just consumed, until you crave it again in a few hours.

This craving is your brain literally being rewired by the ingredients of your meal, and begging you for one more hit.My generation’s expectation for instant gratification in potentially unhealthy ways does not end there.

Think about how many young people perceive their lives nowadays as framed through social media. We spend hours curating ourselves around an artificial sense of perfection, and in turn, get rewarded with short-term signals: hearts, likes, comments. Then, we conflate these signals with real value and love.

Feeling down? Post that picture you took last week.

Is it cloudy today? A #TBT to last summer is sure to brighten your mood.

We seem to be stuck in a world of instant gratification from the moment we wake up: a constant hum of push notifications and low-level stress. We might think that we are multi-tasking, but in reality, it’s harder than ever to singularly focus. What this really is, in the words of Chamath Palihapitiya, is fake and brittle popularity. It’s short term, and like a drug, leaving you vacant as you conflate its side effects with #realfeelings. Our ways of seeing have been permanently altered by how we send and receive “love.”

Ask any modern couple that’s been in a long-term relationship, and they will tell you that part of the secret lies in a myriad of little, non-grandiose, unsexy actions. It involves frequent attention and awareness, discipline, effort, and being able truly to care for someone — the ability to sacrifice for them, over and over. Living in a bubble of instant gratification, we have convinced ourselves that hard things are easy.

We now find ourselves in an alternate universe, governed entirely by the quick hit: Tinder on the subway, Instagram in the elevator, a burger for lunch. Whatever we want, good or bad, is just one click away.

Whether we like it or not, we are the Porn Generation. So what is that doing to our ability to appreciate the mundane, day-in-day-out, facets of our lives? If we are constantly thinking of optimizing our primal needs for pleasure, we are more likely to act selfishly and think of ourselves first. How can we reconcile this, knowing that behaving in such ways can hurt us on a regular basis?

I honestly don’t know… I am just as guilty as anyone of falling into all of these traps. Although, they say the first step to fixing a problem is knowing there is one.

We are being robbed, rewired, and permanently changed by technology — are we cool with that?