Technology and Immediate Gratification

Let’s get into our DeLoreans, make sure the Flux Capacitor is full and crank the speed up to 88 mph.  You have just joined, me, Marty McFly and Professor Emmitt Brown in time travel back about 50 years.  Welcome to the 1970’s.

NO: calculators, smart phones, internet, personal computers, e-mail, online dating services, GPS, text messenging and streaming movies on tv movies/shows on demand.

YES:  slide rules, phone booths, regular mail, meeting people in bars, going to the movies, using maps that you could never fold back to the original form and having 5 channels of television to watch at home.

What is a sort of commonality to the technology available now as opposed to years ago?  The answer is “immediate gratification” (IG).   Technology brings us LOTS of IG.  We can message people immediately and respond, check sports scores or the stock market up to the minute, have a computer voice tell us exactly where to turn to reach our destination as quick as possible, check out “available” people on dating apps, buy airline tickets or reserve a hotel room within minutes, etc etc etc.

 We, as human beings, are very much built as an IG specie, much like other animals on the planet.  Our primordial instincts love IG and we would seek this constantly if not for an intellectual part of our brains that can sometimes stop IG behaviors based on a potential greater “good”.

High caloric food, snacks and alcohol provide an IG.   When consumed, on the immediate basis, these behaviors make us feel good.  However, cumulatively, those behaviors wind up making us feel real bad when co-morbidities of poor weight control develop.

Take a step back and evaluate how much IG plays a role in your life.  Have you become intoxicated/addicted to the IG of technology and has this spilled over to your quest for IG with derailing food/drink items? 

The more you “think through” your behavioral patterns, the more likely it is that you can change them.  And, for the first person that answers this question correctly (without technology assistance) to receive a FREE bottle of serotonin:  Who is the actor that played “Biff” in the Back To The Future triology?