We All Got Tricked into Content Addiction

Source: We All Got Tricked into Content Addiction, Horses, 10:16, uploaded 2023-04-07, Watch Later position 1032.

Horses begins with a familiar scene. We scroll through Twitter whilst watching television, listen to podcasts whilst working, and watch split-screen TikToks that let one short video accompany another. The speaker includes himself in the complaint. Constant stimulation feels ordinary, yet a quiet moment can bring enough anxiety that we reach for something to watch or hear before we have had time to ask why.

The usual explanation points to dopamine. A funny video or an arousing image gives us a quick hit, which makes us return for another one. Horses had accepted that account before making the video, then found that it simplified what dopamine does. The argument moves from the pleasure-chemical story to the crowding of attention by more information than a person can absorb, then to technology’s failure to deliver the freedom from work and ignorance that it promised.

Dopamine and the moving baseline

The popular account treats dopamine as a pleasure chemical. It makes self-improvement easy to package: reset your dopamine and happiness will return. Horses says that dopamine fires before pleasure arrives, so it has more to do with anticipation and the impulse to try again. A hunter who misses the target still needs to make another attempt. A signal that encourages the attempt has more survival value than a chemical that simply records enjoyment after success.

The video illustrates the point with a button that pays five dollars. Each press creates anticipation of the reward. When the button starts paying one hundred dollars, the response rises for a while. Repeated one-hundred-dollar payments then become the new baseline, so the signal declines even though the person still receives much more money. When the button returns to five dollars, the response falls below its former level. The value of the reward has stayed the same whilst the expectation around it has changed.

The same pattern appears in a walk. Walking outside in silence can once feel like enough. A podcast adds another layer and soon becomes part of the walk. Scrolling TikTok whilst listening to the podcast makes the experience still more intense. Once that combination becomes ordinary, the walk by itself feels strangely empty. The walk still contains the same physical and sensory experience. The baseline has moved, and the mind now asks for the higher level of stimulation that created it.

Horses treats this as an open-ended process. Consumption raises desire, which makes ordinary rewards harder to notice. Cooking breakfast, sitting in a park, and taking a walk become the five-dollar button after the mind has learnt to expect a hundred or a thousand. Dopamine helps explain the movement, yet it does not explain why so much information now presses for entry into the same limited attention.

The finite room in the mind

Horses says that attention spans have become shorter as the amount of information in the world has grown. The video presents this as a claim supported by several studies, although it does not identify their methods in the narration. The basic problem is easier to state. A person’s mind has limited room, whilst the available material has multiplied. A person can ignore some of it, yet social pressure treats ignorance of any news item or current event as a moral failure.

This is the fear of missing out. People are expected to know what happened, care about it, and remain ready to discuss it. Their own interests still demand time. There is endless information about music, politics, games, science, and every other subject a person might love, so the pressure to fit everything into one life grows beside the desire to pursue anything deeply. The mind has not expanded to hold the supply. Its attention divides into smaller pieces.

The video joins this pressure to the moving baseline. The more a person consumes, the more they want, whilst the larger culture keeps producing reasons to consume. This gives constant stimulation a social cause as well as an individual one. A person reaches for the next item because it might be pleasurable, and because being out of date can feel like a failure of character.

The failed promise of technology

The last part of the argument turns from the brain to the promise attached to technology. Robots and computers were meant to lighten the collective load. Horses thinks they have removed physical work whilst adding a form of spiritual exhaustion. Physical distance has shrunk, yet new divisions have appeared. The world’s information sits close at hand, yet ignorance feels more widespread because the supply has outgrown anyone’s ability to understand it.

The speaker calls this a failed promise made by technocratic government, capitalism, and the people who accepted the promise. Horses leaves the downfall of modern technology aside and asks how anyone can tell when a tool has begun to do more harm than good. It admits that it has no answer. The question matters because the system changes slowly. A person can recognise a problem, vote, and work with others to change the conditions that produced it. Individual will cannot remake the system today, although a person can change how they act inside it.

That distinction keeps the conclusion from becoming a simple digital-detox prescription. Horses refuses to provide a well-defined cure because people differ in their brain chemistry, experience, culture, and circumstances. Meditation may help one person. Avoiding digital life may help another whilst remaining impossible for someone whose work or relationships depend on it. The speaker also says that he has not won this battle, so the recommendation comes from an unfinished practice rather than from a position of mastery.

The more durable question concerns happiness. Fleeting pleasure does not amount to lasting happiness, so a person might ask which activities produce a deeper and more stable sense of fulfilment. The video leaves the answer at the level of personal judgement. It suggests seeking those activities and finding some joy in the work of discovering or accomplishing them. Media remains easy to consume, whilst changing a life takes effort. Failure therefore belongs to the process. A person can get up and try again each day.

Limits

This note reconstructs Horses’s argument and keeps its scientific claims attached to the speaker. The video says that dopamine is an anticipation signal, that near misses produce more dopamine than success, and that attention spans are getting shorter. The description points to studies on dopamine transport and reward anticipation, delayed gratification, comprehensive overstimulation, attention spans, and dopamine release during music. Those links show the areas of research Horses drew on, yet the video does not explain which result supports which sentence or whether the studies establish its wider claims about content addiction.

The description has no chapter markers and gives no full bibliography. It also includes music credits and links to Horses’s own site and Instagram, which do not carry the argument and are omitted here. The video ends with a personal commitment to keep trying and offers no tested programme for reducing stimulation. Its account is useful as a diagnosis of a cultural feeling, whilst the causes and remedies remain open to evidence and disagreement.

Further reading / references

• Manon Dubol et al., “Dopamine Transporter and Reward Anticipation in a Dimensional Perspective: A Multimodal Brain Imaging Study”, Neuropsychopharmacology, 2018.
• Gregory Robson, “The threat of comprehensive overstimulation in modern societies”, Ethics and Information Technology, 2016.
• “Why Are Our Attention Spans Shortening?”, The Wall Street Journal, 2022.
• Zilong Gao et al., “The neural basis of delayed gratification”, Science Advances, 2021.
• Valorie N. Salimpoor et al., “Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music”, Nature Neuroscience, 2011.