How to Hack Back
There are primary rewards our brain seeks. You can think of them as psychological needs or drivers that are built into our biology.
These include our need for group membership (i.e., a “tribe”), our need to seek pleasure and reward (i.e., “to hunt”), and our need for mastery and control (i.e., valuing our sense of self, our contributions to the “tribe”, and control over our environment).
1. Our Need for Group Membership
We are a biologically social species. It is what helped us become the most dominant species on the planet – at least that is what we like to believe.
Over our history, if we were not part of a tribe, we did not survive. So, we are driven towards group membership. There is a reason for the phrase, “social death penalty” because our bodies literally think we are going to die when we are rejected.
Whether it is the tribes we join on multiplayer online games, our number of “friends” on Facebook, or our obsessively returning to Instagram to count our number of “likes,” we are driven towards social connection and acceptance. The “likes,” of course, also add in the addictive “benefit” of variable reward, which I have discussed in previous posts. Double whammy.
2. Our Need For The “Hunt”
Tens of thousands of years ago wild humans engaged in persistence hunting to tire out and eventually kill big game animals. Today, we pursue other things. As an example, we get up day after day, and work long hours, in the pursuit of money.
However, we also keep scrolling down a never ending social “feed” for another post that might catch our attention, whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest.
We will play an online game until the early hours of the morning, seeking to beat just one more level. Of course, there is always one more level. And our drive to pursue things, to seek pleasure and reward, keeps us going.
3. Our Need for Achievement, Mastery, and Control
We are driven to master our environment and achieve goals because a sense of competency feels really good inside. It also, perhaps, makes us more attractive to others, tapping into our need for social acceptance.
Video games, along with a drive for social connection, clearly tap into our need for achievement. Individuals keep playing to “level up,” unlock new powers, and defeat our enemies in a quest to reach a goal (i.e., winning) that will never come.
Our perceived achievement and mastery also give us an illusion of control. As a species, we aim to organize, compartmentalize, and ultimately control our environments.
Creating order out of the chaos of life gives us a sense of control and ability to predict the future. Ironically, grasping for a sense of control over our lives, when in reality we have little if any control over the interconnected causes and conditions of life, leads to a lot of stress and discontent.
Technology, however, can give us a false sense of control, whether it is over the avatar we created for online gaming, the image we craft of ourselves on social media, or our incessantly checking and sending work emails at all hours of the day.
So Now What?
Ok. So, this is part of our biology. What is the problem then?
The problem is that these psychological drives have been hijacked. Yes, these are biological drives that have developed over the course of human evolution, and they serve important roles. They were not, however, develop for the purpose of scrolling social media, playing video games, or incessantly checking email.
What we need to do is to take back control over these psychological drives and deploy them skillfully in the pursuit of greater joy, happiness, contentment, and wellbeing. If your aim is to be more productive, deploy them towards that. We can mindlessly let these drives be hijacked by technology or we can mindfully take back control of our lives and use them with purpose.
