Push Notifications – Your Hidden Addiction
What is Addiction?
In general, we have a good understanding of things that people can get addicted to. Wikipedia has a good overview of some of the more common ones. Needless to say, all humans can, and do, get addicted to various things in their life, at some time or another.
The thing about addiction is that the person affected is often unaware that they have an addiction until it is pointed out to them, or until the source of the addiction has been withdrawn.
Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO)
To many, this may be a new term. The background and a good description can be found in this Wikipedia reference.
Large technology companies, advertising agencies and governments know how to exploit this addiction in humans, so much so, that most people are totally unaware that it is occurring.
The Drug Dealer
Here is how it happens:
- You are given a piece of technology to use and are told that it is free.
- You a convinced that it will connect you with your fellow humans in a better and more exciting way.
- You are sent “Push Notifications” on your electronic devices:- PC, mobile phone, car headset, etc., to tell you, in real-time that something has happened.
- Now you feel that you are no longer missing out. This is the neurological stimulus that drives this addiction. This triggers the dopamine rush in the brain.
The Drug Addict
Did you know that the programs (applications) running on all of your electronic devices, mobile phones, PCs, tablets, TVs, etc. have the ability to sent “Push Notifications”.
By default, Google, Facebook, X, Instagram, Microsoft, Apple and countless more companies enable push notifications in their applications and many do not allow you to turn them off.
Rest assured that if you do nothing but install, or use any of their software, you addiction is being fed.
Consider Rehab
Before we had PCs or smart devices, people were able to do nearly everything that is necessary to grow, interact with each other, learn from each other and manage their existence.
Can I suggest that the world will not come to a crashing end if you put your phone in the kitchen drawer when you come home from work and only take it out just before you go work. Perhaps you can go even further and consider reading a book or a magazine, rather than watching TV or playing computer games.
If you try this for even a few days, you will experience all of the symptoms of drug withdrawal. If you do it for long enough, you will notice a period of healing and then longer still, a period of awakening. These are phases of cold-turkey rehabilitation.
Take Control of Your Life Back
In 2022, I went through this process. Remember I work in IT and have responsibilities in my job and yet, I managed to try this out and I feel much healthier now (mentally).
So now I will explain a process that I have implemented to allow me to stay “drug free” and still conduct business as usual.
- Turn on your phone, go to “Notifications” and turn them ALL OFF.
- Turn on your PC and any other smart device and remove all applications that want to send you notifications, but give you not option for turning them OFF.
- Only allow smartphone applications to do anything, “when the application is open”. Not in background, and never “Always”!
- Phone and SMS messages are also push notifications. The current version of iPhone iOS has the ability to send all unknown incoming calls directly to voicemail. You can inhibit this feature for numbers who are in your address book. This alone will change your life forever, since most of the phone calls people get are from people that want to sell you something, or give away government free handouts if you live in Australia.
- Conduct your normal life for a week. Whenever you feel that you need to know that something has happened, ask yourself:
- is it FOMO?
- is it really urgent?
- can I conduct my business without knowing, or can it wait?
- is my life better without it or better with it?
On the second week, I turned ON a few notifications, for only 3-4 applications on all of my electronic devices. You are able to selectively turn on notifications from family members or specific people, on most devices.
Finally, I installed an electronic news reader application. This application allows you to select who you want information from and allows you to read the latest updates from that source, only when you open that application. It “pulls” the data, when you want it. This concept was first introduced in 1970, when the Internet was first developed and still available today. I will write another post to give specific details of the “newsreader, RSS” process and implementation.