Supernormal Stimuli — Why TV, Social Media, and the Modern World Captivate You
This is the evolutionary explanation
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Hi everyone!
If there's one thing I really hate, it's seeing children becoming obese while being raised by television sets. Sadly, it's quite common in modern industrialized countries. We are deliberately putting little kids in front of what ethologists call supernormal stimuli and then wonder why we end up with jaded teenagers.
What? You don't know what a supernormal stimulus is?
Well, you should. It explains much of our behavior in the modern world.
Supernormal Stimuli — Why TV, Social Media, and the Modern World Captivate You
This is the evolutionary explanation

We do really weird things that don’t seem to make any sense. Teenage boys get erections while staring at slabs of glass hooked up to wires, toddlers remain motionless for hours in front of light-emitting plastic boxes, girls obsess about the relationships of people they’ll never ever meet, and you seek out news every day about events that have no possibility of impacting your life in any way whatsoever.
The world you live in has been engineered to captivate you as effectively as a lightbulb captivates a moth. As a result, you engage in …
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Thanks for reading!
—David