Here’s what we can do: we can outcompete them. There’s a reason why we don’t spend literally all of our time on computers or smartphones messing about on Facebook or Candy Crush, and that is because there are better things to do. It might be reading Station Eleven, or watching Mad Max: Fury Road, or playing Life is Strange.
I really feel what Adrian has described here. At every crossroads, time spent with a single, focused and limited experience leaves me feeling more wholesomely satisfied.
This is part of why, among other things, I’m trying out afternoons where I only work on my iPad (with almost all notifications off.) It forces you to focus in a different way.
The temptation of variable reinforced products is the information equivalent of other generations’ grapple with other social and semi-addictive experiences. Life goes on.