By Jhanvi Gupta
Jhanvi Gupta explores life’s complexities with clear, insightful prose, turning deep ideas into relatable, thought-provoking narratives.
“It is amusing how the humans are normalizing, altering themselves into plastic machines and transforming robots into emotionally intelligent humans.”
Comfort and Crisis
It’s pretty wild, isn’t it? We’ve become incredibly successful as a species, tech, and societies, we’re everywhere. But we also seem good at messing things up for ourselves with environmental damage and fighting. It’s not just about finding old bones anymore; it’s about figuring out why our brains seem to push us towards what feels good right now instead of what’s good for us long-term. Many other animals seem to live more in balance with their environment, so what made us different? What made us prioritize comfort over planning? We need to look at this from many different angles – biology, psychology, and more – to understand how we got here and where we need to go.
Psychology studies about heuristics, the mental shortcuts we use because cognitive work needs a good amount of time and energy, and these are scant resources by evolutionary reasoning. It’s not the heuristics that are the problem; they evolved to help us survive in the past, but the contemporary world is turning this into an input that we are using to code our brains where the output is not even based on reasoning or critical thinking skills, whereas AI is being trained with neural networks to function like a human being. The human brain, which was used to expanding by challenging itself, is stuck in the pool of everything being filtered as “trauma” or a ‘disorder”.
The AI Paradox
The alarming discussion should be around how people who genuinely deal with mental illness are not able to get the right guidance as the internet has now normalized these specific mental illness or issues as well as using Chatgpt to work like an ‘unpaid therapist’; sad part is that chatgpt uses psychological knowledge with flattering words to create a false sense of making them feel understood.
It’s kind of weird how many people are turning to AI chatbots, even just for casual chats, right? It makes you wonder if people are feeling lonely these days. Choosing to talk to a robot instead of another person? That’s a pretty big sign that something’s up. You could argue it might even make us less human, like we might start acting more like robots ourselves—predictable, no real spark, no deep feelings. Why are we doing this?
The Silent Cost
Excessive online interaction, fear of vulnerability, or the perceived ease of digital communication might lead to over-reliance on bots. However, this trend carries significant risks, potentially impairing social abilities, diminishing empathy, and fostering a sense of community detachment. We seriously need to dig into why this is happening and what it all means, plus figure out how to stop people from becoming isolated and detached.
The Blind Spot
There are, unfortunately, some psychology students who are focusing too much on memorizing stuff instead of understanding it, which is a problem. They end up missing out on essential people skills, like empathy and listening, that are super important in helping clients. It’s like they know the theories, but they can’t seem to apply them in practical ways, and hence, do not question them, which is important to upgrade them in a more reality-based and inclusive manner. Also, these students seem to be more worried about getting a job and money than actually caring about people and learning about the mind. This can lead to grads who might be technically good, but don’t have the heart for the work, and that could hurt people and generate more stereotypes about the field. If we keep emphasizing memorization over people skills, we risk having psychologists who can’t help with the complex emotional stuff people are going through. It’s important to find a balance between learning the facts and building those essential people skills so psychology can keep helping people and communities thrive.
The Sickness Adaptation
It’s getting tougher for psychologists and healthcare pros to push for truly healthy habits. Society’s ideas of what’s normal are changing, and things that used to be seen as unhealthy are now often accepted, or even considered cool. There are constant reels and videos about how aesthetics,brainrot slangs, and spending a majority of time on the internet is the ‘new unsaid norm’. This messes with our ability to help people get healthy. When we downplay the bad physical and mental effects of unhealthy habits, it’s hard to get people to make good choices. You can see this a lot with teens and young adults – vaping, overdoing it on caffeine, and other bad routines and practices that get popular online. When these unhealthy behaviors become “normal,” people stop worrying about the long-term effects, and it’s way harder to promote healthier options. So, there I believe that the psychologists have a wake-up call to take steps to change this gamification of the general population’s life and be proactive. We’ve got to focus on education, teaching people to think critically about what they see online, not letting celebrities promote these unhealthy trends, and getting back to what studies say about what makes for a truly healthy life.
The Irony of Progress
The Internet itself is not the real villain, but the use of it should be promoted in a way that the habits do not become symptoms of addiction. A 2019 study by Kurniasanti underscores that the internet plays a crucial role in contemporary society, enabling communication, education, and entertainment. However, excessive internet usage can manifest as behavioral patterns resembling substance addiction, characterized by tolerance, withdrawal, and functional impairment. While not consistently associated with physiological changes, neuroscience and neuroimaging research suggest potential biological alterations in brain areas such as the ventral striatum, temporal cortex, and prefrontal cortex
that play a very crucial role in a wide range of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral functions. These changes may lead to impaired executive function and increased impulsivity. Consequently, internet gaming disorder has been identified for more in-depth examination.
Societies are prioritising not accommodating people but the industries, which shows how humanity has intellectualized feelings to keep them on a superficial level and spreading an awareness which is again profit-driven and not purpose-driven. We are all becoming commercially focused and running
after how to fit in society, where the truth is always hidden behind the media that is trained to keep us blind. This again leads us to understand that healthy should not have blurry lines with unhealthy, just because it is being advertised in a very ‘Machiavellian’ manner.
Drawing these threads into a tapestry, we as a species have consistently colored outside the lines of what’s possible. We are tapping into innovation and simplicity, which not only saves our time and energy but also helps human beings live more effectively. The real knot in our thread is not being able to register the depth of prioritizing materialistic vision over a sagacity leading to humanitarian prescience. Psychology is maturing as a science, with new frontiers being unfolded consistently to understand human complexity, but psychologists have to design the architecture based on what is truly robust rather than passively accommodating the new normal.
References
- Gurwinder. (2024, April 20). Why Everything is Becoming a Game. The Prism. https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/why-everything-is-becoming-a-game
2. Gurwinder. (2023, August 27). Why you are probably an NPC. The Prism. https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/why-you-are-probably-an-npc
3. Kurniasanti, K. S., Assandi, P., Ismail, R. I., Nasrun, M. W. S., & Wiguna, T. (2019). Internet addiction: a new addiction?. Medical Journal of Indonesia, 28(1), 82–91.