The word "apprehension" has different applicability in different contexts. For some, it may just be the scare of something unpleasant happening in the future, whereas for some, it will be the immediate anxiety attack in the present. For me, in the current situation, it is the former. This made me pen down my thoughts and probably through this, find my way out of this apprehensive stage.
Is not it strange how knowingly/unknowingly, our situations and our experiences move us for life? I grew up in a middle-class family. A typical Marwari household. I saw incidents where females were not allowed to speak much. And this, to date, has stopped me to express my opinions on multiple occasions. I always thought that someday, someone will shush me down. Even at the current age of 28, I fear up to open in professional spaces. I write down what I have to say next before I unmute myself. Probably to the younger me, I would have said - speak more. It's ok to speak and be corrected than to never speak and retreat into a shell because you never know when will your speech be an inspiration to someone.
I am currently going through a phase where I feel, whatever I jump into, will turn out negative. Ya ya, I know it's my negativity speaking and my overthinking overtaking, but, apprehensions of the future, because of the failures of the past have made me lose complete confidence. Has anyone of you faced a similar instance? And if yes, what did you end up doing?
At times I hear people say that we are stuck in the paradox of choices. This means that we are lost because we have a lot of options to choose from. For entertainment, we can turn to movies, shopping malls, OTT platforms, and even reading. For even a simple activity like feeding ourselves, we have so many options nowadays - cook in the home, dine out, or simply order in. The choices don't stop here. In the "genre" of foods, we even have now healthy cult foods, desserts guilty pleasures, food for people not watching their health, food for senior citizens, and so on. We are living in an era with multiple choices at hand and probably that is what is spoiling us by making us more indecisive. We tend to need the best of not just both worlds, but rather all the worlds, all the time.
Is it that we are becoming paralyzed by technology? I am giving out this opinion because everything nowadays is technologically driven. Soon we will be having cars that are driverless and phones that are sim-less. Name a day-to-day activity and you have an app for that. I am glad that exercise is still something that we need to do ourselves. Hope we don't find robots to run on treadmills and lift dumbells for us!
How many of you are constant watchers of Instagram reels? I am sure a lot of you do that in your free time. Have you noticed that these reels are very short? Somewhat around 30 seconds to 1 minute? Thought as to why? This is because technology is trying to shorten our attention span. As per Statistics Brain, the average attention span has been declining every year. It has gone down from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8.25 seconds in 2015 and is apparently less than the attention span of a goldfish, which is merely 9 seconds. But, one thing that makes me ponder here, is, how come we binge-watch day-long web series in one sitting if our attention span is only 9 seconds? Is our focus diminishing or is it getting more demanding? We want a variety of exciting content to consume. Thought of the reason behind this? It's that every time we read or watch something that excites us, a shot of dopamine is released from our brain. When we share it with someone, then again, our brain gets a dopamine kick. This way, every time we find something exciting, dopamine hits, and then the bar of our expectations rises. We want better and the best content every time to share and consume. Every time you read content that does not meet your expectations, then your brain has disappointment and it leads to rejection of the content. This way we train our brains to expect better every time.
I somewhere totally feel and align that the highest chances of the apprehensive stage are driven by technology. We feed ourselves with so much content on a daily basis that we start questioning our own worth. Is it that we are doing enough? Is it that we need to do more or stop? We fear we compare, we overthink, we stop ourselves and then we get stuck in the vicious cycle of unending doubt and question, leading to being self-critical.
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