A personally customized life

In today’s world we’re busily refashioning in our own image. We fine-tune our moods with Spotify playlists, craft our meals around allergies and ideologies, customize our bodies with Freeletics and others app and wearable technologies and surgery.

In everything we do, life is moving closer to us. We barely see the world as we’re immersed in our world. Here it is our dilemma: how to cope with a socioeconomic system that is almost too good as giving us what we want? a socioeconomic system that often mistakes want for need?

Is an economy oriented to give us what we want the best for delivering what we need? The digital revolution made the market more efficient at gratifying immediate individual desire and ourselves worst at meeting long-term social necessities.

“Increasingly online, it’s becoming impossible to escape your own point of view.” – Eli Pariser

Which are the consequences? Inequality has exploded, narcissism has rised, instant gratification is a must and Amazon Prime is a god, our need to validate our political point of view instead of understanding diversity, jobs have shifted rewards from labour to capital and so on.

What we can do to defend us from ourselves is all about inclusion, long-term goals and the lost art of thinking.

Through inclusion and an holistic approach we can reduce the existing gaps (between genders, ethnicities,…). Because technology is not neutral we need to input data that have less biases.

Long-term goals will help us not to focus on instant gratification but to pursue our more balanced goals in a more happy society.

Recommended Sources

• World inequality report
• MIT technology Review – This is how AI bias really happens—and why it’s so hard to fix
• Forbes – Artificial Intelligence Has A Problem With Bias, Here’s How To Tackle It
• Why Is Narcissism Increasing Among Young Americans? 
• The Psychology of Instant Gratification and How It Will Revolutionize Your Marketing Approach
• https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brainside.html
• Why Instant Gratification Isn’t So Gratifying
• How Instant Gratification is Harming Society and What to Do About It
• https://www.inc.com/melissa-chu/why-your-brain-prioritizes-instant-gratification-o.html