A few days ago, when the family was chatting, my aunt was full of sadness when she talked about her cousin who was unemployed at home. This time, it's not because he can't find a job and is in a hurry, but because his cousin has been obsessed with it recently, watching dramas, and brushing up on everything. It's not two dark circles under my eyes every day, and I only get up from bed at noon;Even when eating, he still smirked at his mobile phone ......Don't you just watch a TV series, why do you get nervous?The elders didn't know why, but they heard a few words that occasionally popped out of my aunt's mouth, what "Dragon King", "Son-in-law", "Black Lotus" ......I suddenly realized that my cousin was hooked by a "short play". 
01 What is a skit?said two common plots: everyone thought that the male protagonist was a poor ghost, and he was cleaved by his girlfriend, but he didn't expect a group of black-clothed people to drive a luxury car to the door to ask for a meeting, and the first sentence of his mouth was: Respectfully invite the Dragon King to return to the throne. The vicious female partner framed the heroine, and as a result, the heroine was reborn, expected the enemy to take the lead, all kinds of face slaps are not counted, and there is a domineering male protagonist as a flower messenger ......Regardless of whether this plot is thunderous or not, it is said that the male protagonist pretends to be a pig and eats a tiger, and the dick silk counterattacks;The heroine takes revenge on the scumbag and protects the body. Who is upset to see it?Therefore, the core of the short drama is a cool drama, which has two extremely attractive elements. One, a collection of daydreams. In The Creator and the Daydream, Sigmund Freud said: "All the women in * are in love with the protagonist, and this kind of thing can hardly be seen as a description of reality, but it is a necessary ingredient of daydreaming." The short drama takes this kind of cool point to the extreme. Not to mention the abundance of admirers around the protagonist, such as rebirth, time-traveling, systems, adventures and other golden fingers also abound. Second, the feedback cycle is extremely short. In today's era of fragmentation, short dramas can be said to have come into being. Generally, an episode is only about two minutes, whether it is fishing at work, or between commutes and after tea, you can watch it on your mobile phone. And the plot advances extremely quickly. "The Legend of Zhen Huan", which was popular all over the country that year, Zhen Huan went from being trapped in Ganlu Temple to killing all sides after returning to the palace, with 9 episodes and 40 minutes of plot transition in the middle, and the regular operation of short dramas is two to three episodes, and even each episode has reversals and slaps in the face, never letting the audience be abused. It's so "refreshing" that people can't stop it. 02 Not long ago, the League of Nations ** made a statistic, and now the market size of short dramas has reached 20 billion. What is this concept?In 2022, the total box office of Chinese films is 30.1 billion. Not to mention, the recent uproar about the "spiritual opium" export incident. The micro-short dramas produced by Chinese companies dominated the screen overseas, and the app to which it belonged once topped the iOS entertainment list in the United States. 
Such a grand occasion reminds me of what Ramsey Brown, the founder of Dopamine Labs, said: "There must be addictive ** in this world, I know how the human brain works, we can make the brain automatically do certain things through software programs, and use dopamine to make your app ......addictive.""It's scary to think about. And this "addictive **" is real. Timothy Wilson, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, once did an experiment. The 409 students who participated in the experiment were asked to put down their cell phones or anything that distracted them and spend 15 minutes alone in an empty room. As a result, more than half of the students felt terrible. The group was then asked to spend another 15 minutes alone in their familiar environment. As a result, 1 3 students still cheat because of bad feelings, and they peek at their phones, TVs, etc., out of boredom. In the last experiment, the students were "locked in" the lab, and they were given two options. One is to sit there and do nothing, quietly waiting for the time to end;The second is to press the electric shock button and give yourself a microcurrent electric shock to pass the time. As a result, 25% of women and 66% of men, pressed at least once;One male classmate even pressed 190 times in 15 minutes. Through this set of experiments, we can get a truth:People instinctively chase excitement and fun. And in this Internet era where "algorithm is king", these excitement and fun will continue to push to you. For example, if you just finished watching a short drama of "Dragon King", you don't need to deliberately search, as long as you log in to some online platforms, a "God of War" will immediately appear in front of you. Over time, it can lead to addiction in some people. This just confirms the terrible prophecy in Brave New World:People will gradually fall in love with industrial technologies that make them incapable of thinking. 03 Friends who often read insight articles may know a psychological theory:Eating melon seed effect. When we pick up the first melon seed, we can't stop eating it, and the time passes before we know it. But if you replace the time of eating melon seeds with Xi and work, many people may feel that every minute is suffering. The reason is actually very simple, eating melon seeds is a kind of timely feedback. Xi and work require long-term effort to achieve results, which is a kind of delayed gratification. In other words, as long as the feedback time is shortened, you will indulge in the satisfaction and pleasure of short-term entertainment. But the more you indulge in this short-term pleasure, the easier it is for you to inadvertently fall into the trap of the poor. No one can salvage you. First of all, it's your body that's going to be a drag. In the classroom, a 13-year-old boy suddenly hit his head against the wall like crazy, his face was still twitching, and the teacher couldn't hold back. After being taken to the hospital, the condition continued to deteriorate, and the boy was unable to speak, walk, and mentally declined. The boy was diagnosed with immune encephalitis. Further**, I learned that the boy was playing with his mobile phone excessively, resulting in irregular work and rest, his body was too tired, and his immune system was confused. 
Secondly, it's your brain power that is dragging you down. Someone asked on Xiaohongshu: Will you become stupid by watching a short drama?A screenwriter laughed at himself: "I don't know if I'll be stupid when I watch a short play, but I can write a short play." "Because skits don't require rigorous logic, and they don't care about complex human nature, as long as they are full of coolness and satisfy people's most instinctive desires. In fact, whether it is a screenwriter or watching a drama, under the influence of this "brainless" behavior mode, your cognitive ability must be single, one-sided, and shallow. Over time, the ability to think deeply is lost. In 2001, the jurist Keith Sunstein wrote in The Internet Republic: "In the Internet age, people are faced with a massive amount of information, and they tend to choose what suits their preferences and absorb it, with the result that the scope of content ingested by everyone will become more and more narrow." This is often referred to as the "information cocoon", and it is now a reality. In the end, it's your mental strength that is dragging you down. Anna Lembuck, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, says in her book Addiction: "The dopamine desire we pursue is actually a mechanism preserved in natural evolution to help us gain a greater survival and reproductive advantage in the midst of brutal competition." However, if we overactivate this mechanism, when the brain Xi becomes accustomed to a stimulus, it becomes numb. That is, the brain is tolerant to pleasure. The more stimulation, the higher the threshold for making you happy. Take my cousin as an example, he has been unemployed for more than half a year, during which he also had a few cheers up and wanted to struggle, but when he picked up his mobile phone, brushed **, and played games, his mood dropped again. I remember my cousin once complained to me: "You work hard for a month, can you compare to the live broadcast of an Internet celebrity for one night?""I shuddered at that moment. Short-term pleasure addiction is far more sinister than we think, because it can blatantly steal a person's unwillingness and ambition. 
04 Having said all this, I am not against everyone enjoying entertainment, but we must understand the importance of moderation. Many people have heard such a classic dialogue. Nick Bilton, a reporter for The New York Times, interviewed Steve Jobs and said, "Your kids must love iPads. Jobs replied, "They didn't use an iPad, and we put restrictions on the use of technology by kids at home." Chris Anderson, the former editor-in-chief of Wired, has a similar rule at home. His five children are never allowed to use screens in their bedrooms. You go and ask those short drama makers, and then look at those short ** platforms that keep pushing streams to you, do they want you to get real happiness, or do they want to get the happiness of taking money out of your pocket?Psychologist Adam Ault once put it bluntly: "People who produce high-tech products seem to abide by the number one rule of the drug trade: they must not become addicted". The poor work for the rich online, which is the "poor man's trap" brought about by short-term pleasure addiction. Because the part of people at the top of society knows better than anyone that there is only one result of falling into short-term happiness - entertainment to death. Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, wrote a sentence on Weibo: Mediocre has gravity and needs escape speed. It is human nature to enjoy and lie flat, but lying flat ≠ rotten, and ordinary ≠ wastewood. If you want to make your life a little more exciting, speed up the "escape speed", which is self-discipline and restraint. Loved a blogger@崔璀Words: "We all have a little man living in our bodies, who likes to be lazy, who craves immediate pleasure. We don't need to blame it, because with it, we know how to rest and know how to enjoy. It's just that sometimes we need to manage it, keep it away from **, and give way to diligence and hard work. "If you can do that, then congratulations. You are already a fish that has slipped through the net in this era of "algorithm is king" and "entertainment to death".