The Monday morning dread is a Pavlovian response to years of alarm clocks, I think if not entirely then it at least contributed to making us associate that day with the end of rest and the start of obligations.
It's also a bit of a combination of psychology and programming.
A more subtle yet noticeable one is we've also been Pavlov'd into checking our phones every time we hear a notification, it's just how our brains work now, i.e been conditioned to expect something interesting or important.
I've heard of this Pavlov's dog experiment mentioned in sentences without much going into the details of what it actually was or how it worked.
The basic gist is Pavlov noticed that dogs would naturally salivate when they saw food and then decided to repeatedly ring a bell right before feeding the dogs. Eventually, the dogs started salivating just from hearing the bell alone, even without any food present. Since they had learned subconsciously to associate the bell with food.
A more technical version is a neutral stimulus becomes associated with an automatic response via repeated pairing with something that naturally triggers that response.
Two things.
First, I'm trying to reason how this experiment has evolved and iterated upon across the ages into the present era.
And the second thing is my mind is kind of viewing it as finding a loophole in a system from also two perspectives, an openloop and a closedloop.
Long time coming
With the first point, Pavlov's experiment potentially laid the groundwork for understanding how anyone can be trained through association.
I'm not sure this was known before the said experiment, but I think it did bring awareness that such was possible, a means to achieve it available and fast forward to today, tech companies have industrialized this concept at scale.
For the second point about loopholes, the openloop perspective would be recognizing that one CAN interrupt the conditioning.
We're not permanently stuck in a stimulus-response pattern. I can turn off notifications, change my ringtone, break the association. The system has an entry point where I can intervene before the automatic response kicks in.
The closedloop perspective is trickier, as it's when the conditioning becomes so deeply embedded that the loop closes on itself.
My brain completes the circuit automatically without conscious intervention. It's the point where the brain starts generating phantom vibrations even when there's no actual notification received just to find an excuse to grab that phone.
When the loop has really closed, finding the loophole requires going deeper, maybe through mindfulness practices or deliberate pattern interruption over time.
Active manual mode
I think humanity's navigation through modernity might just become an effort-based exercise in conscious resistance, as passive agency as a baseline has quietly left the building.
By that I mean, not so very long ago, we used to live in a world where our automatic responses were shaped by natural environments and genuine social interactions. More real fear as opposed to perceived fear, less access to escapism, confronting reality as it is, etc.
Now we're swimming in a sea of engineered triggers, many of them designed to hijack the same neural pathways Pavlov arguably stumbled upon over a century ago.
I don't have a clean solution here yet. Just the growing awareness that the bell is always ringing, sometimes I'd ignore it on purpose, it's easy when I'm already distracted by something interestingly beneficial to my genuine curiosity.
Other times, it's like falling into a trance and before I know it, an hour has evaporated into a scroll-hole, and I can only vaguely recall what I saw.
An uncomfortable truth is that opting out as an end goal of sorts means constant vigilance.
Each notification setting/app permission/autoplay feature are all small battles in a larger war for attentional autonomy, which on a broader background is a fundamental renegotiation of what it means to be autonomous.
Hence, effort based exercise in cconscious decision is the only way to stay in control, it's now a 'Manual Mode' era for humanity.
Thanks for reading!! Share your thoughts below on the comments.