How To Make Peace With Social Media In 2024
Spending more time than you’d like scrolling on social? Not to worry! Let me try and cure you with a choice of 10 therapies.
Humans living in 2024 find themselves in a bind.
On the one hand, life is happening now, and that life is as exciting as it is challenging. Despite great progress in living standards, wealthy societies are grappling with opportunity inequality and poor mental health. Ecosystems are screaming for help. Technology is advancing fast and if we want a piece of the cake, we’ll need to build up our skillset — by yesterday. Keeping healthy in old age requires that we monitor our sleep, exercise, and diet regularly. Our finances, our emotions, our time, our relationships — Everything must be managed. Truly, there is not one second to squander; it is time to get active and get productive!
On the other hand, our lives have been invaded and upended by technologies that can make it harder for us to take control of our time, of our attention, and of our life. The modern human has to spend inordinate amounts of mental energy fighting back the appeal of idleness and escapism. We lament the collapse of relationships, yet increasingly spend our time hooked to a screen — with cellphones as our new bodily protrusion, we excel at being alone together. And on top of it all, lounging on the gilded throne of bloated uselessness, rests social media.
To be clear: This is not a Luddite column. Rather, you can call me the Allen Carr to your Internet addiction.
I give my students self-reflection and time management exercises, and the overwhelming majority of these lovely twenty-year-olds report they wish they spent less time consuming online content. My adult coachees fare no better when it comes to resisting the allure of mindless scrolling; while they hesitate to label social media as wholly bad, they definitely recognize it is a poor use of their time.
So, here are 10 reality checks that, as I endeavor to save myself, I hope will liberate you to take control of your life. Go ahead and pick your poison; I’ve listed the 10 “therapies” below so you can choose to read whichever you think might be most relevant to you.
Reality Check #1: There is nothing social about “social” media.
Reality Check #2: “Social” media wasn’t created for you, nor does it serve your interests. In fact, the platforms should pay YOU.
Reality Check #3: Social comparison and infinite circles of concern are a recipe for a miserable life.
Reality Check #5: Anti-social media acts as a distorting mirror of social reality; it does not reflect actual society.
Reality Check #6: Any stranger who thinks you should spend even one second of your limited and invaluable time staring at pictures of them wearing clothes is not your friend.
Reality Check #7: 280-character communication begets 280-character thinking.
Reality Check #8: The argument that “everybody is on antisocial, so you’ve got to be too” is dubious at best.
Reality Check #9: You can’t trust user feedback if the product is addictive, and attention farming certainly is.
Reality Check #10: In your final hour, you will know what matters.
Note: Let me clarify what I mean by “social media.” In this article, social media will encompass any online platform that satisfies the following criteria.
- The platform derives most of its revenue from advertising: It sells users’ attention to advertisers who are able to target potential customers more effectively thanks to individual data provided by the platform.
- Users do not pay money to join the platform, and there is no or very low cost to posting content.
- The platform actively engages in tactics to make sure that users come back to the platform and spend as much time on it as possible, pursuing engagement metrics.
According to my definition, facebook, Instagram, and TikTok will qualify as social media, while YouTube and Medium will not. My argument is that the relatively high cost in time, money, and effort of producing content for the latter platforms generates self-selection toward greater quality. In addition, social media platforms rely on advertising targeted at certain user profiles, while other platforms will target behavioral data. Ultimately, I am more than open to debating this distinction!
Reality Check #1: There’s nothing social about “social” media.
One of the great opportunities of the Internet economy is the ability to re-brand reality when a new service sprouts up.
If, during my high school years, I had asked my friend what they did over the weekend and they had told me they spent the whole of Sunday watching an entire season of a TV show, I would have assumed they were sick. “No, no, I wasn’t on bed rest, and it wasn’t a special occasion,” they might have retorted. Blimey! Only one conclusion comes to mind: Obviously, my friend must be depressed if they can’t muster the strength to get off the couch and engage with the world.
In 2024, in contrast, staring at a screen for hours on end has been normalized, if not somewhat glorified, with the phrase “binge watch.” Yet, a more accurate term might be “lobotomize oneself.” Nothing wrong with a bit of lobotomization from time to time, but let’s call a spade a spade.
This being said, branding platforms as “social” is spurious to a much higher degree.
At the most basic level, when, for instance, I comment on a tweet, I am in fact merely reacting to pixels on a screen. This quickly solves the mystery of why users can be unhinged on social: precisely because it is not social! There is no human involved, simply a mind reacting to visual information displayed on a screen, and so behavior is not constrained by the acknowledgment of others’ existence.
Would you call reading a book a social activity? Is watching a video your mom sent you social? And if I add a little button for you to press at your favorite moments, eliciting a kick of dopamine in your brain, does it make the experience “social”?
True enough, watching and reacting to pixels on a screen creates an emotional experience, but branding it as “social” is at best misleading.
As you receive pixelated stimuli from your display, the object of your attention only exists as a projection of your current self. You are to decide what you see with no intermediation from another human mind.
In contrast, what qualifies as a social experience?
Neuroscientists are just beginning to uncover the complex and fascinating ways in which we humans exchange and co-create meaning when sharing physical space — ways that were well known to our forebears but that we tend to ignore in our modern, highly rationalized social realities.
In “Eye contact marks the rise and fall of shared attention in conversation,” neuroscientists Wohltjen and Wheatley describe how the pupils of two people engaged in conversation fall in and out of dilation synchrony. As ideas are exchanged, the pupils of both parties mimic one another, a phenomenon that culminates in eye contact. While eye contact is maintained, synchrony decreases, each mind retreating in its own realm (as self-reported by participants).
In “Brain-to-brain synchrony tracks real-world dynamic group interactions in the classroom,” Dikker, Wan and their colleagues show that in a classroom setting, the level of student engagement can be predicted by brainwave synchrony as measured by portable EEGs. In other words, even as a group, humans in the same physical space are able to synchronize their brain activity, and this synchronization modulates group dynamics and predicts learning. How we human beings accomplish this feat exactly remains a mystery.
And so, our asynchronous, desultory online interactions preclude the synchronization of two human brains that is the very definition of a social interaction. We cannot infer meaning from subtle clues. We cannot clarify, rectify, or inquire. We cannot intuitively feel the other and their intended meaning. In sum, there can be no co-creation of meaning.
Some may object, “Wait, Ms. Partypooper, are you saying I shouldn’t like the pictures my friends post?” Surely not, please like away! But my point remains: Liking someone’s Instagram picture does not qualify as a social activity, and the kick of self-satisfaction they will get from seeing your like is just that. On not-social media, there are only disjointed me-to-me events.
In the greatest marketing hoax of the century, the magic of calling not-social media “social” is the suggestion that refusing to partake makes you “antisocial.” Yet, as we’ll see in Reality Check #5, the opposite is probably true.
In the very same way that cigarettes used to be advertised as a diet plan, attention farming is now being advertised as the pinnacle of social activity.
1920s women might have had slim waists, but also, they had cancer. When we let younger generations believe that staring at pixels is social and that they might be antisocial by not partaking, then it should come as no surprise that their mental health runs amok, for reasons we’ll see in Reality Checks #3 and #6.
The problem with selling something that is not “social” as a social, sharing or “togetherness” experience is that users’ brain will mis-categorize the product and start using it toward an end that it simply cannot achieve. It is as if I sold steak knives by calling them “combs.” Suddenly, the world would start trying to fashion their hair with my knives, and we can speculate the result would be disheveled, uneven hairdos and head injuries.
Whereas our social experiences are meant to soften us — to allow us to step outside of our minds, feel the other, and co-create meaning together — the barrage of self-centered experiences that are provided by not-social platforms have the opposite effect — as we come to only accept information that is self-serving, these experiences make us more rigid cognitively and turn the world monochromatic, despite the promise of unbounded self-expression.
That is because self-expression, while valuable, is not a learning experience; it is a refining one (in the sense that it allows you to reorganiz and prune your brain connections and obtain clarity, as I am doing by writing this article). Self-expression is a self-motivated experience that does not allow you to expand your cognitive network. Receiving information of course can create new connections, but then on platforms, we face the dire problem of depth as we’ll see in Reality Check #7.
Our digital products are much more susceptible to confusion because their immateriality means we rely on what others tell us to make sense of them, rather than on our own, physical experience with the product. If I bake you a chocolate cake but replace the chocolate with human excrement, you will be quick to find out my deception. In contrast, digital experiences are parsed through our imaginations.
In conclusion, when it comes to “social” media, neither the product nor the companies that produce these platforms are social in nature. The product procures isolated experiences of information consumption that trigger chemical reactions in your brain but preclude the co-creation and exploration of meaning between two human minds that turn you into a wiser, more tolerant human being. It is no more social than exchanging emails or watching the news, and no one thought of calling that “socializing”!
The company is a for-profit advertising agency that trades user attention for ad revenue; the activity is no more social than plastering interactive ads in subway stations.
Calling a fundamentally navel-gazing, self-induced experience “social” is shooting ourselves in the foot with a pump-action shotgun. The words we use to describe our immaterial, digital experiences are important because they will determine how these products are incorporated into our existing brain networks, and hence, how we use them.
It is not to deny that ingurgitating information from a screen does not have very real social consequences, but most of our actions do in fact bear such consequences, from putting on make-up and choosing what clothes to wear in the morning to watching the news — and again, these actions have not been mis-categorized in a way that obfuscates what they can and cannot accomplish.
As long as this charade is maintained, our societies will keep on getting sicker, and despots, who have long understood the inner workings of the human mind so they can manipulate it, will have the upper hand. The only remedy to this predicament is to re-place the human experience at the center of societal endeavors (what is a society, after all, if not humans sharing physical space?): Technology is meant to elevate human experience, not degrade it, and must be gauged in this light.
So, just because a platoon of moneymakers decided during a meeting that their latest moneymaking invention should be called “social,” you are going to believe it?
This was a rhetorical question, needless to say.
Reality Check #2: “Social” media wasn’t created for you, nor does it serve your interests. In fact, the platforms should pay YOU.
When customers pay for a service, they essentially pay for someone else’s labor and expertise.
Instead of cutting my own hair (or asking my mom to do it, for that matter. Sorry, mom!), I prefer to pay for a professional to make me look somewhat respectable.
Instead of going into the wilderness to hunt game and gather berries, I prefer to stop by the supermarket and torture myself in the chips and ice cream alleys where too many delicious snacks exist for me to bear.
Instead of investing in my personality, I prefer to buy Apple products that make me look like a creative and dynamic young professional (I kid, of course: While I am indeed a proud owner of everything Apple, I haven’t renounced on myself just yet).
In all of these instances, I am paying money for someone else’s expertise because if I were to learn how to cut hair, how to hunt, and how to build a computer myself, I would certainly die before having had a chance to experience my first Zoom-hosted brunch date... By relying on the work of other humans, I am able to save an infinite amount of time and attain living standards that I could only dream of otherwise.
With not-social media, it is easy to think that using the platforms is a “free” benefit bestowed upon us, the lucky souls living in the 21st century. However, as economists rightly profess, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
There are only 24 hours in the day, and — apologies for the pesky reminder — every minute that passes brings us closer to our ineluctable end. And within these 24 hours, we only have so much energy and attention to expend. So, the cost of engaging in an activity is not merely the dollars we paid for it: It also includes an opportunity cost, which is the forgone value of the best thing we could have done instead but chose not to.
Let’s say I spend 30 minutes every day scrolling on social. What else could I have done with this time that would have achieved the same end?
Perhaps calling a friend to have a chat would have reduced my loneliness. Asking my brother about his day could have improved my mood. Helping my parents in the kitchen would have made me feel useful. Playing board games with my family could have created joy. Studying for classes would have increased my self-respect. Learning a few new words in a foreign language would have stimulated my curiosity. Reading about job prospects might have made me excited about the future. Doing a workout would have filled me with energy and motivation.
Put differently: 30 minutes per day amount to 182.5 hours in a year, or 7.6 sleepless days. How would my life be different if, instead of mindlessly ingesting semi-relevant information, I had used this time to do the best thing I could have done for myself? How would my relationships be different if I had spent that time attending to the people who surround me, my family, my friends, my neighbors?
Whatever action would have made the best difference in my life, that is the opportunity cost of scrolling on not-social media. And so, using the platforms is not “free.”
Now, if I am paying a cost, what do I gain in return?
I haven’t worked at Meta, but I’d be ready to wager the weekly Monday meeting isn’t about “making our users’ lives better.”
The Monday meeting is about how to increase time spent on the platform (how to bring users back to it and have them stay longer), how to increase engagement (the actions users can take that are rewarding, like liking or sharing), and how to increase the number of advertisers (which hinges on how well ads perform, as reported by Meta). It is not to say that nothing of value has come out of these meetings, say for instance the “I’m safe” feature, but those are fortunate side effects, not the main goal of the enterprise.
While everyone will have a different experience, what can be said is that no user gets a “service.” The service is for the clients, who are the advertisers. Users’ attention is one input — the main input, in fact — in the transformation function of Meta.
So, it kind of sounds like as a not-social media user, you are paying a cost — all the things you could have done to improve your life — to give something to the corporation that is then selling your attention to other corporations.
As you can see, the actual business of not-social media is to farm attention, but considering that your attention is perhaps your most valuable resource, it is in fact you who should be paid to watch advertisements, with Meta taking in the difference.
Now, you may interject that Meta is indeed providing you with free access to their platform, so to clarify, we must distinguish between two transactions.
It is the content that you create and share that makes the platform valuable and keeps other users hooked. Yet, you are providing this work without receiving a payment for it. Here, we could say that you are compensated in kind, through the ability to “rent” digital space on the platform at no charge. In this barter-based transaction, creation, production and publication labor is exchanged for the free use of space.
But my previous point concerned a different transaction that even users who do not post content are party to.
In this second transaction, users give their attention to the platform, which then exchanges it for a payment from advertisers. On this point, Simon Kuznets who created National Income and whose work was instrumental in developing the GDP metric we use today, would have told you that advertising is a necessary evil of market economies and that as far as his proposed economic metric was concerned (Simon Kuznets aimed to estimate the net individual welfare created by markets, but Gross Domestic Product was favored instead), advertising is a cost, or a subtraction from net individual welfare.
Hence, Meta is imposing a cost on their users in the shape of intrusive, commercially-driven content and disruption of attention, but is not compensating them for it.
Every minute we spend scrolling, we are effectively sending cash directly into the pockets of the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. Thus, we can’t make these people rich and then complain about Big Tech and the monopoly of the GAFAs and the curse of Silicon Valley capitalism, when we are the ones who are funding them!
In the 21st century, I say we have enough information and enough education to help each other navigate the economy and act for the benefit of ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities. That entails understanding the contracts we are party to, whether their terms are in print or concealed.
The contract we have entered with attention farming platforms is not made to serve us. It is not meant for us to be happier, smarter, or thinner. It is a lopsided agreement where work is exchanged for the free use of digital space and attention is given for free. And like any contract, if what I get isn’t worth what I forgo, I have no obligation to partake.
Reality Check #3: Social comparison and infinite circles of concern are a recipe for a miserable life.
What type of information do you get from scrolling on facebook or Instagram?
Some might be practical, for instance pictures of a coffee shop you’re considering trying out. In such cases, the information provided helps you make better informed choices in the real world. Some content might be instructional in nature, although the pithiness of the format precludes any real depth or nuance. In the best case scenario, the post includes links to other resources that allow interested readers to explore the idea more thoroughly. Some content will be cute, inspirational or comical, providing relief, motivation or entertainment to the reader; if consumed in moderation, this information can indeed provide a positive addition to our daily life.
Unfortunately, and barring outright scams and illegal content, regular attention farming scrolling will disproportionately lead you to face two kinds of information that are universally recognized as poor for your mental health.
In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey defines our Circle of Concern and our Circle of Influence.
Our Circle of Concern encompasses all that we care about, from our health to what people might think of us to the plight of our natural ecosystems. Our Circle of Influence encompasses all that we actually have some control over, from our daily interactions with other people to what time we go to bed at night.
Having posited the two circles, Covey distinguishes between two ways of focusing our attention that will hamper or improve our mental health.
If we spend our time lamenting things we have no control over, be it even a noble cause like the fate of polar bears, we end up lugging around the sense of helplessness and nausea of a life spent merely observing unfathomable, menacing forces. As a result, our mind becomes dissociated from our daily and immediate circumstances, an alienation of sorts, disconnecting us from the tangible and substantial pleasure of being in the present moment. In this zombie state, our Circle of Influence will eventually shrink further and further — we become unhappy and ineffective.
However, a mind that is solidly anchored to the here and now, driven through its alertness to maximize every interaction and every moment, will result over time in an expanding Circle of Influence. The truth is that, yes, any one of us might help save the polar bears, but doing so would require that we work tenaciously at it for the very long term — I’m talking twenty to fifty years. The way to get there is to commit to one small action today, then a larger one tomorrow, thereby increasing our Circle of Influence one inch at a time until some day in the distant future we may in fact have enough influence to realize our mission.
Hence, Stephen R. Covey advises maintaining a Circle of Concern only slightly larger than our Circle of Influence, subsequently expanding it when our Circle of Influence catches up with it.
Note that he also considers the case where one’s Circle of Concern is smaller than their Circle of Influence, which he adjudicates as a case of irresponsibility. As your Circle of Influence grows, you also have a responsibility to expand your Circle of Concern: If Bill Gates’s only concern in life was to have as many Ferraris as possible, Covey would consider this reprehensible.
And so, what of not-social media?
An uninterrupted information diet of celebrities you don’t know jet-setting as you’ll never be able to, lamentations on the many wrongs of the world that can’t be helped by any one person, and half-assed opinions on complex topics that would require sustained thought to parse out will certainly thin your mind to a state of feeble numbness.
“Where is my swimming pool?” you ask.
“Why is the world so evil?” you cry.
“How would I know if the moon landing was shot in a Hollywood studio?” you deplore.
But in truth, all of this mental energy would have been better spent having a laugh with a colleague, thinking of ways to have fun with your kids, or taking a beginner course in flight mechanics.
A corollary to Covey’s model is that social comparison is a particularly insidious kind of focus on our Circle of Concern.
So, a celebrity you don’t know is vacationing in the Bahamas and your high-school classmate got the job of your dreams — how is this useful to your own present decision-making?
Truth is, the celebrity might be a drug-addicted miserable person with no honest friend to their name and your high-school classmate is filing for divorce. Whatever you see of people’s life on not-social media is a very poor, very shallow reflection of what their life is actually like, and so, it has no informative value and there is nothing you can learn from it.
As money coach Ken Honda states, social comparison is a surefire shortcut to a miserable life. Even the wealthy can fall prey to this detrimental worldview: One may feel self-satisfied to have purchased their first private jet for a moment, but there will always be another person with two private jets.
In summary, this life is the only one we’ll ever get and how we experience it is mainly a function of where we choose to spend your attention. To develop robust mental health and build a satisfying, useful life, we ought to spend exactly 0.0000000000 second mindlessly gobbling up abysmally useless information such as “my bikini body,” “my amazing life” or “my uninformed opinion on a complex topic you can’t do anything about.” (Okay, since we’re all human here, let’s aim for as little time as possible)
Your life belongs to you; it is for you to spend creating memorable experiences with the people who surround you. It is for you to spend in an effort to improve the lives of every person you meet. It is for you to exert in the pursuit of your own enlightenment and self-actualization. No matter where you are in life, there are within your reach challenges you may rise to and learn from.
You are not powerless; in fact, you bear incredible, unfathomable power. You have the power to ensure the people you meet today have an amazing or terrible day. You have the power to create more beauty and grace in the world — or more coldness and resentment. But this power is not found on not-social media, where pleasure is unearned, addictive, and inconsequential. The source of your true power lies in your Circle of Influence.
So, here is my challenge to you: Understand how powerful you are, and use this power to create moments of grace for yourself and those around you. The first step will be to remain intently focused on the present moment — on your body, on your immediate circumstances, and on the good you can do in every second you are alive.
Reality Check #4: Compassion and level-headed discourse are the bedrocks of democracy — Better not to entrust them to a platoon of post-pubescent college dropouts with the emotional intelligence of a wide-headed mallet.
Would you receive surgery from a doctor that did not attend medical school? Would you entrust your child to a daycare whose staff had barely ever been around toddlers?
Generally speaking, when we entrust somebody with something very dear to us, we try to vet the professional and make sure they have area expertise.
As a society, what is more important than our relationships and our communication? What is the foundation of society if not how we perceive, understand, and value our friends, our neighbors, and our compatriots? What determines the future of our nation if not the culture that is shaped out of the myriad human interactions taking place within our borders?
When our collective mind is the very thing that holds us together — that makes the constant compromising required by democracy acceptable — why would you ever consider entrusting that very backbone of our shared experience to a prepubescent seventeen-year-old who knows nothing of other people and of the world?
With all due respect to the Jack Dorseys and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, who are certainly very intelligent and whom I have nothing personal against, they simply have no business deciding the fate of our democracies.
What do they know of the complexity of the world and of society? What could they possibly have learned about the lives of their billion fellow humans from the comfort of their Harvard or NYU dorm rooms? What do they know of psychology, of morality, or of history? And who is the most different human being they have ever engaged with?
I’m afraid to say — in truth, they knew nothing outside of the privilege of their circumstances and the mechanical parsing and prompting of computer programming.
The fact that the hubristic whims of seventeen-year-olds can be not only entertained but funded and that, according to Wikipedia, Zuckerberg received his first $500,000 investment in facebook at the age of twenty is simultaneously the pinnacle and the demise of American capitalism. Most cultures are built upon a sense of prudence that makes it very difficult — for better or for worse — for a single individual or a greenish entrepreneur to achieve disproportionate influence on society as a whole.
Let me put this differently. Say you are a billionaire who believes the not-social media we have been served with will be the ruin of pleasant society.
You decide to put your considerable resources to use and help create a different product. Thanks to a feat of your engineering team, you manage to go back in time before current platforms were created. Once in the past, you seek to form a committee of founders who, in your view, embody the best human gregariousness has to offer.
Although you are welcome to disagree with my selection, for the sake of the thought experiment, let me declare that our committee of founders includes the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Keanu Reeves, Warren Buffet, and Graham Norton. You now task the committee with creating an online platform that will serve to connect people and must be profitable. Since your request predates the creation of facebook, you are certain that the committee’s thinking will not be influenced by these later developments.
Now the question is — What do they come up with?
While the question is impossible to answer (so I will not even try here), we can at least hypothesize that the committee’s output would significantly differ from what came to be. That is because the tool reflects the mind of the creator — what the creator notices, values, and pursues. And when the tool comes to be used, it in turn shapes the thinking of the user — by creating experiences that are constrained by the tool’s design.
And so it is of our not-social platforms.
Except that in their case, they modify the very foundation of society: How we perceive, conceptualize, and communicate with others. What we think is true of the world, and what we think matters.
Now, for the same reason that we wouldn’t receive surgery from a high-school graduate, the creation of any tool that competes with our existing democratic institutions ought to gauged through the lens of our constitutional goals. Is the design aligned with democratic discourse and the values of the nation?
A democracy is not an institution; it is not merely having elections or the right to start a company. It would be indeed erroneous to equate democracy with the right to vote, which derived from the necessity to elect representatives at a time when technology did not allow geographically distant people to engage in discussions.
Democracy is what happens when the representatives so elected enter lengthy and tedious debates, hopefully keeping in mind the good of the nation.
A democracy is a culture; it is a preference for slow, constructive dialogue over the intuitive defensiveness brought about by diversity of opinion. A democracy is a value system that comes to life through the daily actions of its citizens. Democratic institutions are the embodiment of this culture, not the other way around, and so, without a preference for compromise and a shared pursuit of human improvement, democratic institutions cannot perdure.
By allowing the insubstantial ideas of seventeen-year-olds to sway the very foundation of society, we have not only done a disservice to democracy but to the very founders whom we purport to have rewarded.
Had the Dorseys and Zuckerbergs of the world not be taken too seriously too early — had they been allowed to flail and struggle and contemplate their own insignificance, we can wager they’d have developed stronger moral character.
Who knows — they might eventually have used their shrewd intellect to create tools that bear actual value and elevate the human experience.
Reality Check #5: Anti-social media acts as a distorting mirror of social reality; it does not reflect actual society.
Meet Taylor and Alex. Until ten years of age, Taylor and Alex were the exact same person (you may imagine them as living in parallel universes).
However, at the age of ten and due to circumstances outside of their control, their paths parted in one dramatic way: Taylor’s mind had to cope with a real-world situation by severing communication between their brain’s conscious processing centers and their interoceptive processing centers, which deal with signals emerging in the body. In other words, from that point on, Taylor is much less aware of what is happening in their body. They live in a highly rationalized reality, while Alex lives in an embodied reality where every experience is felt deeply and emotions are used consciously for learning.
As Alex goes through the world while feeling their body, they grow to reasonably infer the feelings of others and build a robust theory of mind. Taylor, meanwhile, remains as disconnected from other people’s emotions as they are to their own. As a result, Taylor makes decisions primarily based on abstract desires (e.g. I want a computer / I want to be rich) with little consideration for emotional repercussions, which don’t exist much in their world. For Taylor, other people are either useful to achieving an end, or not useful. Because they have a shallow theory of mind, other people resemble complex objects whose buttons can be pushed to achieve certain ends.
Now, how will Alex and Taylor fare on the not-social platforms? We can safely assume they will have vastly different experiences considering that, as posited in Reality Check #1, these platforms do not provide “social” interactions but disjointed me-to-me events.
For Alex, who lives an embodied life, the distinction between engaging in an in-person, nuanced, and emotional connection and staring at pixels on a screen will be felt immensely. Social media will feel incomplete and unsatisfying, and to the extent that they think independently, we can expect they will generally dislike or limit their use of the platforms in favor of more rewarding pursuits.
Taylor, however, is more likely to see not-social platforms as a low-cost way to push other people’s buttons: For them, an online interaction is not fundamentally different from an offline one, but it is much less risky or inconvenient.
The point of this thought experiment, however imperfect it might be, is to show that by its very nature, and especially because of the marketing hoax that led attention farming platforms to be labeled “social,” not-social media will be disproportionately appealing, rewarding, and innocuous to certain types of personalities that we can predict are in fact the least social of personalities — in truth, “social” media might more accurately be coined antisocial media.
The more you see other people as objects whose buttons may be pushed to elicit desired reactions, the more you will welcome the ability to achieve the same end at a distance, from the safety of your sofa. The more narcissistic you are in nature — i.e., the more you experience each and every moment of your life in terms of “what does it mean for me? what do I get from this? what about me?” — the more natural the online environment created by the platforms will feel to you. That is because, as we determined in Reality Check #1, what you experience on the platforms is merely the projection of your own ego onto the object of your attention, which is precisely the way narcissists tend to experience the world.
I could make the converse argument. Meet Blake, who feels generally fulfilled. Blake gets along with their family, enjoys their work, and has hobbies that include tasks that are physically and mentally challenging. Every evening, Blake looks forward to socializing with friends or staying home for a cozy night of reading or watching a movie or playing boardgames with family. If everyday is constructively busy, and if everyday comes to be rewarding, what would Blake have to gain from mindlessly consuming irrelevant information that takes them away from the satisfying reality of their life?
Whatever noise comes to Blake’s attention on antisocial media will pale in comparison to an already peaceful and gratifying life.
In one way or another, there is a selection bias at play in determining what psychologies are drawn to antisocial media. In other words, certain personality types are likely over-represented on antisocial media, and so, whatever happens on there is not representative of society, but of the specific segment of society that is active on the platforms.
More worryingly, this selection bias is likely to worsen over time.
As antisocial media swallows users in a distorted, unwholesome version of social reality, those who have the mental fortitude to recognize it and enforce boundaries will either exit the platforms or limit their use to very specific and confined purposes. They will for instance make sure that their children do not partake in this harrowing social experiment until the children have fully-formed brains and enough life experience to compare their life with and without the platforms, hence being able to make a fully informed choice as to whether to join. Meanwhile the children of those with fragile mental health or lower education will be allowed to join at an early age, which means the platforms will shape how their brains develop, at the likely cost of their mental health (see Reality Checks #7 and #9).
Over time, antisocial and vulnerable users come to represent an even greater share of the user base, which worsens the outcomes created further — feeding into a self-reinforcing cycle.
So, when I call “social” media antisocial, I am not merely attempting a petty jab at the platforms.
I mean to describe a specific social mechanism that I expect will lead to antisocial and vulnerable personalities being increasingly disproportionately represented. It is not that good things can’t happen on antisocial media — see Reality Check #1 — , but the likelihood of positive outcomes will likely diminish over time.
And as the vicious circle accelerates, its detrimental consequences materialize in the real world and come to be borne by non-users as well.
And when, adding insult to injury, traditional media mistakenly believe that antisocial media reflect the real word, without seeking any evidence to support the big leap of faith they are taking and in doing so, confounding a few shouting, malevolent voices for the silent majority, the cycle accelerates furthers.
Failing to ask questions, trained journalists surrender to an inaccurate reality, and by spreading the inaccuracy, inadvertently help this distorted reality come to pass.
As for the common human, lest they be swallowed whole into this discombobulated hallucination, the best they can do is to plug out and protect their children.
Reality Check #6: Any stranger who thinks you should spend even one second of your limited and invaluable time staring at pictures of them wearing clothes is not your friend.
Any person who actually cares for you will want you to fall in love with your life, not theirs.
Now, let me go out on a limb here and declare that when your favorite celebrity took the time to snap a few shots of their wedding anniversary on a St-Barts yacht, select the best one, apply a filter and share it with a few emojis, their internal motivation was not “Gosh, I bet my followers will be so much more grateful for their own existence after seeing this!”
What is the motivation, then? We can understand that celebrities are under a lot of pressure from their agents, publishers and producers to establish popular public accounts. And given our endless curiosity for the private lives of the rich and famous, it is easy — and I am sure rewarding — to do. This allows celebrities to plug a product, be it theirs or someone else’s, and makes the economy go round.
However, in doing so, public figures also vitiate the very foundation of their followers’ human experience.
Let me ask you: What is your life?
Your life is a succession of experiences. Each one of these experiences is created by your brain based on your current context, your current affect (how your body feels in the moment), your past experiences, and your current focus. In the moment, you have little impact on the world around you (you can’t make your friend un-angry) and on your body (you can’t un-do the fact that you didn’t sleep enough last night).
The only thing you truly have control over is your attention. Shifting your attention from how unjustified your friend’s anger is to the fact that you both want the same thing — to have a good time today — will allow you to resolve the conflict. Shifting your attention from how shitty you feel today to how well you’ll sleep tonight will allow you to realize your discomfort is only temporary. What we pay attention to becomes our experience of life.
This is true not only in the moment, but also in the long run. What you pay attention to determines your current experience. This experience is then encoded in your brain while you sleep and integrated into your already existing library of experiences. Tomorrow, your brain will use this library to predict your present. In that sense, what you pay attention to also comes to shape your future.
Although we talk a lot about the benefits of investing our time wisely, the vital and deterministic factor in our lives is how we choose to extend our attention. Tell me where you spent your attention this year and I wager I can predict your life trajectory with some margin of error.
Hence, any person and any technology that make it more difficult for you to hone your ability to focus and direct your attention is robbing you of the very experience of life.
It is robbing you of your ability to learn, to be fully aware and alert, to explore the wisdom of your body, to form your own thoughts through silence and contemplation, to connect with others deeply, and to develop a sense of control over your own time, which has been shown again and again to be correlated with life satisfaction and well-being.
When someone shares with you pictures of what they ate for breakfast without your asking for it beforehand, they are diverting your attention away from your immediate circumstances — your life — toward an object that has no relevance to you.
Were it a family member, there would indeed be relevance — you might decide to ask them to save a few pancakes for when you visit them later today. And having your attention diverted from your life — your present — , might be alright from time to time, but if it becomes a constant state of affairs, the psychological repercussions on your mental health are likely to be dire.
Note that if you follow a scientist or book tuber who delivers information that is actually relevant to your daily decision-making, and in the case that this information is not force-fed onto you, then you are in practice improving your quality of life. Harmful effects arise when the information 1) is irrelevant to solving problems in your life, and 2) unwarrantedly redirects your attention without asking for your permission first.
The goal of antisocial platforms is to farm your attention so it can be sold to advertisers, yet your attention is the very biological root of your experience of life.
To reiterate, your ability to focus intensely on an idea is your ability to learn. Your ability to focus on the present moment is your ability to experience joy. Your ability to concentrate your attention on the things that truly matter to you is the secret to a positive and constructive life. Your ability to prevent your mind from wandering into dark places is your best shot at keeping good mental health. And so, anyone who interrupts the experience of your own life, makes it harder for you to find solutions and joy in the present moment, and force-feeds you low-quality information that has no practical or spiritual value is not your friend. If anything, they are your enemy.
It is so of the celebrities, and it is so of the non-famous. The key for us is to make a difference between interactions that provide value to our lives and attention farming. This requires that we carefully select the type of information we expose ourselves to, but I would argue the extra effort is worth it.
In that sense, we can understand the great disservice that we older generations are doing to our youth today by failing to apply prudence and protect them from harm. Since I was already an adult before attention farming caught on, I was quickly able to assert that it made no improvement in my life, on the contrary. I can see that the three times I have actually actively participated in this folly were when I was heartbroken, when I was deeply dissatisfied with my life, and when I was trying to sell something.
But younger generations do not get to compare their life with and without attention farming, which means they are in effect prisoners of it.
As for the many people who, guided by a sense of service, do provide value to their followers, I would like to suggest that by deciding to stay on antisocial media, they are still condoning attention farming, which is invasive, debasing, and addictive.
As long as well-intentioned influencers condone attention farming, it will be impossible for another entrepreneur to gather funding from investors by convincing them they can make $100 million in five years. “Why would people leave where they are, and hence, where they seem content to be? The cost of leaving might be greater than the benefits you are proposing to offer considering that in networks, the value of the network grows with size in an exponential manner” investors will rightfully advance.
And so, innovation is stuck, consumers are stuck with bad products, and our economy rewards antisocial pursuits.
Again, let’s get our facts straight. If antisocial media is in the business of attention farming, influencers are the farmers. Of course, if that is good enough for us, then there is nothing inherently wrong with this, but we don’t get to complain about how alienated we feel from the world and how poor our mental health has become.
We get the life we think we deserve.
Reality Check #7: 280-character communication begets 280-character thinking.
Parkinson’s Law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” (The Economist, 1955). In a 21st-century reversal of the Law, we might observe that thinking shrinks to the space it is allowed to occupy.
The world is not black and white; it is infinitely nuanced. Understanding an event requires exerting the significant time and mental effort necessary to identify the actors, their motivations, their perceptions, the context of the event, and our own biases.
In other words, good thinking — by which I mean thinking that is helpful because it allows us to find effective solutions to problems — requires time and variety of input.
For instance, here is what happened to one of my clients in 260, 812, and 1,771 characters.
“My client is a non-native speaker of English. Her UK colleague visited the Tokyo office for a week, and as they parted, his last words to her were ‘Well, good luck to you.’ My client was shocked and ashamed that he would complain about how bad her English was.” | 260 characters
“My client is a non-native speaker of English, and her colleague from the UK visited the Tokyo office where she works for about a week. Although the trip went really well and my client got along with her colleague, she felt frustrated at times because her English wasn’t as good as her other Japanese colleagues’. It seemed that conversation with her was a bit more labored than with them — although her British colleague never complained. On the last day of the trip, as she was leaving to join a meeting about women in science that would be held in English, her colleague said goodbye to her and added ‘Well, good luck to you.’ My client wasn’t sure she had heard right and couldn’t make sense of the statement, so she concluded he meant ‘Good luck speaking in English,’ which elicited feelings of shame in her.” | 812 characters
“My client is a non-native speaker of English, and her colleague from the UK visited the Tokyo office where she works for about a week. During this trip, they had many opportunities to interact, in meetings or during meals, and were able to discuss a wide range of topics. Despite this, my client still felt that her level of English was insufficiently fluent, notably because conversations between her UK colleague and her other Japanese colleagues seemed less labored. On the very last day, she had to leave early to join a meeting for women in science that would be held in English. Her colleague said goodbye, then something that she couldn’t parse out, but she heard ‘Well, good luck to you.’ On the spot she didn’t ask him to repeat, but wondered on the way to the meeting if he had been pointing out her lack of proficiency in English.
However, this behavior would have seemed at odds with what she had observed during her colleague’s visit. Lastly, she wasn’t sure that her colleague knew her next meeting would be in English. But he would have known it was related to women in science. Perhaps he was referring to the hurdles faced by women in science. Perhaps he had simply been at a loss for words — goodbyes can be awkward — and so, he had simply meant good luck for your next meeting without any negative judgment behind the statement. In fact, considering that he was traveling to Japan, it would be quite unrealistic, if not downright rude, to expect that his Japanese colleagues be as fluent in English as a native speaker — and he certainly did not give out this vibe. In the end, it seemed the most likely explanation for what happened is that she projected her own insecurities onto the situation and that whatever he did say was not meant as a dig.” | 1,771 characters
These examples show that appreciating the many nuances of an event as well as the ability to change our intuitive viewpoint and consider different aspects of a situation require space. Our brains are physical objects, and so, they obey the laws of physics — our thinking is not instantaneous; time is necessary for electrical signals to travel and be born. Time spent holding our attention onto an object allows us to deepen our understanding of it.
In contrast, if you spend your day looking for the next 280-character statement to tweet out to the world or the next perfect selfie shot, your attention is directed toward salient, surface features.
As the day unfolds, your experiences are sorted for emotional impact rather than depth or nuance. And as churning out low-resolution statements devoid of context becomes a daily habit, your thinking too turns into reflexive, knee-jerk, and emotionally driven disarray.
This is dangerous to you as a person because this lack of reflection makes you susceptible to manipulation. You react to events without allowing space for your mind to process information and for your free-will to assert itself.
Living at the surface, without any depth of thought that can anchor you to something more real, you follow the currents blindly with little idea of where they may lead. Accustomed to pithy, high-shock-value statements, your mind automatically rejects any idea that does not conform to your existing schemas because your brain has not formed the habit of expensing energy in this way.
This is dangerous for society because knee-jerk, black-and-white thinking leads complex problems to be misrepresented as battles of good vs. bad and remedied with ineffective solutions that often make matters worse because they deny the humanity or experiences of those considered “bad.”
Here is someone pretty famous who saw the world in twenty-kilometer-wide pixels.
I’m referring to Hollywood’s favorite baddie, Hitler. In Chapter XI of his manifesto entitled “Race and People,” Hitler gives us a peek at his view of the human world, and I can sum it up in 8 lines total.
Race only framework to understand humans!
Good race and bad race: Consider race, not individual.
Good race good!
Bad race bad.
Good race has always been good!
Bad race has always been bad.
Now, good race suffering because bad race bad!
Good race good; bad race bad; no more bad race makes good race good again.
Hitler’s thinking doesn’t stand the test of basic logic, let alone 21st-century science (wink, wink, human genome project!). In an explosive cocktail of emotional projections, overgeneralizations, confirmation bias, unresolved trauma, and lack of any depth of knowledge, he shows us what happens when a human brain forgoes curiosity and complexity in favor of self-indulgent black-and-white, good-vs-bad thinking.
In Hitler’s view, the individual is subsumed by the “race” to which they belong. Hitler doesn’t see individuals; he sees the representatives of “races.” Everything one says or does is an expression of the “essence” of their “race.” This essence is immutable and can be used to explain history.
Again, these views do not hold up to 21st-century science. However, you’ll notice that this type of simplistic, Manichean thinking seems in resurgence and was perhaps even pervasive in American culture in 2023. Unfortunately, if we continue to proclaim that communicating in 280-character bits is the new apex of human modernity (“because technology good! No technology: bad! More technology, more good!”), there is no reason to think this trend will reverse.
Reversing the trend would require developping a preference for slow and non-judgmental thinking, the kind of thinking that is necessary for a democracy to function.
Every one of us holds a piece of truth, a unique insight into the human experience and the vast universe to which we belong. Finding peace within ourselves and developing our potential requires that we tap into our own power, which lies in the incredible flexibility and complexity of the human brain.
Every time you do any of the following activities, you tap into your own power, increasing the depth of your own thinking and becoming more open to the complexity of the world.
- going for a walk
- reading a book
- having a deep conversation with a trusted friend, with whom you explore ideas while letting the other express themselves without judgment
- observing Nature
- meditating
- asking questions to try and understand a point of view different from your own rather than talking
- going for a jog or doing yoga
- any activity that allows you to 1) focus your attention to the present moment yet travel to the future or past, 2) pause and move at your own pace, and 3) relax and be open to new thoughts.
And so, the attention farming that has been allowed to proliferate in our societies is antithetical to human self-actualization and progress.
So, let me use one of Hollywood’s favorite shading technique: inserting the big bad guy in a semi-valid comparison.
Antisocial media, by systematically eliminating context and nuance and systematically emphasizing emotionally arousing content, is turning our brains into the 21st-century equivalent of Hitler’s.
Reality Check #8: The argument that “everybody is on antisocial, so you’ve got to be too” is dubious at best.
There is a certain line of thinking you might have come across based on the idea that we individually have no choice but to partake in antisocial media because everybody else is. Self-fulfilling prophecy, much?
Another version of the argument is that anyway, now antisocial media is here, it’s the new reality, and so, it is just too late, and just get on with it. Circular reasoning, much?
Antisocial media has graced the earth with its presence since 2008, so for about fifteen years at the time of writing. Here is a list of things that lasted longer but were eventually abandoned by choice and are now considered not that hype or ineluctable after all.
For about 1,000 years, Europeans believed the sun revolved around the Earth.
The Transatlantic slave trade lasted for over 350 years.
After the 1832 Representation of the People Act was passed, it still took 86 years for British women to acquire the right to vote.
Despite cases of lead poisoning being documented as early as the 1800s, lead-based paint was banned in the U.S. in 1978, or over one hundred years later.
Just because something is doesn’t mean it can’t be changed. Just because something is quasi-universally accepted doesn’t mean it is right. And just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should.
And that is all I have to say on the matter.
Reality Check #9: You can’t trust user feedback if the product is addictive, and attention farming certainly is.
Your friend is addicted to tobacco. Now, imagine you asked them “Do cigarettes make your life better?”
Nowadays, it is common knowledge that cigarettes aren’t exactly a health-promoting product; yet, your friend might still utter “I need tobacco to relax,” or “Cigarettes are the one thing I can look forward to every day.”
The thing is — if your friend did not believe tobacco helped them in one way or another, they wouldn’t be addicted to it in the first place. Addiction occurs when we mistakenly believe the addictive substance we are using helps us cope with bad affect (feeling moody, tired, or depressed) whereas in truth, it is the very substance that is causing our pain.
Professor Huberman, in his godsend podcast Huberman Lab, gives us a cursory look at the metabolic mechanisms underlying dopamine production in the body. My main takeaway — and I hope the Professor would agree — is that, integral to our survival and health, is managing our balance of pain and pleasure.
Professor Huberman defines addiction as the gradual narrowing of the things that bring us pleasure, and so, we can see addiction as a disruption of the delicate balance of biological incentives experienced as pleasure and pain that drive wholesome behavior.
There are good reasons to suspect that antisocial media is addictive. For one, as we’ve seen in Reality Check #2, despite what marketers and other moneymakers would have you believe, the business of antisocial media is attention farming (it is an advertising platform), where every button, every widget, and every functionality is designed so you come back to it and spend as much time as possible on it. Hence, by design, antisocial media is meant to interfere with your daily thought process and highjack your decision-making.
Additionally, I’ve never heard someone say “I wish I spent more time on the platforms.” What I have heard countless people say, however, is a version of “I wish I spent less time on it, but for some reason, I seem to lack the self-control to limit my consumption.”
When my friend explains to me his latest attempt at regaining a sense of control over his time by installing the productivity tool LeechBlock NG, specifically to block Instagram and facebook, that kind of sounds like a cry for help. As LeechBlock’s developers explain in the product description, “LeechBlock is a simple productivity tool designed to block those time-wasting sites that can suck the life out of your working day.”
Looks like our economy is based on selling poison, then selling the antidote to the poison.
But through which mechanisms could antisocial media be addictive, and why would attention farming reduce a user’s ability to seek and experience pleasure?
Firstly, we need to note that pleasure that is not preceded by effort is always followed by pain, and the pain is proportional to how intense and abrupt the pleasure was. This is why watching a movie after a long and stressful day at work can be such a bliss, while starting the day by binge-watching TikTok videos is likely to leave you feeling demotivated and dull-witted for the whole day.
Hence, by exposing users to a continuous stream of undeserved, acute and triggering content, platforms interfere with the slow-building, internal balance that allows us to function optimally throughout the day. Each little injection of pleasure you get from looking at pictures leaves you feeling depleted a second later, and your automatic reflex is to look for more pleasure — so, you keep scrolling without realizing it is the unwarranted jab of excitement that is causing your need to look for more in the first place.
The problem worsens significantly when you begin using platforms to regulate your daily mood swings. Every time you feel tired, unmotivated, disappointed, sad, or anxious, you turn to antisocial media to procure a little dose of short-term pleasure and comfort.
And so, just as though trying to learn to walk using crutches, you never learn to self-regulate. Your brain never learns to turn your sadness into acceptance, or your tiredness into the decision to take a short nap, or your anxiety into the reflex to move your attention outside of yourself.
Over time we can imagine that without your continuous flow of little jabs of entertainment, you feel like a deflated balloon, unable to construct your own joy, meaning, or motivation — blaming instead your inability to regulate your own emotions on your circumstances. You are left ineffective, victimized, and depressed.
This is the mechanism that makes antisocial media addictive and progressively shrinks your ability to find pleasure in daily life.
Life is not intrinsically pleasurable or tragic or anything in between; life is what we make of it. A happy person is simply a person who manages to find joy, serenity or learning in every circumstance, although it will of course be harder in some than others. Contentment is a practice; it needs to be honed, and it requires our full attention.
Hence, attention farming most likely meets Professor Huberman’s definition of addiction.
Let’s think for a second of what the real-world equivalent of the attention-farming business model would look like.
As soon as you wake up in the morning, a Meta employee slides out from under your bed with a red megaphone. “YOU MISSED 6 THINGS THAT HAPPENED WHILE YOU WERE GONE!! Might be your best friend’s birthday! Might be someone’s political opinion on the latest thing the President said! Might be your neighbor’s vacation pictures! Might be a cute picture of a cat!”
“Well,” you mutter to yourself in your morning breath, “I guess I better check it out, in case it’s important or in case it puts me in a better mood to start the day. I am after all feeling rather groggy from having just woken up and quite stressed about this presentation I have to make at work.”
So, you let the Meta employee pull you out of bed and drag you to a room next door.
When you enter, the room is barren except for one wall where six posts full of color are displayed. The Meta employee points at the wall, “Look, someone had a baby! Here, your buddy spent the weekend at the beach — ” Attracted by the appeal of azure skies and white sand, you approach that section of the wall, making a mental note to ask your friend about it next time you — “Why don’t you like? Be a good friend! They’ll be sooooo happy to know you care about them!” the employee interrupts.
As this seems reasonable, you get closer to the wall and push the like button, which instantly makes you feel like you are a good human being.
Unbeknownst to you a second Meta employee has entered the room and is flanking your other side. “Wait, why don’t you share? Make sure everybody gets to enjoy this lovely beach! Oh, wait, what about all these other posts? Look, the President said something stupid!! A cute rabbit is eating a carrot!! It’s the end of the world!! Here’s how to make perfect Sunday pancakes!!”
As you wonder whether it might be time to go back to your actual day, you realize the room is now crowded with an infinite number of Meta employees, each brandishing another post and shouting “Check me out! Check me out! I might be important!”
You make a dash for the door, yelping effusive I’ve got to gos on your way out. As the door comes ajar, you feel the chilly outside air rushing into the boisterous, reassuring room. The outside corridor feels cold and stressful as you expect you’ll flunk your presentation and receive your boss’s harsh criticism. You stand still. “Perhaps I should stay here just a little longer. After all, these rabbits are indeed cute and these disasters are just pixels on a screen: Unlike my boss and real life, they can’t hurt me!”
You shake your head. No! “I have to face it, or I’ll be late!” Before you change your mind, you exit swiftly, banging the door shut behind you.
Back in your studio, you take a moment to calm your mind and gather it back to what you need to do — make bed, take shower, brew coffee, get dressed — “YOU MISSED 3 THINGS THAT HAPPENED WHILE YOU WERE GONE!! It could be a murder! It could be an opinion! It could be…” A new Meta employee emerges from behind your fridge.
Such is the madness we have let into our lives.
Our bodies are the result of billions of years of evolution: They are not going to circumvent the shortcomings of our new technologies in a snap of the fingers. Rather, we would hope that whatever new technology is developed is designed around the immutable reality of the human metabolism — what keeps us healthy, motivated, and content. Technology should be molded to us, not the other way around.
In 2021, internal Meta documents that looked into the impact of platforms on teenagers’ mental health were made public by a whistleblower.
The documents showed the firm had been looking into the potential negative impact of its platforms on teenage mental health, and there was considerable backlash.
In an attempt to defend the company, facebook either downplayed that antisocial media had much of an impact on users’ lives or pointed out that many users reported a positive impact on their well-being, from consuming entertainment to self-expression.
However, there are problems with these two lines of defense.
Firstly, the argument that antisocial media only has minimum impact on teenagers’ lives is probably incorrect as we have demonstrated in this Reality Check. And most important, it is contradicted by Instagram’s own internal report, which states “Instagram shapes daily lives and moods. […] Teens’ sensitivity to content on Instagram creates a relationship between the platform and their daily state of mind — a mental connection that frames the platform in a positive or negative light.”
So, in fact, Meta is very well aware of the sheer significance of its products in shaping the daily human experience of its users, but will take no responsibility for it.
Secondly, the aforementioned report, for instance, was based on 2-hour in-person focus groups of 40 teenage users and an online survey of 2,503 users. There is no information about how respondents were recruited.
Hence, we have to wonder if these groups disproportionately represented very frequent users, in other words, the most addicted users. As per the selection bias mechanims detailed in Reality Check #5, this leads us to infer that the sample surveyed is unlikely to represent the teenage population. And in any case, since the product is most likely addictive in nature, user self-reports are moot.
It would have been different if younger generations had been given a chance to experience life without attention farming and so were able to discern the effects of the technology in their lives, but as we discussed in Reality Check #6, it is not the case.
If Instagram truly meant to understand the impact of its attention farming on teenagers, it would have analyzed outcomes between comparable groups of users and non-users. Hence, the study can be said to have been utter fluff — one might even contend, a way to give employees something to munch on and relieve their likely increasingly enervating toothaches.
Of course, it is not that only bad things happen on the platforms, but the very business model of attention farming, the very foundation of the product, is pernicious. In the same vein, many a good thing has happened while smoking a cigarette — making friends, relaxing, perhaps even falling in love. These positive side effects do not make cigarettes healthier.
And so, the positives cited in the same study (namely, “connecting with friends and family,” “enjoying entertainment,” “seeking out information and current events,” “wider world view and community,” and “pursuing a passion”) describe the advantages of Internet use and could be more aptly achieved through other services that do not seek to farm users’ attention.
In summary, if Meta wants to be praised for the good, it must also accept responsibility for the bad.
But here is the problem (many a problem will have been highlighted in this piece of writing!): The good you do doesn’t make up for the bad.
This is why doctors’ Hippocratic Oath states “I will do no harm,” and not “I will make sure to kill fewer people than I save.”
This is why Jeffrey Epstein’s defense was not “Sure, I’ve raped all these underaged girls, but just look at all the money I’ve given to charity!”
So, if you sell a product that is designed to get people hooked, you don’t get to use your users’ addiction as evidence that your product is beneficial to humanity. At least drug dealers have the decency to call what they sell what it is.
Reality Check #10: In your final hour, you will know what matters.
For this ultimate section, allow me to make a broad, bold statement (as though I hadn’t already made plenty!).
There will come a day, for both you and I, when we will live our last moments on this earth, and on that day, as we lie on our death bed, here is one thought we will not have: “Gosh, I wish I had consumed more TikTok videos! Why, whyyyy did I not comment on more celebrity selfies? Aaah…. I expire! Here it comes! Log off, save my watch history, comment section off— ”
Instead, we might tell ourselves “I wish I had had more courage.” I wish I had engaged more fully with life. I wish I had felt my feelings and learnt from them instead of numbing myself. I wish I had allowed myself to be vulnerable and looked for more meaningful relationships. I wish I had quit my job and taken a chance on my dreams. I wish I had spent less time consuming things that make feel bad and at least tried to experience life without them. I wish I had traveled and explored the world. I wish I had spent more time with my parents and made peace with my siblings.
You see, it is not merely that expending your attention on the largely unusable information that is shown to you on a screen takes time away from what else you could have done; it is that it makes it less likely that you will have the alertness and courage required to take action on the things that truly matter to you.
A good life is playing board games with your family in the evening. A good life is helping out your friend through their struggles. A good life is finding innovative ways to make each and every day more joyful and inspirational. It is having curiosity for the human and asking more questions.
You don’t need to be rich or famous to enjoy the good life, but here is the deal: If you make it so that you do create a good life in every day you are alive, you become more likely to escape worries of mental health and scarcity. That is because, as you are fully present and curious in every moment, your mind allows you to see opportunities and respond to them. As people like having you around, they are more likely to provide you with chances to grow.
But what happens when your attention and mind are colonized by low-quality, addictive information?
You become a hapless pawn in a game you don’t understand. Awash with an uninterrupted flow of befuddling information, you are left with no space to develop your own opinions by adding nuance and depth to what you just absorbed. Floating in a see of simplistic statements and emotional impressions, you live life floating at the surface of things, moved by the currents, never anchored to anything profound and true.
As your gaze scours antisocial media websites, it is triggered by a multitude of signals that are designed to keep you enthralled and dependent. As you become addicted to the continuous stream of little jabs of pleasure, your mind unlearns to derive pleasure from effort. The only thing you believe you have the motivation to do is sit on your sofa and lobotomize yourself with an overdose of pixels.
And so, the first rule of attention farming is that you should not partake. Just like at the casino, the only way to win is not to enter.
Your mind is your greatest asset; it is the beginning and the end of your experience of life, and so, you owe it to yourself not to abuse it. Because — I can tell you this assuredly even though I do not know you — you deserve better. You deserve to have a good life, which is spent creating positive experiences with the humans around you. You deserve better, and so does society.
Sometimes, making peace with something begins with seeing it as it is, as opposed to the way marketers, investors, and other moneymakers would have you see it.
Once you let go of what you feel you are supposed to do in our current culture, what society seems to tell you is “cool” and permissible — in our modern age, that is lobotomize yourself, numb your experience of life and in doing so, make the very creators of your chains obscenely rich— , once you disable the accounts and turn off the screens, you are left with an abundance of time. You are left with your true self and your actual life. You are left with the necessity to manifest courage in every interaction. You are left with the freedom to determine your own thoughts. You are left with infinite possibilities and the anchoring, sobering realization of your own power to determine your fate and that of others around you.
As we explored in Reality Check #6, your life is a succession of experiences, and these experiences are determined by how you choose to direct your attention. Hence, anything or any person that jeopardizes your ability to hold, direct, or simply be aware of your attention, is vitiating your very experience of life — and making it less likely that you will one day leave this earth without any regrets.
You must see attention farming for what it is.
Once you see, you are free.
Disclaimer: This article reflects my opinion at the time of publication. I reserve the right to revisit the ideas hereby expressed, update the content of the article, and even change my mind!
