Social Media is Not the Problem
You’ve probably heard the phrase “You are what you eat.” It gets thrown around all the time to remind people to eat their vegetables and go easy on the tequila shots. When you eat healthy, you feel better. When you don’t, you feel like a rotten bag of potatoes.
The brain has a metaphorically similar digestive pattern to that of the stomach. Just as our ancient ancestors evolved to scavenge for caloric dense food in the wild, the brain has evolved since the advent of Homo Sapiens to scavenge for valuable information.
However, in today’s digital age, we no longer need to scavenge in an information scarce environment. Instead, we are constantly exposed to increasingly invasive information that pervades both the public and private spheres of our lives. Given the reliance on internet resources to gather information, avoiding the gauntlet of scintillating pornography, dopamine-inducing instagram stories, or relevant ads (how did they know I wanted a blue kitchen towel?) can make it difficult to focus on what truly matters.
The famous psychologist William James once said that your life becomes that which you pay attention to. The English language doesn’t use the verb ‘pay’ here loosely- the proverbial dedication of mental resources to specific stimuli in your environment (i.e. hot Instagram models in Bali) is more akin to attention being stolen from you rather than you paying it.
If you’ve listened to arguments on free-will, you may be inclined to believe that it doesn’t exist. I won’t go into the details of the argument for the sake of saving your time (and attention), however, its important to know that will has no role in determinism. The absence of free-will implies that we are more vulnerable to attention being stolen from us more than we may be aware of. It’s why you suddenly find yourself watching videos of people shaving their legs with sharp knives at 4am on YouTube without realizing how you got there.
The lack of free will doesn’t imply that you are completely a slave to social media manipulation, however, it posits that we are vulnerable in ways that we may not be aware of. Our nature as information-seeking beings combined with our desire for instant-gratification makes it easy to manipulate and influence people.
This is why Instagram influencers are predominantly female and not male. How many guys are making a career on OnlyFans compared to women? Sex sells.
Ultimately, the cascade of causality that influences the destiny of our lives becomes manipulated by those who want to hijack our attention for their own gains or benefits. Influencer marketing or Facebook ads have become ubiquitous in online media for this reason. Resisting certain forms of online media become increasingly difficult on an individual level.
Naval Ravikant refers to this as the modern struggle- the struggle being to forge one’s own destiny in the shadow of overly-addictive online media. When they come for you, there will be no one there to help you.
The phrase “where did the time go” has become synonymous with this form of attention thievery. It seems radical to suggest ditching technology and becoming a hermit, but I’ve met people who insist upon using Nokia phones (yeah, remember those?) instead of smartphones as a means of shielding themselves.
One can look at this issue from different angles: either there exists an entity that seeks to influence our behavior via attention hijack, or we are too weak to resist an AI algorithm that knows us better than we know ourselves.
I believe in a third perspective that transcends the previous two. That is one in which a person with no meaning in their lives can become easily exploitable by either scenario. Such a person will have no choice but to acquiesce to online media as a means to pacify their inner worries of living a life without purpose.
Social media addiction is a symptom of living a life without purpose.
Failure to launch, oftentimes referred to as Peter Pan syndrome, is a consequence of an inability to transition to adulthood. People with no clear purpose in their lives seek to live a life devoid of responsibilities, one in which they can negate their filial duties to take care of kids or to support themselves with a job. We often ridicule such people for “not getting their shit together” because we assume that they would know better.
A lot of times, these people were dealt a bad hand of cards, either genetically or due to circumstance. We spend our lives criticizing these people without knowing the complexity of what’s going through their minds.
I believe that people with no clear purpose in their lives are the most vulnerable to being taken advantage of by social media. We give in to instantly gratifying sources of digital media as a means to distract ourselves in the absence of meaning. Because a life without purpose results in suffering, we turn to our phones to numb the pain.
The monotony of a 9–5 can be tuned out by going on Reddit or watching YouTube at work. Mindlessly checking emails instead of engaging in creative projects makes us revert to social media like a pacifier for a baby.
Pursuing that which is meaningful is the ultimate solution to your social media addiction. In previous blog posts, I’ve written that it’s better to start somewhere than to live a life of contemplation. Contemplation can be good for short periods of time, however, the same problems aren’t resolved using the same anxieties, and the same anxieties cannot be solved using the same pacification methods (whether drugs, social media, etc.).
This negative feedback mechanism is brought into existence by old habits that we developed unconsciously at a younger age. Every human desires a greater goal to work towards- this is part of being human. Without such a goal, we lack purpose, and without a purpose to our lives, we become slaves to those who steal our attention and benefit from lives without meaning.