The Absence of Freedom in Social Media

We live in a society that guarantees unlimited amounts of freedom and an abundance of choice, yet human nature leads us to become enslaved by our own impulses.

We are given any choice of who we want to be, or who we can marry, or how we like to drink our coffee in the mornings; yet we choose certain habits due to reasons that are beyond our own comprehension. We cannot explain why we prefer blondes to brunettes, or chocolate to vanilla, or even our own sexuality. These are all preferences that have been ingrained in our DNA; there is an inability to question preference beyond reason.

Addiction has a similar pernicious element that cannot be explained using emotional reason. To understand addiction, one must look under the hood at a molecular level to understand the imbalance of chemicals that makes someone crave a substance or behavior. Addiction manifests itself through habituation, or repeated exposure, to an addictive stimulus over time, even if the propensity to become addicted is lower in individuals who have no genetic pre-disposition.

It’s in this way that we often become slaves to our own impulses, like someone sleepwalking into a trap. Someone who wants to quit smoking understands the consequences, logically, of continuing to smoke, yet they carry on smoking. Despite their best efforts, they cannot stop.

Resisting an addictive stimulus requires a great deal of cognitive effort. This is one reason why it’s difficult to win back attention in the digital age when our environment is filled with distracting and information-rich stimuli. Performing goal-related tasks and discounting distractions is what ultimately separates the winners from the losers in the Western world. The name of the game is attention, and the capacity for it is becoming diminished every day.

If our cognitive ability to selectively attend to tasks depends upon the amount of mental resources that we possess, then these resources can be both depleted and replenished. However, the depletion of these mental resources often occurs more rapidly when we attempt to focus on tasks that we don’t find interesting and are not particularly meaningful.

When someone lacks meaning in their life, whether they have a mundane job or no one to love, they seek an escape from their suffering. The inability to tolerate a meaningless existence is often met with addictive impulses, like smoking or social media, to assuage any suffering left in the absence of it.

We use social media to cope with the lack of meaning in our lives; we are addicted to information in an overly connected world. Our ability to tolerate boredom has also reached new lows.

It used to be that someone stopped at a stoplight had to bide their time, let their mind wander, and think about what they had for dinner last night. We’ve now obliterated this ability to mind-wander with the ubiquitous use of hand-held devices everywhere we go.

The demands that are placed on us in the real world are very different from the benefits of the virtual. The asynchronicity between both of these realms fractures our attention and creates a dissonance that makes reality increasingly unbearable when it doesn’t match our expectations.

In a society that guarantees unlimited amounts of freedom and choices, we end up becoming slaves to repeated patterns of behavior.

The solution here is not simple, and this is a somewhat slippery slope to traverse; limiting freedom of choice goes against many of the ideals that Western Civilization is grounded upon. To suggest otherwise would be to cast a nod towards the draconian measures China is currently enacting to mitigate social media usage among adolescents. This doesn’t necessarily imply that we require a government to babysit us, but it certainly suggests that we are not capable of solving the issue at an individual level.

Imagine telling a drug addict that they need to have the mental fortitude to resist their impulse to use heroin. “If it’s not good for you, why don’t you stop using it?” Similar sentiment occurs when someone tells a depressed person to just be happier.

If we wouldn’t tell this to a victim of addiction, why don’t we expect the same of a young teenager, whose brain is still developing, and who has grown up in an age where social media dominates their conscious experience?

Companies have taken every possible measure to invasively demand our attention. The end-result is a generation of incompetent individuals who spend more time in the virtual than the real. Social media addiction reduces skin in the game in the real world, which makes it more difficult to understand your own emotions when difficult situations arise. It’s no wonder that work by Jonathan Haidt has shown that adolescent girls are suffering from an increase in anxiety and other mental health disorders due to social media usage, with the numbers steadily increasing every year. Every moment longer spent in a reality that is less real than your own is a moment lost understanding how the world, as well as others, functions.

Babies interface with their environment and other children to develop an adequate theory of mind and collect evidence/cues to make sense of the world. We’ve seen recently that the advent of iPad parenting, when parents let their children raise themselves using technology, is correlated with a sharp increase in autism disorders, perhaps resulting from children inadequately developing a theory of mind.

Before we get totally plugged into the meta-verse, we need to ask ourselves what the consequences of living in a virtual world would be. Would we lose grasp of what is real and forget how to interpret emotionally salient events?

The brain simply hasn’t evolved to absorb the amount of information that is being projected to it 24/7. The solution to this issue is to become better at blurring out the noise. We cannot keep track of 20 tabs open at once, and can’t expect our brain, with limited attentional resources, to keep track of multiple tasks in our environment. Divided attention leads to mental deficits that give rise to cognitive impairment.

Choice in the Digital Age

A greater variety of choices does not always equate to a greater freedom of choice. People often want others to make decisions for them, an inability to make a decision results in anxiety around the choices available. Pursuing meaning becomes increasingly difficult in an error where choices available trumps meaning.

At a practical level, before we can embark upon understanding what is meaningful, we need to choose how to limit distractions and focus on things that are salient, rather than cheap dopamine-inducing distractions. This is extremely difficult at the individual level, which is why I started Social Media Rehab to help people become competent and win their attention back.

There are plenty of other resources on the internet, including the Center for Humane Technology, started by Tristan Harris as a means of spreading awareness around the negative consequences of technology use.

The fact of the matter is this: the less meaning you have in your life, the more reliant you will become on mindless entertainment to distract you from your purposeless existence. To confront the problem head-on is painful enough, which is why so many people decide to go back to using their phones and dying a death by a thousand cuts.

There is nothing else that matters because at the end of the day, your life only becomes that which you pay attention to.