Social Media is BAD!
Social media has been on my mind for a long time. I think it’s an incredibly destructive force in modern human culture. Let’s get into the reasons why, and some of the solutions.
I’m not an expert on social media. I’m just a person who finds it extremely annoying and destructive.
Why It’s Bad
It’s a massive time waste.
Social media does nothing but take your time and offers very little in return, just pushing those little buttons. Look at this. Isn’t this cool?
I know a lot of people who like to scroll, and I’m not talking them down. But even those people would admit it’s a problem, even if they haven’t come to that full realization yet.
It fractures your attention.
Stimulation, stimulation, stimulation. They have one goal: get you on and keep you on, no matter what.
Most anything good you want to do requires time, attention, and practice. A much better use of your time than scrolling would be any hobby at all. Sewing, drawing, gardening, getting outside and walking around. Any of these are better.
Was It Always Bad?
It was always bad, but it had some redeeming qualities.
One of the greatest things was connecting people. You could reconnect with people from high school, people you worked with, people from college. As an idea it had real promise and potential.
Unfortunately that promise was completely corrupted by money.
I remember when Instagram used to be people putting up their pictures. You’d scroll and look at cool images. That was still fracturing your attention, but at least it wasn’t all ads. Now, from what I understand, it’s full of AI slop and people communicating mostly through memes.
It’s all part of this condensation and fracturing of attention.
And the money made it worse. The attention economy. They figured out how to make it addictive, how to keep you scrolling, and they know that humans don’t like to be bored. You think you’ll scroll for a few minutes. It’s an hour. It’s two hours.
Time is the one thing you can never get back. It’s the most valuable thing you possess.
Young People
I feel bad for young people. They came up in a world that in some cases always had this, always had that fracturing of attention, multiple platforms hitting them constantly. Their lives are on display in ways that didn’t exist before.
If you were ostracized when you were young in my day, you could at least go off and be ignored, do your own thing. Now it’s just awful.
If you’re young, get some distance from it. Try life without it. Try moving at regular human speed. It might be a little tough without the extra stimulation, and that goes for the games as well. They’re moving too fast, fracturing your attention, and it’s going to be more difficult to be happy and to accomplish anything meaningful.
What Can You Do?
Stop using it. Drop it entirely. Instagram, Facebook, all of it.
If you can’t stop, limit your time. Put a timer on. There are apps for that. Even the platforms themselves occasionally suggest you take a break, though not seriously.
That’s why they call it doom scrolling, not because you think the world’s going to end, but because in essence it really has for you. Life becomes increasingly less meaningful with each swipe.
Embrace being bored.
Just sit in a chair and look out the window. Watch the leaves move. Watch the birds. Just be bored.
Being bored is incredibly powerful. If you get bored enough you might actually decide to do something. And if you do something you care about and keep doing it, it brings real meaning and value to your life.
Also, if you’re having trouble connecting, remember that what human beings are most interested in is other people. That’s mostly what brings meaning to life. And if you’ve got kids and you’re spending all this time scrolling instead of playing with them, teaching them, going somewhere with them, and putting them on the scroll machine just to get them out of your hair, don’t do that.
A Few More Things
Email is great. You can write someone and they can reply. It’s like letters used to be, just faster and cheaper. Real communication.
Some people call YouTube social media. I spend plenty of time on YouTube, but I’m looking for value, something that’s going to teach me something. Short-form content is a different thing entirely. TikTok, Reels, Shorts, scroll and hit and scroll again. Your attention span becomes like that of a gnat.
If you need to distract yourself from boredom, do it with a book.
Where This Is Headed
I think down the road, twenty or forty years, people will look at social media the way we look at smoking now. Back in the twenties, thirties, forties, everyone was smoking. Then awareness came. And I think the same thing will happen with social media.
The problem with starting an alternative is that if everyone isn’t on it, it’s not the town square. Though forums are good. You find like-minded people and communicate about something you’re actually interested in. That’s the key, you need to be interested in something other than scrolling.
That’s my rant. It’s a cancer. But the path out is simple: stop, limit your time, embrace being bored, and find something real to do with your life.
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M Francis McCarthy