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A lot has already been said about social media’s affect on mental health. This, in turn, makes me hesitant to write about it myself. However, with Facebook rebranding to the Meta, and several whistleblowers revealing what should have been revealed a long time ago, I want to look at the social media phenomenon from another perspective. The perspective of a disappointed parent.
Whichever standpoint you take, it is difficult to deny that we are a generation of addicts. Or, at the very least, behavioral addicts. Neuroscientists have found that as long as an action is rewarding and serves to ease our daily pains, the brain responds in the same way it would to drug use. Whether one excessively drinks or obsessively checks social media, as long as the reward circuits in our brains are activated, we can become addicted. What more, the social media platforms that do best are the ones which directly trigger these pleasure circuits. This is done partially through a phenomenon called intermittent reinforcement. Intermittent reinforcement occurs when a behavior is rewarded without schedule and predictably. In comparison to a behavior which is rewarded all the time, intermittently rewarding a user leads to a more enslaving experience. Rather than being exposed to new content at each swipe, we are only rewarded sometimes, with the residue of past pleasurable experiences still hopefully alive in our minds.
This phenomenon is further reinforced through our innate human need for novelty. We have evolved to seek novelty in everything, be it finding new locations for food water, land and territory in the past, to a general restlessness today. We experience pleasure through new experiences. However, unlike two-thousand years ago, we now have excessive novelty from which to choose. At the tips of our fingers. What more, it is novelty based within our realm of comfortability. We don’t even have to leave the security of our homes.
That said, our sense of comfort comes at a price. Unlike substance abuse, compulsive mobile usage is socially accepted. Through conformity bias we tend to think that we aren’t doing anything wrong. Or, at least, not as wrong as the next person. Unfortunately, our obsessive need to be constantly entertained has harmful consequences, not only to our mental health, but our ability to focus. What more, the moment we feel even the slightest inkling of suffering or dissatisfaction, we distract our minds with the fabricated person we molded online.
Our incessant social media usage has altered how we view the “I” which makes up the essence of our personal selves. What makes up the “me” we identify with is how we treat others, how we react in certain situations, and how we go about life’s daily challenges, etc. The ability to understand and, in broad lines, identify ourselves, is a continuous developmental process and depends heavily on education, environment, parents, and so on. Today, instead of living life for the self, we have curated a profile which is reliant on the reactions of an audience. Not only does this audience judge the identity we have formed for ourselves, but it also shapes the character we will one day become. With this in mind, we selectively choose the pictures and information we wish to convey, and befit our roles accordingly. In the process, a strange thing takes place between our online selves and our real-life selves. The more we show our idealized personas online, the more we must alter our real-life selves in order to align to the avatar we have created. At one point the two versions of ourselves will mold into one. There is something vastly addictive within social acceptance. Through likes, comments and followers, social media manufacturers exploit our drive towards affirmation. We become fiends for the endorphin rush which comes with praise.
Compulsive mobile usage hinders one to live a fulfilling life. My average screen time is about 3.5-4 hours a day. If I were to keep that up, by the time I am 60 I would have spent almost 6 whole years on my phone. How often do we go to bed regretting our lack of productivity throughout the day. These feelings are all the more dire for this generation, addicted as we are. The time we spent staring at our screens could have been used to experience life fully, and to create something we can ultimately be proud of. A life spent online, then, is not a life at all.
Let’s end in our usual way, with a quote by Nietzsche: “In such a highly developed humanity as the present one each man by nature has access to many talents. Everyone possesses inborn talent, but few possess the degree of… acquired toughness, endurance and energy to actually become a talent, that is to say, to become what they are.”
onward and upward. pin it down and cut it to pieces. gg. i can't count how many people around me have turned themselves into living memes. and look at me, I'm just a joke.