I dislike social media, yet I inevitably find myself scrolling through Reddit or watching video after video on YouTube. I believe this is a common problem, even for those who consciously avoid social media. The smartphone is right there in your hands—all it takes is a few taps, and you are immediately diverted from your idleness, bombarded with a deluge of interesting things one after the other. You eventually stop either when you have to or when you have exhausted all your mental energy. You might often wonder, apart from leaving you mentally numb, does it actually “harm” you? We now have ample research-backed findings that point in the affirmative; yes, it is, indeed, insidiously warping your psyche and your perceptions of reality.
Social media sites are dominated by a handful of prolific posters, who generate most of the content and spend the most time on these sites. People who become these mega-posters often harbor extreme sentiments and seek a “safe” outlet to vent, free from repercussions; think about the polarized reviews you might see on Amazon, which are overly positive or overly negative. Sprinkle in the algorithms that decide what gets to everyone’s screen, and we have the current social media landscape where extreme, outlying, abnormal posts consistently reach anyone and everyone. As you might expect, most people in real life are not ideologues, bitter about their lives, consumed by politics, or blessed with extraordinary wealth or success. The established norms on these sites allow moderate posts to be eclipsed by the loud ones.
Therefore, what you see on social media is a warped version of reality—a warped land where group identity is supreme, people are motivated by the worst tendencies of their groups, and the future is possibly worse than our past. Even the seemingly positive ideas are out-of-the-ordinary and inspire awe and surprise.
People are using social media—a lot. There are varying estimates on how much time we spend on social media, ranging from a couple of hours to every waking hour when we are not doing anything else. There is immense pressure to fit in, to reorient our perceptions (that we have formed from our real-life experiences) to become a part of the discussions. You might think that you are immune to this because you are not actively engaging in social media, but merely lurking. Unfortunately, we are pattern recognition beings; perhaps, too much so, to our detriment. We notice patterns and instinctively react to them, even when we are presented with random data with no connections between them. A constant exposure to extreme content is bound to affect our perceptions—am I partying enough? Am I earning enough? Am I “seizing” life to the fullest?
It turns out most of our perception-building mechanisms, like observing those around us, figuring out patterns to mentally devise a normative structure, and constantly updating it as we progress through life, completely break down in the online world. The structure we internalize from online interactions is inherently more extreme than normal, and hence we already operate with a baseline that is biased toward the extreme. Any optimization we make to our mental model pushes it further toward the extreme.
No, not really. Human beings have a remarkable tendency to come out stronger from predicaments than we ourselves would expect; resilience is not the exception but the norm for us. Social media is Pandora’s box; we have opened it, now there is no going back. I do not have answers to how to deal with social media, but I believe I have a few ideas—ideas which I would experiment with myself:
Try to be mindful of how you are using your phone. It is fine to take out your phone to click a picture of your loved one doing something funny, but you should start mentally accounting for what you are actually doing with your time. Just as budgeting your finances opens the door to thinking more fruitfully about your relationship with money, the same strategy will work here.
Accept yourself. Looking at other people’s success and failure will have no effect on your life; each of us has our own journey, which we began from different positions. Also, accept that just because something is “trendy” or touted to be “cool” does not make it necessary. It is okay to try something “cool”, but only when you want to and not because you have allowed yourself to believe that’s what you should want.
Understand that what you see online is not “real” but a heavily modified version of reality and circumstances designed to fit in with the norms of the social media in question (Instagram: attractive, interesting; LinkedIn: rich, driven, successful). Thus, even when you engage with these sites, you can reframe it with a framework that will ground your perception.