A lot can be said about social media, but to keep it short and “sweet”, we’ll explore three reasons that you should consider limiting your use of social media. The choice, of course, is completely yours. Limiting social media can sound a little extreme considering the outwardly harmless nature of social media; so, exploring the following concepts could help to provide the basis for what might otherwise seem like an overreaction. The first two reasons are how constant comparison and shallow rewards have an effect on you and the third reason is the drug like effect social media has on us.
What is “Social Media”
Social media is a great place to keep up to date with people you know and like, and what’s wrong with that? However, like all media, not all content is created equal and mundane content doesn’t get as much attention as exciting fresh content does. For example, nobody’s posting about doing the dishes but they are posting about their exciting holidays, their new adventures, and their latest achievements. This is the same for the news, adds, and movies, it’s always the most extreme, most impactful stories that are shared. So social media, like all media, is biased because in order to keep your attention it has to be exciting. So far, so obvious; so, what’s the problem? Surely, we’re not advocating for boring content. The issues start when we examine how we interact and relate to this constant barrage of exciting content, while all the mundane and real aspects of life effectively censored out.
“Comparison is the thief of Joy”
President Theodore Roosevelt
01 Comparison
While making comparisons can be helpful, how and what we compare makes a big difference. Social media gives us a very small and very biased perspective of other people’s lives. If we compare that to the full spectrum of our own life, we’re bound to feel like we’re coming up short. It’s not fair comparison to compare everyone’s best days to whatever day we’re having when we see their posts. In other words, the comparison game is “rigged”, and when you play a rigged game your is destined to feel deflated and even a little depressed. Two of the major drivers of depression are feeling Worthless and Hopeless and if we feel like others are living a life far greater than our own, we might start feeling both.
02 Shallow Rewards
Social media teaches us that to get people’s attention we need to share things that are exciting. However, we can’t possibly share our whole experience, so instead we share highlights, that little taste that lets people fill in the rest with their imagination. In essence, we share a proxy for the actual exciting thing, a proxy which also has the advantage of possibly being more interesting than the real thing. What this means, is that we’re constantly getting social approval for a proxy of something meaningful, rather than the meaningful thing itself.
Getting rewarded for a proxy, a shallow representation of something meaningful, teaches a person to spend less time pursuing meaningful goals and pursue the proxy directly. Why, because why bother with something that is hard and takes a long time before you get a reward when you can be rewarded almost immediately for something easy like a proxy? Speed is big thing when comes to learning and social media is very quick to reward us. With a large enough social network, no matter when you post something someone is bound to be online ready to give you that instant reward; and those likes and reactions just keep on coming after that. So, we spend less time pursuing the meaningful and instead settle for a consistent, although not as intense, stream of validation. We start to value perception over reality because when we share that perception we get rewarded for it. With enough rewards for what we post we might even be tempted to ignore our reality, at least for a little while.
There’s a story about a photoshoot with Jennifer Lawrence who, unlike the other models, was actually playing soccer while they were only pretending playing soccer for the shoot. Suffice it to say, her photos weren’t used for the photoshoot. Really playing soccer just like real life is messy; not that you’d know that from social media. (Link to video below)
Jennifer Lawrence – The Graham Norton Show
03 Drug for your attention
Social media is fast paced, novel, and takes little effort to enjoy. These are three characteristics of substances like, caffeine, sugar, and drugs, which are addictive at various intensities. As described above, social media also attempts to always be exciting to keep our attention but it doesn’t always achieve that. Believe not, not always being exciting is actually part of why it’s so addictive; you don’t know when the next post will be interesting but you do know that if you scroll enough, you eventually, you’ll find something. Also, because there is such a low cost to scrolling to the next post, we’re happy to keep looking for the next exciting post. Sound familiar, sound a little like gambling for example? What we’re describing here is the random reward aspect of social media and we find random reward in a lot of addictive gambling games like slot machines, blackjack, and roulette. The combination of it being fast paced, novel, and requiring little effort, plus the random reward make it an easy and “harmless” addiction. Except it really isn’t harmless when we consider that we’re training our attention to function in only short-burst and because it’s such a “small” commitment we find ourselves losing hours of our day, 30seconds at a time.
Summarising the negative impacts
- Unhelpful comparisons lead us to we develop an unhelpful and depressing perspective on ourselves as the story we tell ourself about our life becomes distorted by unrealistic expectations.
- Shallow Rewards push us away from meaningful goals with delayed and meaningful rewards and towards shallow and meaningless rewards that feeling good in the moment but due to their shallow nature leave us unfulfilled and therefore seeking more of the shallow reward. Vicious cycle.
- The drug like affect: We lose the capacity for sustained attention required to achieve meaningful goals, which only perpetuates our desire to engage in short-form content. We end up wasting significantly more time on social media than we expected.
Check out strategies to curb these impacts below.
Doomscrolling can also be defined as the excessive consumption of vertical, short-form videos for a long period of time, without knowing the amount of time passed. It may leave the person with a feeling of tiredness or unproductiveness after doomscrolling.
Wikipedia
Curbing the effects
We can curb the impacts of social media by including the following practices in our life style.
- Creating time in our day or week, specifically to reflect on what we appreciate or are grateful for. Think of this practice as pulling focus off the difficult aspects of life towards the more positive and rewarding ones. This will help balance your perspective of your own life.
- Finding something that you can do for someone you know, once a week. This practice gets your focus off your own life and finds something productive to do for someone you care about. Doing this usually results in two people feeling better that day.
- Incorporate delayed rewards into your routine, for example before coming home and crashing on the couch, which you might really want to do, get a chore done that you might otherwise put off. The fact that you could be relaxing at that moment but choose to do something else trains the part of your mind that expect immediate reward to tolerate waiting for rewards.
- Make your goals and purpose obvious to you. If you know your goals post them eye sight, in your room, on your fridge, wherever so long as you are constantly seeing them. If you don’t dedicate sometime during the week to figuring them out. Start with what you know, even if what you know is what you don’t want to do, eliminate those options and take note of why they are not options for you. Using those anti-characteristics might help you find the characteristics of the kind of purpose you can support.
