Social media time trap

One thing I’ve come to realize, is that time is the most valuable thing any person has. Time is our scarcest resource. And it flows relentlessly. How we use that time depends entirely on us. We can do whatever we want with it. We can waste time, or we can learn foreign languages, write software, travel the world, anything.

What we accomplish in a lifetime is limited only by the time we have and how we choose to use it. And this is where the problem begins, because we have things like social networks.

Original promise

Social networks were created to connect us with other people, to enable conversation and information exchange. That was the main premise of Facebook and MySpace before it. People started creating accounts. The assumption was simple: these platforms would help us communicate easily and stay updated on each other’s lives.

But over time, something went terribly wrong.

Shift

The symptoms are obvious. People spend incredible amounts of time, hours every day, scrolling through social networks and browsing the internet. People can genuinely spend five hours cycling through Xitter feeds. Why? Because while social networks were supposedly designed to enable information exchange between people, they eventually had to make money. And to make money, these platforms needed to keep users on the platform as long as possible.

If a social network has no users, there’s nothing there. This is where network effects come in: the more users on a given platform, the more there is to read, see, and do. More points of contact with others. To make more money, these social networks had to increase user retention. They had to get more people to create accounts. They had to ensure more users logged in daily to check what’s new, read, write, exchange information. And most importantly, they had to keep people spending as many hours as possible on the platform.

Amplification effect

If users spend five hours a day on the platform, that means other users can interact with them for those five hours. It all amplifies itself. The longer people stay, the better the social network works, and the more money it makes.

But this is extremely dangerous for those users.

Spending five or eight hours a day on a social platform is simply not good for people’s mental health. Yet here’s the conflict: all of this stems from wrong incentives, assumptions, and business models that these platforms adopted. Social platforms decided that to earn more, they must keep users hooked.

Dark patterns

So they started deploying negative design patterns: push notifications, constant alerts every five minutes, infinite scrolling, random content feeds. Your timeline isn’t actually a timeline anymore, it’s just a collection of random things on your feed. You scroll infinitely while an algorithm serves you random content in an endless loop, creating a constant sense of incompleteness. You always want to write more, read more, watch more, endlessly.

This can make you browse for five hours a day. You constantly feel unsatisfied, yet simultaneously mentally exhausted from spending five hours this way. It’s genuinely mentally draining. All users are mentally exhausted after spending five hours scrolling through random tweets on Twitter.

And these social media platforms can never fix this, because the fundamental assumptions of how these platforms operate are deeply negative and flawed. But they must do it for the money.

Real cost

Meanwhile, users are losing their lives, their most precious resource (time) because they’re addicted to these mechanisms that social networks implemented to make money. These users feel compelled to spend several hours daily scrolling infinitely through random content, and they feel mentally exhausted by it.

This is an extremely negative phenomenon. Each person literally has one life with limited time. Literally at every moment of your life, you have less and less time left to spend on anything. And every moment of life is unique. At every moment, you have a unique set of variables surrounding you: a unique place, location, unique friends at that moment, unique things you can do.

And these social networks make you choose to literally waste this precious time browsing through nonsense, random things that don’t concern you at all. But these social networks are constructed to create the impression that it concerns you, to create the impression that you’re learning something valuable, when in reality it’s completely worthless.

The test

It would be enough for someone to delete their Twitter account to realize that actually nothing changed. They wouldn’t lose anything. They could delete their Twitter account, delete their Facebook account, stop watching YouTube, start going outside, listening to birds singing, and they’d probably be better off because they wouldn’t be wasting so much time.

Suddenly they’d have at least several hours of free time daily. They could do whatever they want with that time: relax, think about whatever they choose, visit friends, anything.

But because these social networks are so addictive, this simply won’t happen. These people will remain slaves to these algorithms indefinitely. They’ll never break free, and that’s perhaps the saddest part. These people potentially have so much free time, they could accomplish so much, but because they’re addicted to a profit-generating machine that functions by wasting users’ time on absolute nonsense, these people are predetermined to waste that time.

Extraction machine

These social platforms optimize profit by literally designing these mechanisms to extract as much money as possible from having these enslaved users who can’t break free, who are chained to this slot machine that functions in the form of an algorithm serving posts on their feed.

If a user really has no choice because they’re psychologically addicted to all these mechanisms that cause them to spend five hours a day browsing Twitter and wasting time that could be better used, is that still free will? I don’t know. I’d lean toward saying that’s already a lack of free will.

Best decision you can make

Literally the best decision you can make in life is to never create an account on TikTok, Twitter, and similar platforms. And the second-best decision you can make in life, if you already have an account on Twitter or TikTok, is to delete that account and never return.

I guarantee that anyone who heard this from me, or read this and implemented it, would feel better and thank themselves in the future for doing it. Truly. There’s literally no better decision you can make.

I have never thought to myself “wow I am so glad I spent the entire weekend looking at random videos on TikTok”, but I know for a fact that I would have been happier if I had spent that time reading a book or going for a walk.

But these services are optimized to make you prefer to look at these random videos, instead of reading a book or going for a walk. So that is why I would recommend deleting your Twitter accounts, deleting your TikTok accounts, buying yourself an e-reader, buying books, whatever. Just not social networks, really. Use chat apps to talk mainly with friends. Ideally, don’t wade into that swamp at all.

Moving on

If we feel we’ve already lost time, well, too bad. We just have to accept that what was, was, and move forward, but do better for ourselves in the future. We have to recognize that what’s lost is lost and draw a thick red line separating the past, and simply enjoy life. Enjoy the moments we have, instead of constantly reading about nonsense that doesn’t actually affect our lives.

There are so many things we could be doing. So many books to read, so many movies to watch, so many games to play. So much to see, hear, experience. And people choose to dedicate five hours every single day to scrolling through social networks that serve up fragments of random information whose only function is to increase profits for the executives controlling these corporations.

Control problem

When someone decides to have a Twitter account, they’re deciding to let that company control them, consciously or subconsciously. When we have accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and similar platforms, we’re not actually able to manage our attention span. We can’t control how our attention is directed, because these algorithms control what they show us.

We can influence what algorithms show us through our behavior, but we can never train these algorithms 100% to work exactly as we want. These algorithms aren’t even public at this point. We can’t tell what’s happening behind the scenes. We can’t tell if the company is interfering with what we see. It’s impossible to determine right now.

So as long as we use such services, we’re voluntarily exposing ourselves to interference in our lives, in our perspective. What we do during the day is our life, right? So a corporation is controlling what we do during the day, what we see, what we think about.

The daily choice

But what stuck with me most, the thought that really resonated, is that we have a limited amount of time. Every day can be used brilliantly - we can do something new, buy a guitar and start learning, or we can spend five hours scrolling Twitter.

That’s the choice we face every day.