Too much doom scrolling

Social media exposure and doom-scrolling is bad for my mental health, but what's it doing to humanity as a whole?

Apologies for the lack of content recently. I’ve been really struggling with depression, insomnia, and writer’s block (these things tend to happen all at the same time).

I’ve had to take a break from writing about the diabolical state of the world because I can’t even look at it, and when I do, I struggle to think of anything to say that adds worthwhile analyses that other people haven’t already come up with.

I can’t bear the thought of just going through the motions and writing derivative shite to keep the clicks flowing, because the main thing that makes me consider my writing worthwhile is bringing new information and alternative perspectives to the table. If I’m not doing that, I struggle to see the point.

I’ve been an advocate of taking social media detox breaks for several years, because I can see how it’s so detrimental to my own mental health to not just keep paying constant attention to the dismal state of the world, but to do it via horrible social media algorithms that are deliberately designed to be hyper-addictive.

During this social media detox break I’ve not been idle. I’ve been doing a lot of reading, and writing about non-political issues (I may publish some of this stuff later, if I feel it’s good enough to share).

I’ve also been trying to do the things that I know are good for my mental health too: Physical exercise; social life; creative activity; healthy eating; and brain control exercises like meditation and contemplative thinking.

One of the things I’ve been considering quite a lot recently, is the time before the Internet and social media took over my life. The time before "doom-scrolling" was a thing.

I’ve tried not to allow nostalgia for my youth to cloud my judgement. I was still prone to bouts of depression; awful things still happened in the world that were far beyond my control; and many things were significantly worse for me, from a personal perspective.

What I’m interested in is what I was doing with all of the time that I now dedicate to doom-scrolling. What we all used to do before, with the time that we now spend feeding our social media addictions.

I know I wasted a lot of time on other things. I used to watch a lot more television and play more computer games, but I also read a lot more actual books, and I also feel like I used to be more connected to reality, by which I mean the real world we actually live in.

I’ve come to realise that I’ve dramatically rewired my brain over the last couple of decades.

I was actually quite late to the social media game, eschewing all social media until 2009, by which time almost all of my friends and family were already on Facebook at least. But then by 2012 I’d somehow built up tens of thousands of followers on the Another Angry Voice Facebook page, and completely embedded social media use into my daily routine.

I was a late social media adopter in my social circle, but an early adopter in terms of the global population. It’s only in the last decade that more than half of the world population has got online, and back in 2009 only about 30% of the world population had daily Internet access [source].

Multiple studies have demonstrated a correlation between social media use and issues like depression, anxiety, and insomnia, but the evidence isn’t as clear-cut as "social media = bad" because it obviously depends on all kinds of factors: What kind of social media is being consumed; how long people are consuming social media on a daily basis; and whether people who are prone to issues like depression, insomnia, and social isolation are naturally more inclined towards heavy social media use to begin with.

One thing is for sure though. A huge percentage of the world population has been rewiring their brains via social media algorithms that are designed to be as addictive as possible, and the speed and scale of this brain reprogramming is unprecedented.

Of course there have been other dramatic changes in the way humans access knowledge across the course of human history.

It’s difficult to overestimate the impact of the printing press and the soaring rates of literacy that followed. Not least the move away from religious institutions serving as gatekeepers of knowledge as more and more people learned the ability to seek out information for themselves. Widespread literacy also created brand new opportunities for the powerful to spread propaganda, in the form of newspapers and magazines.

The invention and proliferation of electronic communication was also revolutionary. Radio broadcasting hadn’t been invented when my grandparents were children; only the wealthiest households had television sets when my parents were small; and these technologies were almost completely ubiquitous by the time I was growing up.

The propaganda opportunities opened up by these new communication technologies hardly need explaining do they?

Nowadays children are growing up on the Internet, with millions of kids learning functions like scroll, click, and pinch to zoom long before they’ve learned to read and write.

There’s a growing consensus that too much screen time is bad for child brain development. China has brought in state-wide restrictions on child screen time (40 minutes per day for under-8s); Australia has banned social media use for under-16s; the EU is looking into restricting child access to social media; and there’s a general consensus in the UK that banning smart phone use in schools is a good thing.

If the idea that excessive screen time and social media use are damaging to child brain development is so widely accepted, surely we should also be asking more about how detrimental so much screen time and dopamine-driven social media use is to adult brain health too?

It’s not like there’s some magical switch in brain function at the age of 8, or 14, or 16 that makes us immune to the damaging effects of excess screen time; doom-scrolling; social media addiction; online bullying and abuse; and all of the other negative effects that come with outsourcing our knowledge-seeking instincts to algorithms that are controlled by unaccountable billionaires, and actively designed to be as addictive as possible.

What’s most concerning is the way it’s happening so fast. It took centuries for print technology to foster widespread public literacy; it took generations for early electronic communications technologies to develop into multi-channel radio and TV sets in almost every (western) household; but it’s only taken a matter of decades for hyper-addictive social media algorithms to spread their influence into the minds of over half the world’s population.

This is without even getting into the issue of generative AI, and how vast numbers of people are now outsourcing their ability to think and synthesise information for themselves over to automated processes.

We haven’t even begun to grasp the vast implications of billions of people restructuring their brain activity to passively absorb what deliberately addictive social media algorithms feed us, and the next wave is already breaking.

I’m not saying this as some kind of luddite who rejects modern technology, largely because you wouldn’t even be reading this at all if social media hadn’t provided me the platform to talk about the left-wing and heterodox economic ideas that would never have been printed by conventional publishers, or allowed by the gatekeepers of establishment media outlets.

But it’s surely worth considering what the impact of these rapid and unprecedented developments are, not just on us as individuals, but in terms of global consciousness.

What happens to all of the diverse ways of thinking, learning, and interpreting the world, when a rapidly increasing proportion of the global population reconfigure their brains around a broadly similar set of highly addictive and manipulative social media algorithms?

It’s generally uncontroversial to state that excessive screen time and social media use is detrimental to the brain development and learning ability of children.

Somehow it’s considered more debatable whether daily adult social media use is detrimental to our brain health and learning abilities.

And it’s rarely even considered what effect such widespread exposure to dopamine-driven social media algorithms is having on humanity as a whole.

It hardly seems likely that humanity is going to reach its full potential if ever more of us are spending ever more time under the direction of hyper-addictive, centrally-controlled algorithms that have been actively designed to harvest our data; control the information we’re exposed to; and above all keep us addicted.

Anyway. I’m going out to experience the real world by walking in the hills now, instead of spending the rest of my day doom-scrolling in search of something else to write about.

Sorry this post is more questions than answers. Hopefully you found it interesting at least.

I’ll try to get back to more regular posting soon.

Tom (AAV)