Digital Burnout
It’s no secret that the internet has taken over our collective consciousness. Our tools, our entertainment and sometimes even our way of living are at the mercy of the internet. It is the greatest experiment of our time, an amorphous network of human minds streaming ideas and thoughts in real-time. One thing is for sure; there is no going back. It has ceased to be an oddity that held a lot of promise and has become the greatest democracy of all - an expression of our deepest fears and desires. We have traded the real for the virtual.
With the advent of the internet came the influx of social media, a way for us to connect across boundaries. In its infancy, social media was the wild west of the internet, allowing you to post anything and talk however you would like with zero accountability. People were not sure what to make of it. But as time went on, the companies behind these apps experimented and workshopped their way to find out how to make the human mind tick. And the results are incredible/disastrous, depending on how you perceive them.
Look, if we are being honest, one of the main reasons social media is so popular is because it’s free to use. So the question arises: how do they make their money? The time-tested answer is advertising, of course. Brands put up money to run ad campaigns trying to peddle their wares. However, the companies behind these tech giants are a bit more insidious in their operations. Since they have access to your personal data (which you have willingly signed over, please read the terms and conditions), they can use cutting-edge algorithms to predict exactly how to cater ads to you for maximizing effectiveness. This is a concept known as surveillance capitalism. We trade our attention and time for these so-called “free” services which are paid for by advertisers and in return, our privacy is being invaded to upsell us on things we don’t need. Companies spend millions of dollars crunching vast amounts of data, trying to figure out how they can make their apps more addictive and sticky so people spend more time in them.
If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.
The internet got its big break with the emergence of the smartphone. What better way to get people hooked than make sure they have access anywhere, anytime? It gets murkier because you truly cannot live without a smartphone now, so it’s up to us to regulate our use. But when our technology has been designed from the ground up to manipulate us, endlessly overhauled to keep us glued to our screens, it is difficult to fight back.
This is especially true for the people who grew up with the internet. Millennials, Gen Z: they are struggling to perceive the effects the internet has had upon them because it’s all they’ve ever known. It feels like a superpower that we took for granted without realising how dangerous it could be. A common notion that the present generation holds is that the internet could act as a substitute for wisdom, as everything we ever need to know is at our fingertips. What they don’t seem to appreciate is how wisdom is generated through experience and how that makes people unique, rather than just being mediocre.
Over time, people have adopted a maximalist attitude in the way they approach technology. They believe that more apps, more feeds and more content will somehow fill the void in their lives, or at least distract them from it. Everything is being deferred to your phone these days: how you shop, how you study, how you bank, even how you sleep. The influence of your phone on your life is ever-expanding. But what people fail to realise is that this process has diminishing returns. We are trying to make everything a tad more convenient, for the sake of convenience and terming it as “innovation”.
If you’ve been keeping track recently, our forms of entertainment have been getting shorter with every passing day. We have transitioned from movies to YouTube videos, to Reels and Tiktoks. Does this mean we are spending less time on entertainment overall? Far from it. The barriers to entertainment are paper-thin, allowing you to fill any slightly boring/unstimulating moments of your life with noise to distract you. Waiting for anything has become unbearably wrong; just ask any child to wait for a video to buffer and you’ll see them squirm.
We have been conditioned to reach for our phones to fill up any downtime we have. In that sense, it’s almost like the modern-day pacifier. Any friction or awkwardness in social settings is quickly suppressed by glancing at our phones. This stifles natural conversation, but we can’t settle for the stimulation of conversation after overdosing on the manufactured excitement of our apps and sites we frequent. It’s messing with our brains, like monkeys foaming at the mouth for some grapes. We have fallen prey to an addiction and manipulation-based tech environment.
The number one argument used to justify all this is that the internet or more specifically social media is irreplaceable. In a way, they are right. The need to be social is a primal need for us, evolved over millennia of working together to survive the elements and build a civilisation. We are psychologically primed to connect with people and build relationships with them, no matter how introverted you think you are. So when it’s made much more convenient to bolster and maintain relationships across the world, anyone would jump at the chance. That’s why whenever you feel the need to quit social media, you cannot rationalise cutting yourself off from the world.
However, the untamed use of social media can reshape your perspective for the worse. Nowadays, Facebook and Instagram do not function just as a place to see photos of your friends. You go there for entertainment, content tailored to your interests and horrifyingly, news. As I’ve said before, the apps are designed to take up the most of your time. No matter how open-minded you think you are, people always love to hear views that echo their own. When you are confronted by an opposing view, you feel uncomfortable and might attribute that to the platform itself. The algorithm knows this and therefore always tries to serve you content based on what you believe. This makes your social media feed a big echo chamber, reinforcing your beliefs instead of challenging them, making you more rigid towards your viewpoints.
To do all this, they have a literal psychological profile of you based on your activity. They gauge your movements across the internet, using your digital footprint to figure out what you like: your hobbies, wishes and even your sense of identity. They know you better than your parents or even yourself. The notion of privacy is dead in the 21st century, leaving in its wake a world of 24/7 surveillance and big data in a quest to know everything about everybody. It is honestly creepy, a sort of digital subconscious that you never knew you had. They can reach into your mind and pull out hopes they can turn into purchases.
Recall the principal need of social media: to stay updated on what our friends, family and acquaintances are doing. Have you ever truly portrayed what happens on a normal day in your life on social media? Because let’s be honest, most of our lives are boring, punctuated by a moment or two of interest. We take those moments, spice them up and share them to make our lives seem fascinating. So it’s fair to assume everybody else does too. And yet, social media is the greatest generator of envy we have ever devised. People post a fabricated highlight reel of their lives, showing them at their greatest moments, and we choose to believe that’s their life all the time. Reinforcing this narrative day in and day out makes us unhappier with our own lives, which seem dull in comparison. Life on social media seems hyper-real, magnifying our emotions in order to receive approval from our peers. This is happening on an exponential scale to our generation. Social platforms have been cited as one of the main causes of widespread mental illness, depression and anxiety among today’s young adults and teens. It’s just not healthy to expose ourselves to this mindset of making our lives seem more interesting just to keep up with the rest.
If you’ve been feeling tired of the internet lately, you are not alone. We have reached a breaking point in how these corporations seek to monopolise our attention by using our own psychological biases against us. It’s starting to manifest physically in our bodies, showing up as a feeling of fatigue and lethargy. Getting off a social media binge is headache-inducing, making our mind feel numb and fuzzy like you are at the dentist’s. On a large scale, we are collectively oblivious of our real lives, choosing to stay preoccupied with distraction that serves no purpose. The sheer overload of perspectives, opinions and agendas of others shoved down our throats is starting to take a toll on us.
I do not advocate abandoning the internet/social media and living the life of a hermit, far from it. But I do ask you to be aware of how you spend your precious time. Choosing wisely makes sure you don’t regret down the road. By staying ignorant, you choose to be enslaved to the agendas of big corporations and billionaires. It’s time to wake up and choose to live life consciously.
No amount of money bought a second of time.
Resources to help you get started:
- The Social Dilemma On Netflix, the most comprehensive summary of how social media is royally screwing us over:
2. Better Ideas is a legend, but I’ve never related to him more than this video:
3. And finally, this book serves as a stark reminder of the new reality we are in:
