Prior to the COVID pandemic, I had been an indifferent, on-off user of Facebook and Instagram. As someone who overwhelmingly prefers socializing in person to exchanging messages on apps, I never saw a compelling reason to spend time on the social platforms. It was unclear what benefits they offered, while the potential drain on my productivity was obvious. Peer pressure didn’t exert a pull on me; I tend to do things I either enjoy or find value in doing, and not necessarily what everyone else is doing. I wasn’t affected by FOMO either; social media is one of those things where, if you’re not on it, you don’t see what, if anything, you’re missing out on.
In 2020, to cope with the rigors of the COVID lockdown and fill the empty hours left by social distancing, I picked up a new hobby, or rather, returned to a hobby I had enjoyed as a child and abandoned in my teens: drawing. I rediscovered the tactile pleasure of making marks on paper with a pencil or pen and watching them take on the shapes and textures of living creatures. I especially enjoyed drawing birds. I marveled at how collections of inky lines could conjure up different avian species and their unique characteristics. It was a relaxing and meditative hobby that acted as a pleasant counterpoint to my job as a software engineer.
I wanted to share my drawings with fellow bird enthusiasts, so I created an Instagram profile for the sole purpose of publishing my drawings. I drew numerous species of birds and wrote my favorite facts about each species. I fancied myself a scaled-down John James Audubon, if you think of a pine sapling as a scaled-down giant sequoia redwood.
I felt a small thrill of validation by getting likes from people in various countries, including an ornithologist in Russia. Then the feelings of validation gradually morphed into a metric fixation, an obsession with tracking the number of likes, comments, and followers. Succumbing to feedback hyper-vigilance, my brain shrank every drawing to a handful of numbers displayed below it. I thought about experimenting with different styles and subject matter but quickly dismissed the idea. I did not want to risk compromising my engagement stats by diverging from the formula that the Instagram algorithm seemed to favor. What began as a relaxing quarantine pastime turned into an anxiety-provoking exercise in algorithmic conformity.
I started checking my engagement stats compulsively, as if my hand was being pulled toward my phone by some invisible force, as if Instagram held the solution to some urgent problem. The inevitable unpredictability of people’s responses to my posts fueled my obsessive app-checking. I was like the rodent in B. F. Skinner’s experiment, in which he placed a rat in a cage with a lever it could push to get food. By varying the amount of food that came out of the dispenser with each push of the lever — sometimes no food came out at all — the rat was conditioned to push the lever incessantly. Skinner showed that intermittent reward, also known as variable-ratio reinforcement, is sufficient to cause addiction-like behavior. It’s the mechanism that makes gambling addictive.
My constant checking of my Instagram stats was soon accompanied by anxiety symptoms. My heart raced whenever I opened my Instagram app. Admittedly, the isolation brought on by the pandemic had already put me in a vulnerable state. There’s a reason why solitary confinement is considered a human rights abuse. It’s likely that I would have suffered from anxiety during the pandemic even without social media, simply from the absence of human contact. But going on social media no doubt exacerbated my anxiety.
The strange thing about my Instagram episode was the absence of even remotely addiction-like behavior in my past. Prior to this, no activity or substance had ever turned into a compulsive habit for me. One night, when I found myself getting up at 3 a.m. to check my Instagram, I viewed it as a wake-up call that was worth heeding. I quit Instagram cold turkey by deleting it from my phone and noticed an immediate improvement in my mental health.
The pandemic ended. My social life returned to normal, lifting away my anxiety the way sunshine lifts the fog. I joined an art group that met at museums, where we would make art together and present our work to the group at the conclusion of each session. I had found a healthier way to share my drawings than going on Instagram.
No sooner had the pandemic ended than another global event rocked the world: the launch of ChatGPT in November of 2022. Practically overnight, AI went from being a specialized tool whose use was limited to tech circles to a mass-market product that everyone and their grandmother uses and talks about. Over the next four years, AI infiltrated every sector of the economy. I observed ChatGPT’s pet expressions creeping into the speech patterns of some of my friends. Many in my social circle are preoccupied with x-risk, or they dread the prospect of being replaced in their profession by AI. The latter has turned into a source of existential angst for my ambitious friends whose sense of self-worth is tied to their accomplishments.
I’ve always enjoyed writing, but until recently, writing was mostly a private activity shared between me and my notebooks. Living in the midst of the most radically transformative event in history changed that. I started a blog in order to share my reflections about the revolution we’re living through. Last August, I was looking for ways to promote my blog when a friend of mine suggested Instagram. My experience with Instagram during the pandemic hadn’t left lasting psychic scars, and I had confidence in my ability to use the app this time without succumbing to compulsive app-checking or anxiety. I figured I had nothing to lose by going back.
I created a new Instagram account and began posting short excerpts from my essays. After the lull of my first seven posts, I suddenly started getting thousands of views, triggering flashbacks to the dopamine loop and metric fixation I had fallen into six years earlier. I thought about the rat in Skinner’s experiment on variable-ratio reinforcement. I also thought about how the game had changed since 2020. There is no way of knowing what percent of Instagram views are coming from people as opposed to bots, now that there are more bots than people on the internet.
Even if I were to get millions of bona fide human views per post, what would I be accomplishing aside from helping to foster social media addiction in my fellow human beings?
Social media addiction is classified as a global public health challenge by many experts. Depending on how one defines addiction, anywhere from five to 25% of the global population may be suffering from social media addiction or problematic social media use. Problematic social media use is correlated with anxiety, depression, ADHD, and sleep issues. Further, social media addiction induces neurobiological and structural changes in the brain comparable to those caused by substance addiction. Children, whose brains are still developing, are especially susceptible to the harms of social media use.
Over the past four years, Meta has been embroiled in lawsuits filed by the attorneys general of all 50 US states, four US territories, around 1,200 US school districts, about 500 municipal governments, and approximately 3,400 individual plaintiffs over harms to children caused by the addictive design of Facebook and Instagram. Last August, 47 states and four territories settled for a combined payout of up to $17 billion and a promise from Meta to implement features on Facebook and Instagram to limit use by minors. Texas negotiated its own $1 billion settlement, while New Mexico won $900 million in a judgement against Meta. Florida’s lawsuit is still ongoing, as are the lawsuits filed by the school districts, municipal governments, and individual plaintiffs.
Did I want to promote my blog by means of an app that is engineered to be addictive? The answer was clear. I deleted my Instagram account.
Why I deleted all my social media accounts.
Prior to the COVID pandemic, I had been an indifferent, on-off user of Facebook and Instagram. As someone who overwhelmingly prefers socializing in person to exchanging messages on apps, I never saw a compelling reason to spend time on the social platforms. It was unclear what benefits they offered, while the potential drain on my productivity was obvious. Peer pressure didn’t exert a pull on me; I tend to do things I either enjoy or find value in doing, and not necessarily what everyone else is doing. I wasn’t affected by FOMO either; social media is one of those things where, if you’re not on it, you don’t see what, if anything, you’re missing out on.
In 2020, to cope with the rigors of the COVID lockdown and fill the empty hours left by social distancing, I picked up a new hobby, or rather, returned to a hobby I had enjoyed as a child and abandoned in my teens: drawing. I rediscovered the tactile pleasure of making marks on paper with a pencil or pen and watching them take on the shapes and textures of living creatures. I especially enjoyed drawing birds. I marveled at how collections of inky lines could conjure up different avian species and their unique characteristics. It was a relaxing and meditative hobby that acted as a pleasant counterpoint to my job as a software engineer.
I wanted to share my drawings with fellow bird enthusiasts, so I created an Instagram profile for the sole purpose of publishing my drawings. I drew numerous species of birds and wrote my favorite facts about each species. I fancied myself a scaled-down John James Audubon, if you think of a pine sapling as a scaled-down giant sequoia redwood.
I felt a small thrill of validation by getting likes from people in various countries, including an ornithologist in Russia. Then the feelings of validation gradually morphed into a metric fixation, an obsession with tracking the number of likes, comments, and followers. Succumbing to feedback hyper-vigilance, my brain shrank every drawing to a handful of numbers displayed below it. I thought about experimenting with different styles and subject matter but quickly dismissed the idea. I did not want to risk compromising my engagement stats by diverging from the formula that the Instagram algorithm seemed to favor. What began as a relaxing quarantine pastime turned into an anxiety-provoking exercise in algorithmic conformity.
I started checking my engagement stats compulsively, as if my hand was being pulled toward my phone by some invisible force, as if Instagram held the solution to some urgent problem. The inevitable unpredictability of people’s responses to my posts fueled my obsessive app-checking. I was like the rodent in B. F. Skinner’s experiment, in which he placed a rat in a cage with a lever it could push to get food. By varying the amount of food that came out of the dispenser with each push of the lever — sometimes no food came out at all — the rat was conditioned to push the lever incessantly. Skinner showed that intermittent reward, also known as variable-ratio reinforcement, is sufficient to cause addiction-like behavior. It’s the mechanism that makes gambling addictive.
My constant checking of my Instagram stats was soon accompanied by anxiety symptoms. My heart raced whenever I opened my Instagram app. Admittedly, the isolation brought on by the pandemic had already put me in a vulnerable state. There’s a reason why solitary confinement is considered a human rights abuse. It’s likely that I would have suffered from anxiety during the pandemic even without social media, simply from the absence of human contact. But going on social media no doubt exacerbated my anxiety.
The strange thing about my Instagram episode was the absence of even remotely addiction-like behavior in my past. Prior to this, no activity or substance had ever turned into a compulsive habit for me. One night, when I found myself getting up at 3 a.m. to check my Instagram, I viewed it as a wake-up call that was worth heeding. I quit Instagram cold turkey by deleting it from my phone and noticed an immediate improvement in my mental health.
The pandemic ended. My social life returned to normal, lifting away my anxiety the way sunshine lifts the fog. I joined an art group that met at museums, where we would make art together and present our work to the group at the conclusion of each session. I had found a healthier way to share my drawings than going on Instagram.
No sooner had the pandemic ended than another global event rocked the world: the launch of ChatGPT in November of 2022. Practically overnight, AI went from being a specialized tool whose use was limited to tech circles to a mass-market product that everyone and their grandmother uses and talks about. Over the next four years, AI infiltrated every sector of the economy. I observed ChatGPT’s pet expressions creeping into the speech patterns of some of my friends. Many in my social circle are preoccupied with x-risk, or they dread the prospect of being replaced in their profession by AI. The latter has turned into a source of existential angst for my ambitious friends whose sense of self-worth is tied to their accomplishments.
I’ve always enjoyed writing, but until recently, writing was mostly a private activity shared between me and my notebooks. Living in the midst of the most radically transformative event in history changed that. I started a blog in order to share my reflections about the revolution we’re living through. Last August, I was looking for ways to promote my blog when a friend of mine suggested Instagram. My experience with Instagram during the pandemic hadn’t left lasting psychic scars, and I had confidence in my ability to use the app this time without succumbing to compulsive app-checking or anxiety. I figured I had nothing to lose by going back.
I created a new Instagram account and began posting short excerpts from my essays. After the lull of my first seven posts, I suddenly started getting thousands of views, triggering flashbacks to the dopamine loop and metric fixation I had fallen into six years earlier. I thought about the rat in Skinner’s experiment on variable-ratio reinforcement. I also thought about how the game had changed since 2020. There is no way of knowing what percent of Instagram views are coming from people as opposed to bots, now that there are more bots than people on the internet.
Even if I were to get millions of bona fide human views per post, what would I be accomplishing aside from helping to foster social media addiction in my fellow human beings?
Social media addiction is classified as a global public health challenge by many experts. Depending on how one defines addiction, anywhere from five to 25% of the global population may be suffering from social media addiction or problematic social media use. Problematic social media use is correlated with anxiety, depression, ADHD, and sleep issues. Further, social media addiction induces neurobiological and structural changes in the brain comparable to those caused by substance addiction. Children, whose brains are still developing, are especially susceptible to the harms of social media use.
Over the past four years, Meta has been embroiled in lawsuits filed by the attorneys general of all 50 US states, four US territories, around 1,200 US school districts, about 500 municipal governments, and approximately 3,400 individual plaintiffs over harms to children caused by the addictive design of Facebook and Instagram. Last August, 47 states and four territories settled for a combined payout of up to $17 billion and a promise from Meta to implement features on Facebook and Instagram to limit use by minors. Texas negotiated its own $1 billion settlement, while New Mexico won $900 million in a judgement against Meta. Florida’s lawsuit is still ongoing, as are the lawsuits filed by the school districts, municipal governments, and individual plaintiffs.
Did I want to promote my blog by means of an app that is engineered to be addictive? The answer was clear. I deleted my Instagram account.