There are various ways how the unreflective social media use is bad; not all apply to all people, but many do.
From the perspective of productivity, yeah it drops dramatically when you spend the entire day online, but it is not the only thing that drops. Meeting people outside your home, and even interacting with people in your home, is impacted, too.
And even on the most private level (even if you live alone and don't care about anyone around you, and you have sustainable free income and zero ambition), there is still the selfish question "does it actually make me satisfied", and I am afraid the answer is.... kinda yes, kinda no.
Consuming random stuff online feels fantastic in short term; that's what makes it so addictive. Tons of things in your reach; if something annoys you, just click on something different, duh. You can spend the entire day doing the most enjoyable thing, so in theory it should be your best day, but in practice... it's not? (Not sure how much I can generalize from my example here.)
One aspect is the "endlessness" of it all. There is always another forum, another web comic, another whatever it is that you want to consume, and that's... surprisingly, not the best way to have things. Seems like humans naturally need change, need to take breaks. We have multiple needs, if we keep satisfying one of them and ignoring another, after some time is starts to feel bad.
For example, when you finish reading a great book, it's time to close it and relax, and let your mind organize the impressions. There may be a feeling of regret: "I wish I had more of this". But in some sense the moments after you finish reading the book are an important part of the experience. The input stopped, now your mind is playing with itself, organizing the experience. Rememeber the "peak-end rule"; when you reflect on the book, you will mostly remember its best moments, and whether the ending was satisfying. With an endless book, there is no ending; no feeling of "now I know how it all ended". Similarly, you can chat with friends around the world, but those chats usually have no conclusion, no agreement on things, no next chapter. It's just an endless stream.
The only way to stop engaging with an endless thing is to walk away in the middle... which feels bad if the thing was good, but if the thing was already bad then what were you doing there already? It's usually like our enjoyment gradually decreases, and we leave after it crosses some threshold (probably much later, because we don't notice immediately, or we may hope that the enjoyment will return). In contrast, a finite thing can simply be good, and then you can walk away satisfied and start doing a different kind of a good thing.
Another aspect is "trading quality for convenience and quantity". Good movies are better than most youtube videos, but those videos are there, and they are okay-ish, and there is a lot of them. Similarly, good books are better than most online debates.
Sometimes this is on purpose, especially with paid content (but with advertising, everything is) -- the endlessness and quantity are the ways to extract most money from you. Now of course, even a good classical writer may publish another book to make more money. But the books are separated, each one requires a new decision. Internet tries to take this decision from you by making the endless flows continuous.
In summary, a life spent reading good books, watching good movies, and doing offline activities with your friends will probably be more enjoyable in reflection than a life spent scrolling endlessly. And this is true even assuming zero ambition.
My friend Justis wrote a post this week on what his non-rationalist (“normal”) friends are like. He said:
This seems 1) factually incorrect and 2) missing the point of everything.
First off, in my experience, worry about screen addiction doesn’t cleave along lines of ambition at all. Lots of people who aren’t particularly ambitious care about it, and lots of ambitious people unreflectively lose many hours a day to their devices.
Second, digital intentionality is about so much more than productivity. It’s about living your life on purpose. It touches every part of life, because our devices touch every part of our lives. To say that people only care about their device use because it gets in the way of their ambitions is to misunderstand the value proposition of digital intentionality.
‘Normal’ people do care about screen addiction
Yesterday I got talking with the station agent while I was waiting for a train, and (completely unprompted by me) he started saying things like “Did you know that in Korea, their books say the internet is a real addiction you can have?” and “You used to have to go to Vegas to be so overstimulated; now they put touchscreens on the street!” and “I go on my phone to use the calculator and then I realize I’m just scrolling and I didn’t even ever use the calculator!”
Or right now I’m sitting at a café, and I just overheard a woman say, “Intelligent people are making things very addictive to distract us.”
‘Normal’ people care about this, which makes sense, because it affects all of us. You don’t have to be ultra-ambitious, or even ambitious at all, to feel the opportunity cost of being on your devices all the time. People lament the moments they miss with their kids or loved ones because they’re looking at their phones. And there are plenty of non-opportunity costs — people complain about their attention spans shortening, their memory getting worse. They think about how they used to be able to read books and now they can’t. And people are on their phones while they’re driving, all the time.
Digital intentionality is value-neutral / not about productivity
How to Do Nothing is a book about digital intentionality (its subtitle is Resisting the Attention Economy), whose author thinks that the entire concept of productivity makes us forget what it is to be human. To her, devices are bad in part because they keep us focused on productivity. Her thesis is that if you really pay attention to the world around you, you’ll find that it’s so interesting that you just won’t want to spend time on your devices. (She made it sound so cool to not only notice but be able to identify all the birds you see and hear, that now I own binoculars and go birding every weekend!)
Even Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism is surprisingly value-agnostic, considering that Newport frames most of his books in terms of productivity. He talks about a father who used to love art, but let it fall by the wayside; after reconnecting with what he wants through digital minimalism, he starts drawing a picture to put in his child’s lunchbox every night.
I’ve read a lot of books on digital intentionality, and people mostly come to it not because they’re worried about not accomplishing their goals, but in desperation when they realize the overall impact of their devices on their lives and psyches.
People just want to be able to sit with their thoughts. They want to be able to live in moments, and remember things, and maybe read a book ever again. People want to feel like humans in a world where life is increasingly disembodied.
I’m not into digital intentionality because I have some big goal I want to accomplish, or even because I had some small goal, like reading a lot of books. (I basically don’t have goals! It’s something I struggle with.) I’m into digital intentionality because I didn’t want to lose any more years of my life to shit that gave me no value and that I wouldn’t even remember, that was designed to keep me sedentary just to drive ad revenue to companies that already have too much money. I wanted to go outside and form memories and be a person and talk to other people. And now I do.