The confusion about social media is a misunderstanding about what it is, and what it’s for.
Most people think it’s a tool for connecting with family and friends. For sharing pictures with grandparents. For announcing important things. For convenient conversation.
But social media is actually none of those things.
Social media is an advertising platform built to create the most powerful companies in the world. It is a data collection engine which extracts every intimate detail of our lives and sends it to the highest bidders, who use our data to shape our desires any way they wish.
Social media is designed for one thing: to exploit our behavior psychology so that we will spend as much time looking at their ads and content as possible. They do that using intentionally addictive designs invented by top brain researchers that are implemented by the best and brightest in the tech industry.
That’s why if anything happens, we first think of posting on social media. When we’re bored, we scroll social media. We freely give them our hearts and minds so they can sell us (their product) to their customers (advertisers).
And it turns out that the best way to keep us coming back is to entertain us, anger us, or worry us. Rage and anxiety are actually most profitable, but occasional comic relief or emotional sentiments (“we care about you, here’s a sweet memory”) is used to keep us thinking we are having fun.
The entire Social Media Complex is fundamentally damaging to society in every way. It steals the most valuable and vulnerable parts of who we are: our identity, our time, and our attention, and leaves us distracted and depressed.
Do not be confused. What you think social media is and what it is for doesn’t matter. What matters is what the companies built it for. They didn’t build it as a handy tool to help you. No, we are their tools. Manipulated by them to do exactly what has happened: to make them the most powerful organizations the world has ever known.
What are your options after reading this?
1. Keep scrolling. I’m probably overreacting or exaggerating. Plus, I’m sure they’ll do something make you forget these thoughts in a couple minutes.
2. Or, read my book, do the practices, and learn to think clearly again, find your purpose, and live the life you were created to live.
Photo by Orsolya Vékony on Unsplash
One response to “We’re Confused About Social Media”
Great point here. I always enjoy your insight.
Hope all is going well with you.
Looks like we just missed each other in South Dakota if we have the timing right.
Mark