How and Why You Should Cut Your Social Media Usage
In the past year or so, I’ve become increasingly convinced that much of the time spent on the internet and on social media is bad both for me personally, and for many people in developed countries. The reasons, roughly in order of how important they were in convincing me, are:
I just feel happier when I go out without a smartphone or a laptop, knowing that I will read a book or talk to my friends without being distracted. The fact that the phone/laptop is not available to me calms my mind, there isn’t some lingering impulse to check and check and check again.
My friends have told me that I seem happier when I’m out of the house without my phone or a computer.
After replacing my iPhone with a Duoqin F21 Pro, I spend much less time doing things that are a waste of time. I thought there was a reasonable chance that I just ended up spending that time doing something else pointless, but mostly it does get spent reading or doing something productive.
Note: the F21 Pro lets you use Google Maps, WhatsApp, the Play Store, podcasts, and so on. You tend not to use it for long periods because it’s inconvenient to spend any significant amount of time on it.
It’s apparent that the social media algorithms reward polarising and politically contentious content. Unlike some people, I don’t take it as obvious that this is a bad thing, but I do think it’s probably harmful overall. I like moderate politics, and social media seems beneficial to the politics of the radical right and the radical left.
There are strong reasons to think that people would get addicted to platforms that give you a quick dopamine hit, and I think we have good reasons to expect that people would use these platforms more than they would read books, even if those books created more long-term value.
The social science evidence seems quite mixed from a cursory look, but I think I’m at least somewhat persuaded by the claim that there isn’t a better explanation than social media for the uptick in mental health conditions that began in the early-to-mid 2010s. John Burn-Murdoch’s piece in the FT gives a good overview.
What are the strongest arguments against? Here are a few:
The social science evidence seems quite mixed, and not obviously in support of the view that social media is particularly harmful. I would expect larger effect sizes in RCTs, and the “well, this is a societal problem and we can’t expect big results for individuals” seems like cope. Given my view, we should expect stronger results in the experiments than the results that we actually get.
Connecting with people over social media can be extremely valuable. I have met good friends through the internet, made very useful professional connections, had one-off dinners and drinks with many interesting people, and so on. This has added a lot of value to my life, and I guess that many other people feel the same way.
This is especially true of people with niche interests, and I can imagine it being very important for people in certain minority groups (e.g. a gay teenager in a conservative environment might feel less alienated because of their online connections, or an autistic young person with a rare special interest).
There is lots of interesting content on social media and if you curate your feed very carefully, you can ensure that most of what you’re seeing on your social media is actually useful or insightful. This might be a better alternative to trying to cut down your internet usage overall for many people. I have found many interesting podcasts, documentaries, and cultural recommendations through the internet and through social media specifically.
People are generally good at recognising their own interests, and so their revealed preferences indicate lots of value created by social media.
Given these arguments, I have some recommendations for people like me (i.e. people who spend a huge amount of time online but think they would benefit from spending less time online). The most important thing is that you should spend less time on the internet at the margin, and you do not need to force yourself to spend almost no time on the internet, which is unsustainable and likely not a good idea anyway. So, here goes:
Get rid of your smartphone, or at least cut down your usage significantly. Begin by going out of the house without your phone for a few hours. If this works well for you, consider replacing your smartphone entirely with a dumb smartphone, like the Duoqin F21 Pro. (Given I recommend this phone so often, I should note that I make no money from my recommendation!). Make sure you get the “Play Edition” of the phone so that you can download apps.
Use SelfControl on your Macbook to limit your access to distracting social media sites for most of the day. Give yourself some time at the end of the day to check them.
Buy a timed lockbox and lock your phone away for a few hours a day, to make sure you won’t be distracted by it. If you want to, buy a larger safe with a key, put your laptop in the safe, and then put the key to the safe in the lockbox (along with your phone) to restrict access to all distracting technology.
Get into a new hobby that will lead you to want to spend less time on the internet naturally. There may be something that you have always wanted to take up. Today, I am giving you explicit instruction to do whatever it is that you’ve always wanted to do. Take this as a sign to begin today!
Curate your social media feed and internet use so that it is the way that you want it to be. Block twitter accounts that you always see posting garbage, prune your follow list to people whose tweets you actually want to read, use the ‘Following’ tab more and the ‘For You’ tab less. Install this extension on your laptop so that you can’t even click on the ‘For You’ tab.
There’s probably a lot more to do, but doing a few of these five things would be a fine start. Good luck!
How do you feel about using Substack?
I feel like I'm the last person in the world whose compulsive phone habits have literally nothing to do with social media (unless you could substack -- but I don't use notes at all, it's all the articles) and everything to do with reading blog type posts, newspaper commentary and LLMs.... Still a huge and distracting timesuck.