Social media as a disease, and the serenity prayer as the cure

I had a frustrating conversation recently. And sure, my fault.

Anyway, I’ve got this friend who to me looks like they’ve got all of the symptoms of a new and growing syndrome of despair arising from social media manipulation.

I don’t believe that there is a clinical term for it yet. But here’s the phenomenon: social media, through processes that are pretty well known to a lot of people by now, creates these emotionally hurtful negative feedback loops. It really doesn’t matter what the input is. But what happens is, some world event or news story or piece of science comes out, it almost doesn’t matter whether the input is a new gene therapy or an incident of genocide, social media algorithms take this thing and emphasize and circulate the most extreme emotional reactions to it.

People think they know how to game the system to get their message out, and they don’t realize that what they call “gaming the system” is simply “following the rules” as dictated by the algorithm. The rules aren’t really complex. It’s called “engagement.” What is engagement? People think it’s just whatever is interesting, but it’s really a little deeper than that. It’s messaging that alters the viewer’s state of consciousness in a way that draws them deeper into the media platform. This is ultimately saying that the most engaging content is not content that calls one to any meaningful tangible action in life, but content that feeds on itself. Engaging content is addictive by nature.

As we understand more about brain chemistry, though, it becomes clear that the most engaging stuff is emotionally upsetting. Israel Palestine is a good example. “What are they trying to distract us from?” Everything, but mostly anything that you could do to make a greater difference in the real world of your own life. It’s not a distraction “from” anything in particular. All of these stories circulated on social media, they aren’t really meant to distract from anything except everything.

It’s meant to make you sad.

It’s meant to make you angry, and specifically too angry to accomplish anything.

And you are feeding it your soul. So am I. I’m deeply infected and not really sure of a treatment. But I’m trying to decouple. I’m trying to pull back and figure out the serenity prayer.

The serenity prayer is about mindfulness and boundaries. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

Social media is about blocking this entirely, from the back forwards. First, social media posts don’t want you to have a clear line between the things in the world that you can and cannot control. Instead, it wants you to obsess specifically over the things that you can’t control, in order to keep you in a state of heightened activation of certain brain regions that make you more impulsive and manipulable. Then, it wants you to disengage from the things that you can change, so that you remain addicted, dependent, and under their control. Finally, it wants you not to accept the things that you cannot change, but only specifically the things that are far enough beyond your control that any flailing you might do will only lead to frustration and a return to the “safety” of social media.

It accomplishes this by amplifying certain content.

I will never agree to publish that content, so I will never be featured in social media.

I do not have a real answer yet except to seriously consider the serenity prayer as you consume social media. When you get calls to emotion, can you translate them to tangible action that will actually accomplish something? If not, you don’t necessarily need to go as far as “ignore it” but maybe you should consider trying to withdraw a little from that line of thought and find something more productive to focus on.

I cannot at present personally accomplish anything with regard to the awful actions taking place in the Middle East. Please do not accuse me of apathy; I did in fact volunteer my very life at one point in an effort to help there, albeit in a misguided way. I learned through that experience that it is actually a lot harder than one might think to truly make a difference. And please do not believe because I am not vocally angry about one particular bad thing that I am disengaged or doing nothing. The reality is that I have learned of the finite nature of my existence and the need to conserve resources and use the power that I have access to wisely. I just don’t know how to effectively share that message.