To respond to this, I like to look at how people live their daily lives today… when I was younger, social media was an innocent tool: it was used as a way to stay in touch with former classmates or colleagues and exchange a few messages, at most a few minutes a day. But now social media takes away pieces of life without you really noticing.
And it starts already in the morning, I say this from stories I've heard, they wake up, know there are a thousand things to do, and yet the first thing they do is grab their phone and open Instagram or TikTok.
They scroll through a video or a reel, then another video, and then check notifications, likes, stories… and all this while they haven't even gotten out of bed! Those are tens of minutes stolen from your real life.
Social media now is designed to capture attention and keep you hooked as much as possible.
Every notification, every Like, etc., works like a small reward that pushes you to stay connected a little longer. Every suggested content studied on what you looked before is made with the purpose to attract your attention and keep you more on the screen. It's a calculated release of dopamine, everything is planned by companies exploiting psychological weaknesses. It's the same dynamic that leads us to seek immediate gratification instead of facing the difficult things in reality. It's easier to make a stupid video and get 100 likes than to commit to real life and maybe get 3-4 people to say “well done!”
People get distracted so often because social media offers fast and easy rewards, while the things that matter, like building real relationships, working on personal goals, whether material or mental, facing problems, require energy, concentration, and effort.
It's much easier to scroll and feel valued by a few likes; after all, modern society encourages laziness, just look at the use of AI.
I always see kids with their phones in hand, sitting around doing nothing, wasting afternoons like that, but social media is a widespread plague among young people, passed on by adults. Adults and workers check messages during work, interrupt important tasks for a notification. It's a modern form of distraction that has infiltrated every moment of the day, during breaks to check notifications, in moments of boredom to take photos to post, etc.
It's like a drug, or rather an addiction: there’s the addiction to scratch-and-win tickets, to tobacco, to drugs, to gambling, and social media is another one... But since it doesn’t cost money and only causes mental dependency, it's not seen as a danger or a problem, so it's fine... I don’t know if people will ever realize it in the future and return to using them correctly, I hope so but I don’t believe it.
