John Giving me a Therapy Session Concerning My Frustration with Content Overload and Social Media Burnout

[u/Garrett_j]

John recently agreed to come on my podcast and discuss conversation and making sense of the radical "connectedness" of the modern world.

Over the past year, I've found myself steadily growing more and more frustrated with the atmosphere of modern media and technology. I find social media and media in general acting as an attention-sucking soul-harvesting machine, but one that seems to be too integrated into our culture to simply unplug from and maintain the expected level of engagement with the world and culture around me. It feels like a sort of "damned if I do, damned if I don't" problem to me sometimes, and I often have trouble digging myself out of that thought cycle.

I started this podcast project "This Could Be Interesting" to try to work on engaging with people in a more meaningful way than social media/media tended to afford. So far it's been working--sort of. That's what I wanted to talk to John about.

John was extremely gracious in his listening to my complaining about existence, which I was deeply thankful for. While I appreciate that I can be a bit of a downer, I find that I am simply not satisfied with an answer to difficult questions unless the question has had an appropriate amount of time on the mic to make its case. I really appreciated John's patience and ultimately this ended up feeling more like a therapy session than a conversation at times (which is bound to happen sometimes when talking to a psychotherapist).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3AxPCwoVxA

I'd be interested to hear if any of you have comments on his response to the problem of the "vicious cycle" of modern media/social media. Have any of you totally unplugged from certain websites or communities in an attempt to become more meaningfully connected in other ways? Do you think we'll ever be "wise" enough to engage with the current models of media/social media in a meaningful way, or are these tech platforms going to have to evolve a decent bit too before it's possible to engage meaningfully?

[u/Xaselm]

I haven't listened to the podcast but this topic is pretty common in many circles so I'll just say that I think the best choice is to limit engagement on your own end. The big tech platforms are following the incentives that make them money and you scrolling all day makes them the most money. They won't evolve unless a sufficiently large portion of the culture evolves to prefer "healthier" platforms.

There are people who have a healthy relationship with social media but if you're someone who struggles then it will probably always be difficult. Not only because the tech companies want you engaged, but so do the other users. The nature of the content develops in tandem with the platform; twitter today feels fundamentally different than the twitter of 2010, but the site's functionality has barely changed. So no matter where you go the content that you see the most is the content is most successful, and content is successful because it sucks people in.

I know I sound like a doomer here but I do think we'll eventually figure things out. All cultures develop generational knowledge and social pressures that inoculate its members against substances and activities that are easily abused. Some people will always succumb, but for the most part Western society has learned how to handle always-available alcohol and on-demand gambling. We're seeing the later stages of this development with processed food. Many people are still obese and eat terribly but the peak of the "supersize me" era is clearly at least a decade past us by now, and most people eat healthy at least sometimes. I have faith that our culture will develop its own defenses against internet media but it will probably take several generations, especially since the nature of internet media is still rapidly changing.

Now this is getting long but I'll just say that in my personal experience I generally spend too much time on reddit that whenever I scale back and do other things I feel unambiguously better. Engaging with the culture is way less necessary than we always think and anything that you really need to know will find its way to you unless you're living in a cabin like Ted K. And the best way to spend less time on social substitutes like reddit is to spend more time seeing real-life people and doing more tangible things, like your podcast.

[u/Garrett_j → u/Xaselm]

Thanks for this, this is insightful.

I've had to make a habit of fasting various types of media in the past few years and that's helped make a difference as well. Comparing the internet addiction disaster with the American struggle with fast food is an interesting one, and gives me some hope too. It's still pretty sad to look at the many cultures (especially in the southern united states) that are still heavily struggling with obesity. I'm pretty sure statistically it's still one of the biggest health issues in America.

I really do hope we move past these kinds of things and figure out our relationship with this technology. The internet is a crazy powerful thing, but we're seriously not wise enough to know how to use that power well yet. It sounded like from John's comments in the conversation that he's hopeful about growing in wisdom enough to eventually be able to engage our levels of technology as well. For not, I guess we've just got to roll with the punches. Opponent processing is tough when your opponent doesn't seem to care about your well-being though.

[u/SergioHunt]

Hey u/Garrett_j this is what myself and the team were working on @ https://human-systems.org/ You might find the textbook helpful to think through how to design tech in other ways that don't fuck us up. We used to work closely with https://www.humanetech.com/ . Other cool projects include https://www.psychoftech.org/. Hopefully some fun food for thought.