The Internet has Become an Addiction Hub
Channel: Daily Insight
Date: 20/11/2018

The Internet was sold to us on a lie. We were told that it would be a tool that will revolutionise the world. And it did! It’s allowed us to contact people from all around the globe. We can look up any piece of knowledge about any particular topic. But what have we let it turn into? Well, it has become a hub of addiction. I don’t mean alcohol. I don’t mean hard drugs. I mean social media. Social media rules the Internet and it’s causing many of us to go into a deep spiral of permanent depression.

When we post on social media, we only post about the perceived “good” things in our lives. We only show the perfectly styled hair or makeup. We only show the five-star resort or the Michelin star restaurants that we have visited. We show pictures of our beautiful wife, our loving children, our new house or car, and our adorable new puppy. The negative is almost never shown. We, in effect, only show the highlight reel of our lives — and it’s killing us.

99% of our life is not what we show on social media. Most of our life involves boring jobs, long nights working on reports, sleeping when we can, eating junk food because we can’t be bothered cooking, and a whole lot of time preparing and pretending that our life is awesome. When we go on social media and look at all the smiling faces and beautifully toned bodies, we inevitably compare our mundane life to the highlight reel of others. It’s an unfair comparison that makes us feel miserable.

When we post a new profile picture, we sit there anxiously waiting for feedback. It’s a nervous wait. Will people like my new hairstyle? Will they comment on my new toned body? Why are they taking so long to respond? And when finally somebody does write a comment, “I love your new look!”, we get a hit of dopamine causing us to feel temporarily euphoric. But it’s only temporary. As soon as we get a couple of more likes, the euphoria starts to fade. We go back to looking at other people’s social media highlight reels and start to get jealous and depressed again. It’s a toxic cycle. Social media does nothing to increase our happiness in the long run. It’s essentially a drug — and the big social media companies know this.

So why do we keep doing it to ourselves? Why do we keep going back for more when it’s clearly hurting us in the long run? Well the only explanation is that it has become an addiction for many of us. We can’t live without checking our phone every 10 minutes. We need that feedback from other people to make ourselves feel worthy of their attention. The unfortunate thing, however, that unlike other addictive substances such as alcohol and drugs, we let our children use social media.

We have laws in place that don’t let our kids drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, or use hard drugs, but yet, when they’re only 8 or 10, we’re letting them jump online and play addictive video games, or participate in harmful social media. It’s wrong. We’re hurting our families, hurting ourselves, and hurting society as a whole. Kids are literally killing themselves because of the harmful effects of social media. They’re simply not mature enough to deal with it.

Like buttons, thumbs up, heart symbols — they’re all meaningless. YouTube forces us to try to get as many likes and subscribers as possible. Instagram is pretty much the same. We’re no longer working to improve our true happiness and self-satisfaction, but instead trying to impress a bunch of faceless web users, all so that we can feel the temporary effects of dopamine. It’s exactly the same reason why people use cocaine, except that social media is far more ubiquitous.

Enough studies have been done to show the depressive effects of social media on the human brain. There’s only one way to make this all right — to stop using it. Or at least, stop using it in an addictive way. I think YouTube’s a great way to spread information and knowledge to the masses. But when it becomes a place where content creators go to greater and greater extremes in order to get more views, more likes, and more subscribers, it’s no longer a social good. It becomes a money-making exercise at the expense of the mental health of the ever-growing number of susceptible users.

Social media has turned into a monster — a monster that we would normally destroy on sight. But for some reason, we’ve let this monster grow and it is slowly consuming all of what is good on the Internet. Cocaine, heroin, meth — they’ve got nothing on the pervasiveness of social media.

Google, McDonald’s, Tencent, Twitter — they’re all companies that profit from our addiction in some form or another. We can’t expect them to do anything to help us. We can only help ourselves.

Let’s stop this madness. Don’t let this social media monster take over your life. Take the power away from these monsters. Switch off today!

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