A young writer, herself a member of Gen Z, has dared to point out the obvious about social media. Sure, it’s verifiably making us sad and anxious, but it goes beyond that: it’s turning us into bad people. Freya India, a columnist at Quillette and a new contributor to Jonathan Haidt’s Substack After Babel, notes that while it’s important to talk about social media and mental health, it’s just as vital to talk about what this stuff is doing to our character. She writes,

Our loss of empathy, our lack of regard for others, our neurotic obsession with our own image — it’s taking a toll. Maybe subconsciously. But I think deep down we know it. We know when people are using their dying relatives for Twitter likes, filming their private moments of “quiet reflection”, all the way to posing on the train tracks at Auschwitz for their Tinder profiles, that the conversation can no longer just be about how bad social media is for our mental health. It has to be how bad it is for our humanity.

What’s Become Of Us? – by Freya India – GIRLS

Social media apps are designed to put the “user” front and center. When I’m on X, it’s easy to fall for the illusion that the app revolves around my own thoughts and opinions. The algorithm tailors the feed to mirror my interest, political preferences, etc., but also subtly shapes and reshapes my own desires and thoughts. I can become preoccupied with fashioning my image, the digital proxy of identity that will come off as interesting and smart to other users roaming the digital wasteland. I realize that my revulsion to social media is only partly that it makes me sad and lonely; it’s mainly that it makes me care less about other people and more about my ego, appearance, and apparent virtue.

Dawn Wible, a responsible tech advocate, recently chatted with Mind Matters podcast host Robert J. Marks on the problem of digital technology/social media. You can listen to that conversation here, and her point of view is valuable: screens eat up our time and can turn our attention inordinately back on ourselves. India also comments how modern tech gives us all ample opportunity to indulge in the darker aspects of human nature all the more easily:

 Of course we can all be cruel and selfish and insincere sometimes — but never before in history have we had a portable machine here to promote it. To indulge it. To reward our self-obsession and rename it personal branding, to protect our vanity as #selfexpression, to defend our basest desires “because you owe it to yourself”!

India is simply reminding us of the consequences of addiction. Any recovered drug or alcohol addict can tell you that the addiction wasn’t to a certain substance, but to the self, or that the dependence began as a poor substitute to meet genuine human needs and turned into a desperate quest to appease the self. I have to get what I want, and if I don’t, I’ll go crazy. That’s the tragic anthem of the addict. I fear that our culturally acceptable addiction to social media is malforming us into a nation of narcissists. It does no favors to our mental health. Still less does it cultivate in us a predilection for compassion, patience, and goodwill.