Long read: How Social Media Shortens Your Life

Gurwinder Bhogal writes about human behaviour and how we can use research in psychology to become aware and live a more fulfilling life especially in a world filled with attention seeking technology. His substack introduction goes: “Exploring the ways we’re fooled in the digital age”.

Most of us have often found ourselves getting sucked into the whirlpool of social media, that we often regret, yet find ourselves repeatedly fall for it all over again. This piece helps us understand how social media apps consciously create strategies to keep us glued and in turn rob us of our time and our ability to live a memorable life, besides the harm it causes to our mental and physical health.

“We kick up a fuss when tech giants steal our data, but we’ve been strangely nonchalant as those same companies carry out the greatest heist of our time in history.

Every social media user has experienced the theft of their time. You may log on to quickly check your notifications, and before you know it, half an hour has gone by and you’re still on the platform, unable to account for where the time went. This phenomenon even has a name: the “30-minute ick factor”. It also has empirical support. Experiments have found that people using apps like TikTok and Instagram start to underestimate the time they’re on such platforms after just a few minutes of use, even when they’re explicitly told to keep track of time.”

He cites research to show that not only have we lost time but also have nothing memorable after all that scrolling: “…our sense of retrospective time is determined by awareness of the past: in other words, by memory. The more we remember of a certain period, the longer that period feels, and the slower time seems to have passed.

Sometimes an experience can seem brief in the moment but long in memory, and vice versa. A classic example is the “holiday paradox”: while on vacation, time speeds by because you’re so overwhelmed by new experiences that you don’t keep track of time. But when you return from your vacation, it suddenly feels longer in retrospect, because you made many strong memories, and each adds depth to the past.

Conversely, when you’re waiting at a boring airport, you keep checking the clock, and this acute awareness of time causes it to pass slowly in the moment. But since the wait is uneventful, you don’t make strong memories of the experience, and so in retrospect it seems brief.

Now, a sinister thing about social media is that it speeds up your time both in the moment and in retrospect. It does this by simultaneously impairing your awareness of the present and your memory of the past. Try to recall what you saw on social media the last time you scrolled.”

Much of our scrolling is mindless beyond a point and this is consciously engineered by these apps: “Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, said: “The thought process that went into building these applications … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’” Parker and other tech executives employ “attention engineers” to design interfaces and algorithms that warp your sense of time.”

He says the social media guys didn’t invent this. Supermarkets and later casinos have been designed to do this since long, by a strategy called the Gruen effect – “the moment when a shopper loses track of what they entered the store for, and begins aimlessly wandering and impulse-buying..

…The Gruen effect is now commonly elicited online similarly to the real world: by continually placing distractions in people’s way. Every webpage is littered with links, each a path to another maze. And many of these links are deliberately placed where they don’t belong; search results are sneakily scattered with recommendations unrelated to your search, and personal notifications often have generic news links hiding among them. The goal is to alienate you from your own intentions, so you lose track of where you were, and when you were.”

Conversely, stories create memories: “The opposite of a maze is a route, and a route through time is a story. This is because stories are linear and syntagmatic — each moment of the tale semantically follows from the previous — and this collective meaningfulness anchors the whole thing in memory. This is why studies have consistently found that people are much better at memorizing information when it’s presented in narrative form.

…your social media feed resists emplotment because it’s the opposite of a story. It’s a chronological maze. It has no beginning, middle, or end, and each post is unrelated to the next, so that scrolling is like trying to read a book in a windstorm, the pages constantly flapping, abruptly switching the current scene with an unrelated one, so you can never connect the dots into a coherent and memorable narrative.

Thus, not only do you forget time while scrolling through posts, but you also forget the posts themselves. We have no problem recounting the plot of a good book we read or movie we saw last year, yet we can barely remember what we saw on social media yesterday.”

And the effects are dire: “ It would be bad enough if this disorientation were only costing us time. But it can also cost us our health too. Social media appears to disrupt young people’s sleep cycles and lead to mental health problems. Further, when people have their sleep continually disrupted, it can have cascading effects on their body’s ability to keep time, causing, for instance, puberty to begin sooner…screentime also seems to speed up ageing. A recent study of 7212 adults tracked various biomarkers of body age, such as muscle mass and telomere length, and found that those who spent more time staring at screens had aged faster, even when controlling for physical inactivity.”

He then suggests strategies to counter this: “So, if we can adopt the opposite techniques, we might just be able to slow time, and in so doing, experience longer, richer lives.

…For instance, when faced with a choice of experiences, choose the option that’s most likely to lead to a good story. Read books instead of scrolling social media feeds. Go on adventures instead of staying home. Being immersed in a story may cause time to speed by in the moment, but its memorability will dilate time retrospectively, which matters more because your sense of past time can last a lifetime, while your sense of present time lasts only a moment.

Focus too on the sentiments these stories inspire. The simplest way to strengthen a feeling is to savour experiences. So stop idly scrolling through life as if it’s a feed, and learn to focus your attention on the here and now. People who practice mindfulness tend to have a slower experience of time.

Be deliberate not just in your experiences, but also your actions. Make a habit of resisting habit, choose a life of choices. Continually question why you’re doing things, and stop when you don’t have a good answer. Instead of instinctively checking your phone every five minutes, only pull it out when you have a clear idea what you want to see, otherwise keep it in your pocket. The more you avoid living on autopilot, the more of life you’ll remember, and the longer it will feel.”

If you find this easier said than done and find yourself falling into scrolling social media feeds, he suggests a way to curate your feeds to bring awareness: “…in Ancient Rome and medieval Europe, people would often keep memento mori — reminders of life’s transience — such as skulls, urns, hourglasses, and wilted flowers….If you spend too much time on social media, then social media-based memento mori, such as Buddhism or Stoicism accounts, are good reminders to stop wasting time.”

He talks about how watching Youtube videos about lives of people with terminal cancer helped him become aware of how precious life is. It doesn’t necessarily have to be as morbid always. We need things that can remind ourselves of the need to be mindful and aware of what we have.

He aptly ends the piece with a Seneca quote: ““Life is short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.” Social media makes you do all three. But you have the choice to do the opposite, and to expand time, for living long is not just about maximizing the days in your life, but also the life in your days.”