Why I Stay Away from Social Media

There is a rule I have kept my entire adult life: I don’t use anything that is designed to be addictive.

I never tried recreational drugs. I didn’t drink alcohol when I was emotionally distressed. I never smoked anything. I quit sugar and processed carbs fifteen years ago. The logic in each case is the same: if something is addictive, it is destructive. If something is deliberately engineered to be addictive, someone else is profiting from your destruction. These are not interesting gray areas or matters of personal interpretation. They are cause and effect.

Social media is addictive by design.

This is not a controversial claim. It is documented. The engineers who built these platforms understood exactly what they were doing when they introduced infinite scroll, variable reward loops, notification systems calibrated to interrupt you at intervals, and algorithmic feeds tuned to maximize outrage because outrage holds attention longer than satisfaction does. They studied the neuroscience of dopamine release, modeled the behavioral patterns on slot machines, and applied both with extraordinary precision. The result is a product that alters your brain chemistry, shrinks your attention span, raises your baseline anxiety, and leaves you reaching for the phone in the dark at three in the morning for no reason you can name.

The company collecting your attention sells it.

You are not the user of social media. You are the raw material.

I have heard every version of the counterargument. That it is just a tool. That it is about how you use it. That some people are fine. These arguments miss the point entirely. The question is not whether you personally feel fine. The question is what the mechanism is doing to your neurological baseline, your capacity for sustained thought, your tolerance for being alone with yourself, and who designed it to do that, and why. Your subjective experience of not feeling addicted is not evidence that the product is not working on you. It is evidence that the product is working very well.

Show me a person who spends three hours a day on these platforms and has a genuinely satisfying life. Not a curated one. A real one: sustained work that requires concentration, relationships where the other person has your full attention, original ideas that don’t arrive pre-validated by an algorithm.

Show me a pornography addict who has a healthy relationship with real intimacy.

Show me a person whose habits were shaped by someone else’s financial interests and who is also living a self-directed life.

Compulsions make you weak. Weakness makes you easier to manipulate. A person who is anxious, dopamine-depleted, and dependent on external validation is simpler to market to, simpler to keep distracted, simpler to sell a solution to the problem the product created in the first place. The long-term suffering of addicted populations is profitable. That is not an accident.

My private practice has been full for years. I know what I am looking at when a new patient sits across from me. The presenting complaint varies, but the substrate is often the same: an attention system that has been systematically colonized, a dopamine circuit trained to chase external approval in small frequent doses, a person who cannot sit with themselves for ten minutes without reaching for a screen. This is not a character flaw in the individual. It is the product working as designed.

What I find more troubling than the patients is the therapists. Professionals who are trained to understand the architecture of compulsion, who can explain the neurological basis of addiction in clinical detail, are running the same loops on the same platforms as their clients. The drug is good enough to catch people who know exactly what it is.

Now imagine redirecting that dopamine architecture toward something it was built for in the world before these products existed. Exercise produces dopamine. Learning something difficult produces dopamine. Creating something produces dopamine. Real social connection, the kind where someone across a table can read your face and you can read theirs, produces dopamine. These are not lesser substitutes for what the platforms offer. They are the original system operating without interference.

The things you keep promising yourself you will get to, the work you claim to want to do, the people you say matter to you, the version of yourself you describe when someone asks what you are trying to build: those become accessible when the hijack ends.

I am not optimistic that most people will make this trade. The product is genuinely very good at what it does, and the short-term cost of stopping is real. But the question worth asking, at least once, is this: whose interests does your current habit actually serve?

If the honest answer is not yours, that is worth sitting with for longer than your attention span will probably allow.

Which is, of course, the point.