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Facebook is ruining your life
A quick look at the negative effects of social media on our society
Towards the dawn of the last Millenium, the Wachowski brothers created a cult sci-fi movie called the Matrix. The storyline centred around the idea of humans hooked to a machine which simulates their reality and harvests people for power. Of course, the idea seemed far fetched at the time.
Today, two decades later, every one of us is living in the matrix. We are hooked to social media for around 2 hours and 20 minutes per day, according to Hootsuite. The social algorithms feed us a distorted version of reality and harvest our time for money. If this sounds scary, have a seat because there’s much more.
First of all, social media works on Likes (or variants of it like hearts). Since being “liked” is a significant social stimulus, people go to great lengths. That is why photos portraying the perfect life of people litter our news feed. Of course, it is untrue that most people in my social circle spend their time on a luxury yacht eating caviar and sipping champaign. But the algorithm knows that these photos (especially the heavily edited ones) garner likes, so it promotes them further. The adverse effect of this is that it accentuates this fake lifestyle (which most people cannot afford) and makes one’s everyday life seem miserable…
