Inventing a Calmer Social Media

Reflections

Social media is popular for a reason.

It’s the easiest way to get distracted and not do what you have to do.

It’s designed to keep you scrolling endlessly. It seems almost life-saving to you and the most useful tool out there, but is nowhere near that for most of us.

You see this guy going around on a mountain, this girl running around all over LA partying, random Venezuelan children learning martial arts and even your cousin joining in on the most childish TikTok trends.

You see everything moving a bit too fast for your perception while all you are doing is scroll and consume whatever is out there on the Internet and loathing for a life like them.

Everyone seems perfect. Everything seems alright.

The world revolves without you. You feel inadequate.

The people you talk to seem fake, as if they are only here for getting something out of you.

Dopamine runs the show. These platforms feed us cycles of it, keeping us at unease. Always at a high. Always at a low. Never at ease.

It’s this mix of multiple emotions firing together that makes it so unmatched, so unboring, so stimulating. So much so that a simple walk in the evening feels mundane rather than refreshing.

The Vegas slot machines are right in our phones, and we didn’t even have the time to realize it. It’s with a different name — social media.

Ever realize how a couple of hours fly by without even realizing?

scrolls

At exactly 12.15 I will go and make that call to my tutor. the time becomes 12.16 Eh, I’ll call her at 12.20, for sure doesn’t realise and the time becomes 12.45 Let’s call her at exactly 1.00, it’s the perfect timing keeps scrolling

This cycle repeats and it becomes 3 o’clock by the time I get to call her.

If I didn’t have to call her in the first place, I don’t think I would even get off the site.

But regardless, I spent 3 hours in absolute nothingness.

Illusions

Social media advertises itself as increasing our connections to each other, but several studies show that people who spend more time on social media are actually more lonely, not less.

Jean Twenge, author of “iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.”

Most of my formative teenage years being spent in COVID and an almost self-imposed exile being an introvert, none of this really helped me develop my social bone or having real life experiences. Hence as one would, I spent most of my time online, isolated.

Social media amplifies this isolation to a level unprecedented. It imitates real connections, and makes you feel like you live in a community — factoring in that tribe mentality we innately have. You are promised connection, but are delivered shallowness more than anything.

Your community might not even be your community.

Possibly just a figment of your imagination.

I have multiple former classmates who have this almost superfluous, perfectly handpicked of a life.

It’s a war of who can fake the most perfection in their profiles.

That’s essentially what Instagram rewards.

When standards are held to such a high that the norm is to be abnormal — it’s not something people can or should follow, but they will due to the human psyche wanting to fit in.

These standards aren’t human.

They’re algorithmic — designed to keep you chasing an ideal that’s impossible to achieve.

It’s not authentic either.

I was in a long distance relationship for almost 4 years.

I know how it feels when you’ve connected on a deeper level with a person who is thousands of kilometres away. You’ve barely seen them, you’ve barely felt them — but you can still feel that they are real, authentic.

Here’s the more surprising part.

We never met. But it felt real more than anything.

I used to feel connected with most people I used to talk to over the Internet.

But those connections were lacking depth.

Curated feeds, curated people, curated personalities.

I was drowning in a sea of superficiality.

I knew I needed to change my whole approach of connection.

To the average 21st century citizen, it is almost like a threat to not have a polished online presence. As if it were uncool to not have the most aesthetic pictures taken of you, of course with dozens of filters and edits.

The threat doesn’t seem as prominent to me now as it was 5 years ago.

Because it isn’t a threat.

It never was.

Our brains have perceived the world of social media to be our community, our tribe — for which we always have this never-ending FOMO about the digital world and the urge to act a certain way, showcase ourselves in another.

I literally pulled the plug for 18 months on all social media in complete frustration, and even wrote about it.

As if social media couldn’t have been much more fake already, I discovered even the “people” aren’t real.

The other day I was scrolling Instagram and man, I saw an amazing looking girl. As if it’s out of a dream.

I convinced myself — no, she isn’t AI. She’s definitely real. What was making me believe her more was because she wasn’t like every other Scandinavian or American girl as uje.

I saw her skiing, doing all sorts of other activities and even wearing different attires, just like any normal human would.

She was also Pakistani. With no links except her Twitter.

I was convinced. Finally, a real girl.

Then I saw the eerie, almost abysmal stare she was giving.

How unnaturally she was carrying herself.

How weird the cup was looking on the table.

How some guy’s jersey in the background has gibberish written on it.

I couldn’t believe that she was AI. But, she was.

Even I can’t differentiate between real and fake now.

More than 300,000 people follow her, some of them regrettably being my acquaintances.

The more people interact with this, knowingly or unknowingly, it aids to the normalization of fakeness all over.

They don’t know she isn’t real.

And soon, none of us will be able to tell anymore.

Offenders

You probably have noticed that you scroll for hours on end.

I can bet that you’ve scrolled several hundred kilometres so far.

This is infinite scroll in play.

Aza Raskin, the guy who invented this, expressed regret saying that he did not foresee the consequences and describing it as one of the first products designed to not simply help a user, but to deliberately keep them online for as long as possible.

And you know why this works? It’s because unpredictable rewards produce a stronger addiction than predictable rewards — making you scroll for longer.

(edit: this is why breadcrumbing in relationships becomes something that pulls you towards the other person, if you aren’t aware on what’s happening to you or what the other person is trying to do)

I literally chased dopamine high after dopamine high before I said I would stop scrolling at a certain time. Our brains are literally wired the same as our primal ancestors, reacting to every evolutionary nudge that we get — delicious food, materialistic possessions, curvaceous women, what not.

All of these are selling us the illusion of that’s something we want.

Not something we need.

When we don’t know which of these to expect, we almost impulsively get pulled towards the vortex of infinite scroll, while the brain perceives all of this as helpful. We’re partially to blame for not being aware of when to stop scrolling, but the psychology behind the feature is meant to capitalize on the same primal way our brains were designed to work.

We’re essentially being cashed in on how our brain works — which is why it’s even harder to stop intuitively.

Your brain has adapted to constant chaos. Anything slower — a book, a conversation, even this piece — feels boring by comparison. That’s hyperstimulation at work.

Willpower alone isn’t enough when the battlefield is rigged.

That’s why we need different platforms.

Ones designed for mindfulness, not against it.

You feel like you’ve connected to people who don’t even know you exist — take celebrities or comedians. But most of the time, it’s just a dopamine high you’ve liked and want more of. Do you know any influencer that does not utilize this tactic of gaining your attention? I’ve seen very few. Scarcely.

I cannot even blame them, they have money to earn and spread knowledge that people would kill for. Neither can I blame the social media companies, even though I do not like their practices. Their companies run on your dopamine highs.

The more dopamine highs you get, the more likely they show you ads and profit from you. They won’t stop until the only thing you do is scroll through their platform in every waking hour that you have.

The profit model of any social media company runs solely due to your addiction.

Saviours

In a world designed to lead you with distraction, this shift towards calmer social media only seems obvious.

So, let’s explore some hangout spots built for connection, not addiction. Shall we?

Slowly

logo of Slowly adapted from TechAcute

I miss having actual, genuine conversations. I would be the last person to say this growing up, since I barely talked to anybody.

This is a unique platform that I have, surprisingly, been using since 2021.

With Slowly, you’re forced to talk to people just like the olden days.

Imagine the letter sending process, just digitized.

I love how you have to actually wait, think out every word that you are writing and are essentially feeling like you are talking to a real person.

No need to be chronically online for seeing your friends’ responses.

I can come online whenever I wanted to and respond in my own time, and not 3 A.M in the morning for the people I talk to on the other side of the planet.

This also fosters within you intentional thought, not reactive typing.

You think out your thoughts and write everything in a calm state of mind. You write more than you initially would, and that brings authenticity with it.

No notifications buzzing.

No FOMO about response times.

Just letters arriving when they arrive, just like how mail used to work.

You don’t have to have a curated profile — they have avatars that you can make, instead of profile pictures which might promote the social media sentiment of “being perfect”.

Slowly focuses on depth over breadth. Genuine connection over fake and transactional interactions.

I’d suggest everybody to try it out.

Here’s a review from TechAcute about Slowly, in case you wanted one.

BeReal

picture from Unsplash of a phone with a BeReal loading screen

This is one of the underdogs most people mention when talking about a more authentic presence online.

It’s Instagram without the filters, effectively removing the toxic social comparison problem right off the bat.

The game changer is their time-limited posts. Every post disappears from everybody’s feed within 24 hours — throwing out the possibility of doomscrolling from the get go. It’s exactly like Instagram Stories.

It prompts you to post the raw, real you.

What are you doing at that exact moment?

A camera pops up — on both sides — and you take a picture of yourself AND what you’re doing. No filters, no perfect timing. Just what you look like, where you are and what you are doing in real time.

BeReal isn’t as popular as it should be, but the fact that they still haven’t shifted to an algorithm designed to be addictive is what gains my respect for them.

The communities that BeReal harbours are another key for it to not turn toxic as these are often smaller, keeping them healthier and leading to a more cohesive social experience.

Substack

Substack is the best, and the most relevant platform we can talk about when choosing calmness over everything in our digital world.

The long form content in Substack encourages both readers and writers to prioritize substance over hot takes, unlike how it is in Twitter or Facebook.

Substack basically said fuck that. Long form wins here.

The algorithmic manipulation that riddles every social media site is not even a thing here. Reverse chronological feeds replace the unstable algorithm — you see feeds just as they are: older posts at the bottom, newer at the top.

I’ve built genuine connections here I wouldn’t have found elsewhere.

Something that gives rise to genuine connections here is the writer-reader relationship, versus the broadcaster-audience format dominant in all social media sites.

It’s a more intimate, more genuine exchange of two individuals where one subscribes to their content and gets it delivered straight to their emails, another intimate form of connection compared to a social profile.

Another thing I want to mention that Substack’s paid model creates a lower dependence on ads, so they have no need to make users addicted to their platform.

Finality

You must have noticed that we are bringing in an intentional friction into our mix of social media sites. That is not a bug — that is the feature we’re heading towards.

Slow does NOT mean it is bad.

Slow just means it is human-paced.

Right now, social media is all about who can get the most hype and likes, while losing the original essence of its intention — being social.

A calmer internet at scale would look like people making more informed choices, and not chasing the clout, not joining every trend just because it’s popular.

It looks like the original, collaborative mindset that Tim Berners-Lee had when first creating the Internet. Sharing information with one another in ease, delivering crucial value over triggering emotions.

I believe the shift is already ongoing, where people choose to live an intentional digital life, and not be a victim to FOMO, and it’s an exciting shift.

I will continue to develop this idea into a full expansive philosophy, because your digital life now is just as important as your physical life, which must be curated according to your goals and your principles.

I will be sharing and expanding more on digital living and I wholly believe it is more important now than ever to talk more about this, because let’s be honest — all of us are netizens.

Even if this is the first time you’re using the Internet.

And the use of the Internet will just grow beyond your smart dishwasher or even just opening the garage door — it is increasingly going to be integrated in our lives.

Since you’ve stuck around this long, I want you to ask yourself this question.

“Am I making an intentional choice as to what I consume and where I have a presence in?”

Because if you are not, you’re clearly going with the flow.

And only dead fish go with the flow.

-Kaifi.