Social Media Mimics Depression
This epiphany occurred to me months ago after I lifted out of a depression. It came one day when I was sitting on my couch, scrolling social media and realized I did nothing all day, was hungry and hadn’t made myself any food, and had been holding my pee because I outright didn’t want to get up and go to the bathroom, so bad had my lethargy increased.
I was reminded of a dopamine experiment where they removed the dopamine receptors from a mouse’s brain, and it starved to death because it wasn’t motivated to eat the food within its reach.
With smartphone in hand, I was that mouse.
When you’re depressed, you don’t feel like doing anything and everything goes untended. You feel no motivation, no desire, and even if things are bad, it’s still not worth putting energy into because you feel like all of your energy was sucked out by a vampire.
Some material evidence my depression had lifted was my sudden interest in hanging every picture on the wall I in storage. I did little handyman things around the house and organized my space. If I thought of doing something I did it right away.
That is, until I started scrolling on my phone. Hours started to go by unaccounted for, like I was lost in a void, afk from life (away from keyboard). I didn’t suddenly get this way, either I’ve always been like this every time I’ve hit up social media.
When I put my phone down, it’s like a cloud has lifted and I can get things done, albeit sometimes I have to zone out and stare at the wall for five minutes, allowing my brain to reboot.
If you ever want to know what severe depression is like, simply pick up your smartphone and scroll TikTok all day. Then at the end of the day you can bask in the soothing sense of self-loathing you feel.
I want to reiterate that social media is the prime mimicker. Checking emails, checking the weather, or seeking out specific information never had any effect on me. Even gaming apps, like Chess, never threaten to occupy me for hours. That’s one reason why I don’t mind, in theory, games that make you wait hours to complete a task. While you might check back on the game from time to time, it won’t allow you to be utterly sucked in and waste hours grinding. The saving grace is the partial grind, but for social media there is no partial grind, it’s endless.
How much better would social media be if it was “free to play” in the sense that you could scroll for an hour, but after that you’d either have to wait three hours before you could scroll again or pay to keep scrolling. How many people would this save?
Furthermore, how many people would experience a lifting of depressive feelings by ignoring social media?
I tried purging my social media follows down to one or two people or subs but the sites would hit me with ‘suggested’ communities or people and it became annoying. Today I only use reddit but it’s not useful to me. I need to listen to my own advice and go back on a reddit hiatus. It’s genuinely hard for me to stick my nose in my phone all day if I’m not going on social media.
I really only want for you to come away with one thing to keep in mind the next time you find yourself scrolling: social media mimics depression. You don’t want that now, do you?