Losing the present: social media as a factory of despair

On the dangers of social media + the possibility of creating a more beneficial digital ecosystem for all

Today, if we choose, we never even have to be still for a single moment of the day, from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to sleep. Instead, many of us spend every moment of stillness we have embroiled in that customized, highly addictive digital shopping mall called the internet, browsing social media, using our phones to constantly check notifications for that little dopamine hit, letting our attentions be swallowed by machines invented by money-hungry behemoths.

We are giving entire young generations access to a deeply addictive drug in the form of the internet, AI, and social media, allowing whole swaths of young people to fall prey to our money-hungry experiments. We are all checked in to a 24-hour news cycle, all exposed to countless headlines and applications all intended to capture our attention spans, to engage and enrage us enough to provoke comments and shares, to keep us hooked for every minute of our spare time. No wonder we are all so exhausted. No wonder there is so much despair.

Every day is a disaster on the internet. Every day you can witness the absolute worst of humanity, the most apocalyptic headlines, the most horrific of behaviors. Pornography is available for free with a single click, and young kids are learning about abuse instead of sex at very young ages from this exploitative and addictive industry.

In some ways, people have always feared new technology; from the rise of written texts to television, there have always been those who resist the newest machine. Perhaps it was unnecessary to be afraid of mass-produced written materials when they first emerged from Gutenberg’s press, and it’s hard to argue that books have harmed us, especially as a writer.

But perhaps some of these fears were drawn from a prescient kind of understanding: books would lead to the rise of ever-more-attention-consuming media, eventually leading us to what we have today. A techno-dystopia where most people do not have to bear the clamor of their own thoughts for more than a few moments of each day. A world where no one even has to think for themselves for a single second because AI has already given them the exact answers they want to hear.

Thanks to the ever-present digital vortex, we are losing touch with our thoughts, which means we are losing touch with the spaces between them, which means we are losing touch with presence. And presence is where the true reality lives; this is the argument put forth by Buddhism, which is based around the idea that we must take time away from our lives to listen to the stillness and to hear what it has to say.

Facing presence can be painful. Facing the truth that hides inside silence can be difficult, so we continue to scroll. We continue to while away hours distracting ourselves from what we know to be true. Meanwhile, we spend less and less time in nature, less and less time away from our screens, more and more time hooked and glued to an unreal simulated world that threatens to become more real than the real one each day.

Perhaps this is not inherently bad, in a theoretical sense. It’s not like reality is some perfect utopia, after all, and the internet does allow for connections that may not have been forged without it. It is also triggering political awakenings and spreading news that may otherwise have gone buried.

But the problem is that what we are seeing on the internet is being dictated by profit-driven models, or controlled by powerful people with very specific desires to keep themselves in power.

We are seeing headlines designed to make us despair — and keep clicking. We are seeing suffering plastered out next to vacation photos. We are seeing outrage-bait and narcotic-like repetitions of the same ideas that the algorithm knows we want to see.

No wonder we are so polarized. No wonder we are so afraid. No wonder why there is so much despair. Humans are wired to go towards what scares us; it’s an ancient evolutionary impulse, to look for the tiger in the dark woods and to place all our attention on it once we find it. Of course we are becoming more afraid, more ill. We are being fed straight into the mouth of our worst fears and worst nightmares, day in and day out.

Presence may be all that saves us. But presence will first expose us to a new kind of despair. When we choose to be present with the actual world around us, only then will we start to notice just how distracted everyone else is. How disconnected we are from the land, and ourselves. How afraid we are to open our eyes.

And we may also notice a growing despair rooted in the destruction of the earth and each other that we are tuning out thanks to the internet. Because while stories of despair and outrage gather our attention, climate stories struggle to be seen online — and when they are seen, they are apocalyptic and figure-based, not representative of the actuality of the situation, which is fluid and ever-changing and certainly not fixed.

Look around you: this moment is not fixed. And the moment, contrary to what the internet — with its obsession with the nostalgia of the past and the terrors of the future — would have you believe, the moment is all we have.

Look around you, really look. The world online is not real. This is.

It is a balancing act, to fear the future and to live in the present moment. But the present is where the solutions to our climate disaster live. The present is where we can find peace. The present is where we can find new beginnings. The present is where we can begin to see the truth of our interconnectedness. The present is where we can begin to shake off the illusions that keep us divided and despairing.

It’s so easy to go back online and to go back into hiding. It’s so easy to miss the fact that our reliance on the internet is paving our way for our reliance on AI, which is really the same as reliance on algorithms driven by shoddily constructed profit-making machines.

So we must place time limits on our social media. Children must play outside, without phones. We must put down the screaming billboards in our hands, which would have us believe the world is neatly divided into villains and angels, and see the actuality of the world around us.

And when we return to the internet, we must do it more mindfully. Many creators are already doing this, using the internet to spread positive, nuanced, and uplifting messages. When we are present with what we see online, instead of blindly scrolling through it, then our online experiences begin to change — and so will our outside worlds. We can cultivate community and change and positivity and even sacredness online.

We can choose what we see. We can cultivate the algorithm, making it so that we are exposed to messages we want around us. We can go online with the intention of seeking out objective sources and with the intention of understanding what our digital silo would have us believe should not even be engaged with.

In the same way, we can influence the algorithm of our own external realities by choosing what we wish to focus on. What we pay attention to grows and grows. If we are not choosing, then the algorithm chooses for us, and the algorithm is a hungry god, and it will pull us into very strange lands indeed if we aren’t paying attention.

It’s time to take back social media. It’s time to reclaim our attention spans. It’s time to question everything we see online. It’s time to stop falling prey to outrage bait. It’s time to turn off the 24-hour news, or to stop falling into pointless comment-section battles when what we really could be doing is talking to our family and friends or writing letters or working on our own art.

An occasional scroll-session or gossip binge is not a bad thing; it’s only human. But we must reclaim control of our attention spans. By keeping us blind, the algorithms and the people in power are making sure we are blind to what’s actually happening, which is the large-scale destruction of our planet.

By falling prey to algorithms we fall prey to all manner of bias. We lose touch with nuance; we are unable to even listen to the arguments of other sides. We are unable to pursue peace; we are unable to be present, where the true complexity and simplicity of each moment lives. We are unable to be present, which is the only place that real change happens.

Many religions speak of “awakening” from the dream of separateness. Now we are tasked with a double-awakening: First, we must awaken from the dre

amland of the digital world. We must see it for what it is: A hall of mirrors. A collection of algorithmically-curated outrage-bait and dopamine hits designed to keep us consuming it, no matter the cost. And the cost will be everything if we do not wake up.