what is Social Media doing to us?

The life we call “normal” isn’t normal at all. A spouse and kids, a mortgage, a 9-to-5 job... who said that was life? What’s so great about working in a factory or a cubicle? You and I, who are artists and entrepreneurs, live a life that’s closer to natural, if you ask me. We migrate, too. We follow the muse instead of the sun.

All addictions share,

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We can always opt out of this arrangement, of course, and live happily in meatspace, but that is precisely the point: Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood.

In Walden , his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of ... life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” In Thoreau’s terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it.

But an unbounded information landscape is not an unalloyed good. Because social media does not favor accuracy or balance or diversity. It favors clicks. The more engaging and enraging the content, the more clicks it receives.