Is social media ruining human connections?

Why my phone is making my life worse, whilst also improving it.

A very autumnal hideaway...

I’ve seen lots of talk in my online world–especially on Substack–about the overuse of social media and the internet, and the effects it has on our mental and physical health. Ranging from people speaking about their own experiences with internet addiction to parents fretting over their children’s smartphone use. 

Personally, I owe most of the stuff I have in my life to my ability to connect with other humans over the World Wide Web. I found my partner online, I met some of my closest friends online (which then transferred into ‘real life’ relationships), and I work exclusively with remote clients, creating content for the internet, to gain customers for their (most often online) business.  

My life, and many people’s lives, revolve predominantly around the internet–especially post-pandemic–so this isn’t an unusual position to be in. 

That’s why today I wanted to explore this ‘trend’ and how our social media addiction has any relation to the changing climate and creating a better future. 

The internet was the bedrock of my existence growing up, and I don’t mean that figuratively. As a lonely home-schooled kid without friends who lived close by, for a large proportion of my life, logging onto the online world was often the only opportunity I had to speak to others my age. 

I loved to read various fanfictions, watch hours of YouTube, and play those silly little online games (I was incredible at both Papa’s Pizzeria and Penguin Diner). I would spend as much waking time as possible on my desktop computer–then subsequent laptop–digesting as much online culture as I could find.  

Obviously, none of these activities are inherently bad, and I have fond memories of many of them. But it’s when it shifts from a feeling of enjoyment to a feeling of need is when it becomes unhealthy, and I think this change began to happen when we moved from using the ‘internet’ to ‘social media’. 

It’s important to make a differentiation here when I talk about these two things. The internet we have now isn’t the same as it was in the late 2000s. It used to be a lot more decentralised, though I must admit that I only caught the tail end of this experience. 

During this time, I would jump from website to website, logging onto various chat rooms and online MMOs (I spent hours on RuneScape, Club Penguin, and Habbo Hotel), and browsing forums and social media sites such as DailyBooth and LiveJournal(!)‌.

Now it feels like we spend our time swapping between 4 or 5 apps, social media apps, on our smartphones. This is where I feel the change in our browsing habits became quite unhealthy, and the introduction of new apps (Like TikTok, but we’ll get onto that later) only furthered the problem. 

For me–it might have coincided with my age–but it was around 2012 when my browsing habits made the shift to primarily social media. I became heavily into apps such as Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram, but mostly Tumblr, which brought along a whole host of awful content and unhealthy browsing habits.

If you were on these platforms during this time, you know what I am talking about when I say these unmoderated social media platforms were a hellscape for a teenager’s mental health. 

For those who have never used the platform before, you had a dashboard where the people you follow would post and reblog (like a retweet or repost, but this was the majority of people’s content) text or image posts. You could also browse hashtags to find content related to your interests. 

When I say unmoderated social media, I mean that on your dashboard you would find fun fandom content abutted next to pictures of anorexic girls and pictures of bloody self-harm scars.‌ Just by simply following a creator you were interested in, you often ended up getting horrifically unhealthy content thrust onto your feed without any content warnings or easy ways to get rid of it–apart from unfollowing the person who posted it, but, of course, you didn’t want to unfollow people you consider your friends. (I haven’t been on the platform since 2016, though I hear it a lot friendlier now.)

With this move from ‘internet’ browsing to ‘social media’ browsing, I believe our relationship with the online world also massively shifted. 

For starters, the difference between having to log onto a laptop or desktop to visit these sites created a degree of separation between the online world and real life, whereas now we can log on whenever we want, wherever we want. Personally, the internet used to feel like an extension of my world, of my real life, whereas now it feels like my online space is my real world–or at least a part of it, anyway. 

I never really clocked about the unhealthiness of my personal use of social media apps until the rise in popularity of the dreaded TikTok.

If you’ve ever used TikTok, you know the black magic that is their algorithm. Within just an hour, it feels like the app knows your niche humour, favourite pop culture items, and somehow your lived experiences. I am not exaggerating when I speak to how well TikTok can hyper-personalise your FYP feed. It’s scarily accurate. 

I stayed off the app for a while, passing it off as a trend, but as soon as I started using it, I was hooked.

And without realising it, my feed was full of the Tumblr 2013, romanticised mental illness, pro-ana skinny girly content all over again. Human degeneracy is followed by a funny niche meme, blending into a body-checking post, trailed by a cute cat video, and before you know it you’re feeling shit about yourself but you can’t pinpoint why. 

In early 2020, after being bedridden with a cold for a week I realised I had spent 10 hours each day of that week exclusively on TikTok (with the other apps topping my screen time up to 12 to 14 hours), I felt awful about myself, awful about the world, awful about everything, I realised it had to stop. It was time to delete the app.

So I deleted the app and solved all my issues, right? That’s how the hundreds of YouTube videos about quitting social media seem to go. Well, not quite. Instead, this began a 3 years technology ‘addiction’ battle that I feel I will never stop fighting.

Let’s talk about that word for a minute: addiction. I didn’t want to use that word as being ‘addicted’ to social media as compared to a ‘real’ addiction felt insensitive, but peering deeper into this world I feel it can actually fit quite well. Social media triggers the ‘feel-good’ dopamine chemicals similar to any other addictive substance. 

On top of this concept of ‘addiction’, my relationship with posting on social media has always felt pretty unhealthy. I have always managed to have fewer followers, likes, and comments than my friends and even in the moment I knew realistically it didn’t mean anything, it still used to affect my self-worth. And as

Lee Tilghman

recently wrote about, realising you weren’t invited to something–not even taking into account whether you would realistically be invited to the thing–never failed to feel like a gut punch. 

Okay… That was a lot more words about my personal experience with the internet than I expected to write, but I feel giving some background is important to frame my struggle. Are you still with me?

Now my daily average screen time on my iPhone sits at about 1 hour and 30 minutes, a massive decrease from the average of 7 to 10 hours I would achieve on a working day in previous years. Most of that is from video chatting, messaging apps, and the Substack app(!) and my iPad at around 2 hours for YouTube and occasional internet browsing or article reading. 

Looking at the numbers like this still feels quite high for me, but at the moment I feel as long as these devices don’t get in the way of the other things I want to do in life (e.g. read, craft, bake) then I’m okay with allowing myself a bit of mindless entertainment. 

I feel like I now have a mostly healthy relationship with my devices, though I am not immune to the addictions that come with the bright lights and tempting touch screens–like when I downloaded the Chess.com app and spent almost 2 hours on it each day. 

But the smartphone itch and phantom notification issue is something that I have yet to solve. 

Almost all of my notifications are turned off, but my phone is still an ever-tempting battle. I have to physically get my phone out of my space or I will constantly pick it up. I have picked it up over 5 times in the last hour of writing this article despite the lack of alerts. 

Sure, I can chuck my phone onto the sofa behind me, or I can close all the tabs on my laptop and focus solely on this Google Doc, but this doesn’t stop the twitch in my brain telling me to check my phone or inbox every time I finish a paragraph. 

It takes an incredible amount of attention to NOT switch tasks, to not check your phone or social media profiles when we are taking part in a creative endeavour. This constant attention-switching means we have to refocus on our task every time we feel this nudge, making us lose our deep focus without even having to pick up our phones.

This quote from Rob Hopkins’ book From What Is To What If–which was a major inspiration for this piece–describes this issue perfectly: “[The] technology we benefit or suffer from, depending on how you look at it, wasn’t a factor for Van Gogh, Einstein, the Wordsworth siblings or Bulgakov. They didn’t have to make a choice countless times throughout the day about whether or not to look at their phone. They didn’t have to summon willpower or figure out creative hacks to make it less distracting. They didn’t have to decide whether to bring it with them, shut it off, to put it on vibrate just in case someone they love or work for urgently needed to reach them. They could sit, uninterrupted, for hours, giving their entire undivided attention to a problem, to filling a blank page, or pondering the bunch of sunflowers on that kitchen table in Arles.” 

Therein lies the problem. It’s not only the technology that's the issue, it’s the constant decisions we have to make at almost every moment of our lives. 

In my quest to curb my addiction, I have picked up various dumb phones, which is ‌just what phones were in the early 2000s. Think simple calling and texting, a T9 keyboard, and Snake. I even picked up a ‘feature phone’ which is a dumb phone with Google and WhatsApp.

This cut my screen time down to basically zero, but as they were awful to use, I avoided picking them up at all, which meant my attention-switching habit pretty much went away. The problem with those phones, though, was that I felt incredibly disconnected.

As I wrote earlier, my online space often is my real world. My friends and family are scattered across the country and apps like WhatsApp and Signal are the only way I get to speak to them. Though this is great for seeing pictures of my nieces and nephews, it makes me ponder on the relationship I have with the people I spend lots of time chatting with. 

For those friends I don’t see in real life very often, I wonder if I am only talking to them because it is easy? If these apps didn’t exist and I had to make an effort to call this person or go visit them, would I make the effort as often as I do to message them? 

I’ve spoken before about the importance of real-life relationships when it comes to the climate crisis. What would these relationships look like if the internet did not exist? 

This is where I think a lifestyle change must start to happen. We can only change so much by turning notifications off or by swapping our devices. Building real relationships with real people can’t happen exclusively over messaging apps, whether these are typed into a T9 keyboard or a qwerty one. 

Of course, I don’t want to take away the opportunity I’ve had to meet so many amazing people online, but I believe we have made a mistake in believing that these online relationships are equal alternatives.

We are more connected than ever, but lonelier than ever, and I'm a big believer that social media has a massive part to play in this. With this simple connection at our fingertips, we might feel we don’t need anything more. But I’ve been considering whether I am really making connections with my friends if I’m speaking to 3 people at once? Am I really building a lifelong relationship if I haven’t seen someone who lives in my town in three months, but chat with them multiple times a week? 

I stand at a confusing crossroads. I feel as if my phone is actively making my life worse, whilst actively improving it. 

I can’t simply say ‘phone bad, make people dumb’, when it still feels attached to my person at all times. I’m considering how I can use the device to help me build the life I want to create. Using it as a bridge to bring together people who think similarly to me, and then find ways to connect with them on a deeper level.

Humans are not inherently independent. If society shut down and we were forced to grow our own food and collect our own water, we couldn’t do it all on our own. Survival is a community effort. Connection is a human imperative. 

We need the entire community, with their full attention, to imagine, and begin creating, a new world for us to live in. 

I’d like to end this with the quote Rob shared, from sociologist Sherry Turkle “We had a love affair with a technology that seemed magical. But like great magic, it worked by commanding our attention and not letting us see anything but what the magician wanted us to see. Now we are ready to claim our attention – for solitude, for friendship, for society.” 

P.S. If you enjoy my writing, you can buy me a coffee to fuel my work.

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Right now I’m writing Finding Sanity free for all readers, but in the long term, I’m going to need some support to make this financially viable. If you think my work is worthwhile, you can pledge a future subscription. 💕

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Inspirations:

Rob Hopkins — From What Is To What If

Many, many substack writers talking about this topic, including

Lee Tilghman

and

Rae Katz

.