You're Addicted to Social Media
And It's By Design
LinkedIn, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube…pick your poison. Whichever it is, you’re probably hooked to at least one of them, or some similar platform. (I mean shit, you’re reading this on either Substack…granted it is probably the most innocent of all the social medias).
I know you’re addicted because I’m wrestling with the same issue. My personal drugs of choice? Reddit & YouTube. For awhile, my first waking moments were spent scrolling through Reddit. Eventually, I noticed something disturbing. Reddit wasn’t just wasting my mornings…it was actively making me feel not great.
I started feeling anxious, defeated, cynical. The relentless stream of content amplified my impostor syndrome. Comparison is truly the thief of joy. Sooo I turned off Reddit notifications and made a conscious effort to meditate and read something positive each morning instead. I’m working on it.
Once you get hooked into a social media pattern, it’s not easy to turn your attention away, but I assure you that it helps your mental health.
I still fall asleep listening to history documentaries on YouTube and that actually continues to feel pretty healthy, I enjoy it. No negative affects there. But, sometimes that bleeds into me watching these doomer geo-political videos or financial videos that do NOT have positive effects. Sure, I learn some stuff, but I feel absolutely awful about the state of the world and I start to doubt one of my core philosophies…humans are naturally good.
Anyways, if you think the social media thing is just another personal problem, you should probably think again. 72% of Americans regularly use social media, with the average adult spending around 2.5 hours per day scrolling through feeds. Younger users spend even more time. They average upwards of 4 hours daily on platforms like TikTok and Instagram!!
We’re hooked. Let’s talk about why.
The Mechanics of Your Addiction
Every platform has a unique way to reel you in:
Reddit feels raw and authentic. It gives the illusion of control because of user-driven votes and communities. It’s lowkey insidious, cleverly masked as genuine conversation, but highly engineered to keep your attention locked. And it is very likely to make you feel cynical, because people on there are often their worst selves, hidden behind anonymity. Human nature requires public accountability, and reddit dissolves that accountability.
Instagram preys on your base impulses…beauty, envy, desire, comparison…crafting an unrealistic lens through which you view the world. The result is that 32% of teen girls reported feeling worse about their bodies after using Instagram, according to some leaked internal Facebook documents. Yikes.
LinkedIn disguises itself as the professional’s playground but can quickly spiral into a cycle of social climbing, career anxiety, and self-doubt. Who got promoted? Who’s making more money? Who’s more successful than you? Plus lots of people are at the very least exaggerating, some are probably straight up lying. And everyone is selling something (even me, I’m selling HiiBo, straight up).
TikTok is chaotic and engineered for rapid-fire dopamine hits, and it will leave you dazed after hours of mindless scrolling. It’s incredibly efficient at capturing your attention: the average TikTok user opens the app 8 times per day and spends 95 minutes daily on the platform.
YouTube, the OG addictive social platform, keeps you glued through autoplay and algorithm-driven recommendations designed to keep you watching indefinitely.
Each platform’s goal is simple: capture and monetize your attention. It’s no coincidence that it’s called a “feed.” It feeds off your focus and constantly demands more, it is truly never satisfied. It knows what you want to look at it and it feeds it directly to your eyes. And you eat it right up.
Your Attention is a Commodity
Social media is NOT designed to make you happy or improve your life. It exists primarily to generate advertising revenue. In 2023, social media ad revenue is expected to surpass $268 billion globally. The algorithms powering these apps don’t prioritize mental health, they prioritize maximizing your screen time.
The user experience is a ruthless cycle of dopamine-driven interactions that leave you feeling drained, anxious, and unfulfilled. Yet you keep coming back, chasing a diminishing return of momentary pleasure, perhaps without even realizing you are chasing anything.
You’re not crazy for feeling bad after scrolling. Research published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology showed limiting social media use to 30 minutes daily significantly reduces loneliness and depression.
BUT cutting back is harder than ever, and it keeps getting harder by design.
Social media is carefully engineered to be addictive.
Investing Attention vs. Giving it Away
We’ve been giving away our most precious resource, our attention, for free. What if, instead, we started to invest our attention?
Imagine a platform where every piece of content you interact with is a deliberate investment. Rather than mindlessly scrolling, you’d consciously choose how much attention (and potentially money, through crypto tokens or similar mechanisms) you put into content you value. Over time, as that content gains popularity, your early attention investment would pay dividends, incentivizing high-quality, original content discovery.
Here’s how it could look:
You see a post. Instead of just a “like” or binary “upvote,” you give it a rating (say, 1–5 stars). This rating represents your invested attention.
The earlier you invest in content, the higher your returns if it goes viral later on.
Ads disappear. The platform is sustained through small transaction fees.
Users, not algorithms or advertisers, control content visibility.
This model would turn our attention from something passively consumed into something actively invested. It incentivizes creativity, originality, and genuine interaction. I hope someone builds it.
Final Musings
We simply can’t afford to keep letting algorithms designed for maximum engagement rule our mental health and well-being. The idea of investing attention might sound radical, but the alternative (continuing to scroll endlessly through anxiety-inducing feeds) seems genuinely absurd.
Breaking the addiction is tough, but awareness is the first step. Turn off notifications, carve out some phone-free time, actively choose positive morning routines instead of immediate scrolling.
Ultimately, we deserve platforms that respect our attention rather than exploit it. Until then, we can at least try to be mindful about our usage, cautious about comparisons, and proactive in reclaiming our attention and mental health.
Attention is your life, it isn’t something that should be sold to the highest bidding advertising agency. Please invest it wisely.
About the Author
Sam Hilsman is the CEO of CloudFruit® & HiiBo. If you want to invest in HiiBo or oneXerp, reach out. If you’re interested, join the waitlist for HiiBo!
Really appreciated this, Sam. The part about LinkedIn especially struck a nerve. After losing my job while six months pregnant, I fell into what I can only describe as compulsive job-haunting. Not job searching, but a kind of obsessive, daily ritual of scrolling through posts, promotions, company news, recruiters, like some mix of career archaeology and emotional self-flagellation.
It went on for over a year. I told myself it was productive, but in reality, it just deepened the sense of disconnection and inadequacy. There’s something uniquely insidious about a platform that frames itself as aspirational while quietly eroding your self-worth.
The idea of attention as investment (not just something passively extracted from us) is honestly the most compelling reframing I’ve heard in a long time. Thanks for putting language to something a lot of us are swimming in without fully seeing.