WHEN THE WORLD IS BEING REBUILT
26. On Social Media
"If you live in harmony with nature you will never be poor; if you live according to what others think, you will never be rich." —Epicurus, quoted by Seneca
Kiddos, of all the new technologies I've written you about, this is the one already in your pocket — already winning, already shaping who you are while you scroll. So before I sketch out the further-off future, I have to be honest about this one. I've been on the wrong side of it more often than I'd like to admit.
There's a chart I saw recently that I genuinely cannot get out of my head. It calculates how many waking hours you have left in your life if you keep using social media at the average rate. The number, after you subtract sleep, work, eating, commuting, and the rest, is depressingly small. You don't have nearly as much life as you think — and a meaningful chunk of what's left is being spent looking at strangers in Ferraris.
Of course we already know this in the abstract. Spending hours every day looking at a small bright rectangle is probably not good for your mental health or your social life. None of this is news. The strange thing is that we know it and we keep doing it anyway.
The deeper weirdness is that, of all the things we know to be addictive and harmful — alcohol, gambling, tobacco — social media is the one we don't regulate at all. Quite the opposite: we encourage it, we hand it to children, we tell them it's how they'll stay connected. A friend of mine described it as the modern equivalent of letting twelve-year-olds throw drinking parties with packs of cigarettes, because hey, at least they're socializing.
I'd love to write you this letter from a position of moral authority. I can't. I've been the monkey too. Let me tell you about the week I tried to be an influencer.
My one week as an influencer
A while back I went through one of those phases where I told myself a noble story: I'm going to be an influencer, and I'm going to use it to actually say something useful to kids. Within about seventy-two hours I was a person I didn't recognize.
I made a few short clips riffing on TikTok trends. For a first attempt they did well — somewhere between forty and a hundred thousand views per video, mostly out of a Vietnamese audience that I had not been expecting. For someone whose previous posts had topped out at a thousand views, the numbers landed in my brain like cocaine.
I started refreshing the view count at 3 a.m. Not metaphorically — actually 3 a.m., pulling the screen out from under the pillow to see if a number had ticked up since I last looked, six minutes earlier. When the second video pulled forty-three thousand views instead of crossing a hundred thousand, I felt genuine disappointment. Disappointment! Over forty-three thousand strangers having watched a thing I made on my phone. My Apple screen-time report told me, helpfully, that my usage had gone up over one hundred percent that week. And I consider myself an educated user — I've read the books, I know the research, I've written critically about this exact problem.
At one point, speculation about my dating life was apparently trending on TikTok. My mother saw it before I did. We need a word for that flavor of shame.
What I want to tell you about that week is not that I felt addicted, although I did. It's that I felt a very specific texture of addiction I hadn't quite understood from the outside. The pull wasn't toward the content. It was toward the metric. The view count. The like count. The little arrow showing growth. I had spent years critiquing this exact loop in other people, and the moment it pointed at me I was instantly, completely, helplessly inside it.
I also understood, viscerally, why the content gets more extreme. The more shocking the clip, the more views. The more views, the more dopamine. The dopamine teaches you, frame by frame, what kind of thing to make next. This is not a conspiracy. It's a feedback loop, and it works on smart people the same way it works on everyone else. Maybe a little better, actually — because we're trained to follow metrics, and this one is right there, pulsing.
The math of attention
Here's the part I keep doing the math on. One of the videos I made racked up over 360 hours of watch time on TikTok alone. Three hundred and sixty hours. That's the equivalent of nine working weeks. Pregnancy, I looked it up, lasts about forty weeks. So with three short videos across two platforms in one week, I had captured roughly one twenty-fourth of a human pregnancy in collective viewer attention. Most of it from people who would never meet me, in a country I'd never lived in, looking at content I'd made in maybe twenty minutes.
That stat is, when you sit with it, completely insane. The platform takes nine working weeks of human attention and trades them for forty thousand impressions worth of advertising revenue. The viewer gets, at best, a small dopamine hit. I get a number to refresh at 3 a.m.
I read Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks on a long flight back to Beijing the summer after I'd shut the TikTok experiment down, and the framing finally caught up with what my screen-time report had been screaming at me. Burkeman's premise is almost embarrassingly simple: the average human life is about four thousand weeks long, and if you actually do the math on what you spend each one on, you start to see your time the way an accountant sees a finite budget — because that's what it is. The line that stopped me cold was that the trouble isn't that we waste time; it's that we don't fully accept how little of it we have, so we keep handing it away in pieces too small to notice. Twenty-three minutes here. Forty-one minutes there. Multiply by a decade. You don't feel the theft because each individual transaction feels free. I had given the app nine working weeks of other people's lives in seven days. I'd never have written a check for that. But I did, in attention. So did everyone watching.
If you treat your attention the way you treat money — as a finite resource you allocate deliberately — you start to notice that the apps are extracting it the way an oil company extracts oil. Quietly, continuously, profitably. And in your case, they're extracting it without paying you anything at all.
What I'm trying instead
I am genuinely not a moral authority here. I'm a guy with a phone and weak self-control. But here are the things I'm experimenting with, in case any of them are useful to you.
I try to do things in the real world that are physically incompatible with the phone. Pickleball, for me, is the big one. You cannot scroll while you're playing a sport. You cannot be on your phone at dinner if your phone is in your bag in another room. The most reliable way to use your phone less is to put yourself in places where using it isn't possible.
I try to consume long-form when I consume. Books. Documentaries. Long essays. Podcasts you actually listen to instead of half-listening to. Things that go deep enough that they leave a residue in your head, instead of vanishing the second you swipe up. Short-form content gives you the texture of having learned something without actually leaving anything behind. Long-form does the opposite.
I physically separate from the phone for chunks of the day. Airplane mode when I want to be productive. Phone left out of reach when I'm with friends. Phone out of the bedroom when I sleep. None of these are heroic. All of them work better than I expected, mostly because the default is so much worse than I want to admit.
I've installed some friction. Screen-time limits that block specific apps after a certain quota. A shortcut that flips my whole phone into grayscale, which makes it remarkable how much less appealing every app becomes when the colors aren't optimized to grab you. Try ordering food in grayscale once and tell me you don't notice the difference.
I lean on social accountability. The fact that I'm telling you all of this in a letter means my friends now have full license to mock me the next time they catch me scrolling at dinner. That actually works. The shame of getting caught doing something you've publicly committed to stopping is one of the cheapest behavior-change technologies ever invented.
And — this is the one I think matters most — I try to use social media for the social part and not the media part. Messaging friends. Real connections. The actual reason these tools were originally good. The thing that ruined them is the shift from "look at what your friends are up to" to "look at what an infinite feed of strangers is doing." In a fourteenth-century village you might have been the best-looking of the twelve guys your age. In a globalized feed, there is always someone better at whatever you're being measured on — real or AI-generated. Comparing yourself across that gap is a guaranteed way to feel worse.
The full solution, the one I'm not strong enough for yet, is the Cal Newport solution: delete the accounts. He's never had social media, and he writes a book a year and runs a successful career at Georgetown and seems by every available metric to be doing fine. Ninety-nine percent of humans who ever lived had no social media. They also seemed to do fine. It is genuinely possible to live a full life without any of this. I sometimes try to remember that.
What this is really about
I've been reading a lot of Stoic philosophy lately. Seneca, mostly. One of the lines that keeps coming back is this one:
"Show me a man who isn't a slave; one who is a slave to sex, another to money, another to ambition; all are slaves to hope or fear. And there is no state of slavery more disgraceful than one which is self-imposed."
I wrote you a whole letter earlier about asking yourself what you're a slave to in life. Social media is the version of that question I find hardest to answer honestly. We talk about our "free time" — and then we hand most of it, voluntarily, to algorithms optimized to make us feel worse about ourselves. We don't even get paid. We're not the customer in this transaction; we're the product being sold. The disgrace of the self-imposed slavery, just dressed up as a friendly app icon.
The deeper cost, beyond the time, is what it does to your sense of self. You leave the feed feeling subtly worse about your body, your life, your relationships, your career, your apartment, your face. You build, without noticing, an internal model of "normal life" that is actually the highlight reel of ten thousand strangers. Then you measure your own actual life against that hallucination and find your actual life lacking. Of course you do. The hallucination is impossible.
The other book I keep returning to on this is Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power, which I read in pieces during a long Beijing winter while trying to make sense of why the feed felt so disorienting even when nothing on it was personally directed at me. Canetti spent decades studying how crowds form and what they do to the individual inside them — the way a person standing in a square loses some of his own outline the moment the people around him start moving in unison. His basic claim is that the crowd offers a kind of relief from the burden of being a separate self, and that we will tolerate enormous indignities to keep that relief flowing. Reading him in 2024 felt like reading a manual for the feed. Every scroll session is a tiny crowd you've stepped into voluntarily. The "we" you feel watching a viral clip — the laughing, the outrage, the shared joke — is the same release Canetti was writing about, except now you can summon it in your bed at 1 a.m. by tapping an icon. What disappears in the crowd is the part of you with separate convictions. What disappears in the feed is the same thing, in much smaller bites, all day long.
The hardest part, for me, isn't the dopamine. It's the slow, unnoticed conversion of your standards for your own life into a borrowed standard that was never yours to begin with. By the time you realize it's happened, you've been making real decisions — what to wear, where to eat, who to date, what to pursue — based on a version of reality that was engineered to keep you watching.
What I want for you
I'm not going to tell you to never use these things. You'll use them. The world is built on them now, and refusing entirely will cost you in real ways. But I want you to know, going in, what they actually are. Not communication tools. Not connection. They are attention extractors, optimized by some of the smartest engineers of my generation to mine you for as long as possible.
Defend your attention the way you'd defend your money. Notice when you've been pulled in. Have rules that you mostly keep. Have friends who can call you out. Get off the feed and into something physical, ideally something you love. And every once in a while, look up from the phone, at whatever is actually in front of you — the person across the table, the light through the window, the city you're in — and remember that this, right here, is where your life is actually happening.
The phone will always promise you something better than this moment. It is, almost always, lying.
I'll close with the Epicurus line that Seneca quoted, because it's still the cleanest version of this whole thought:
"If you live in harmony with nature you will never be poor; if you live according to what others think, you will never be rich."
Love,
Dad.