Going viral, like a disease

There is a moment, right as you wake up.

You hear the alarm go off “beep beep beep”, you turn to your side and hit snooze. Eight mins later it goes off again. You grab your phone. Your hands aren’t even warmed up yet, but you open Instagram anyways, like it’s muscle memory.

Now you’re in it.

You sit there before your day has begun, and you are caught in a doomscroll. Already starting behind the 8 ball. The “solution” sounds simple: don’t engage with it at all. But that’s the whole point, these apps aren’t built for you to casually check them. They designed for you to stay.

Nowadays it feels like everyone is posting content. Building a “personal brand”. Even me. This writing is an example of that.

The algorithm can feel like a cruel mistress. One moment you’re posting into the void, and the next a random video of your dog gets millions of views. Of course it’s the dog video. Those types of videos just hit something innate inside us that is warm.

And that’s the hook: all it takes is one.

Now you’re stuck in the scroll. You keep going until you get that hit of dopamine again. We are junkies.

That might be the biggest problem with social media: it trains you to live in these tiny emotional cycles. Hit, Spike, crash, over and over... Trends tend to move fast, but attention moves faster. It’s like the entire culture is on a kitchen timer. The eggs are done cooking...

When you look at the incentives, it makes sense.

Most people inherently know these social media apps make money through advertising. So logically, they make more money by keeping you on the app. They are incentivized to keep you engaged, to keep you reacting, to keep you scrolling.

The videos that get the most engagement like I noted above are on the ends of the spectrum: either it makes you feel good, or makes you feel something sharp.

Cute dog video on one end.

On the other? A street fight. A car crash clip. Someone hitting an electric pole and knocking it over. Lighting up the sky with a dark purple flash, like a portal to another dimension spawned. The kind of video that makes you say, what the hell, and watch it twice.

Here is the thing. I don’t know if these companies are deliberately pushing an “agenda”. Maybe they are. Maybe they aren’t. I do know there are teams of engineers fine-tuning the backend logic, ranking systems, recommendation models, and engagement loops. All because engagement pays. Attention is the new currency.

Even if nobody is sitting in a room with a whiteboard. The code is still learning to keep you connected.

If you need a clue about how addictive this stuff is: a lot of people who build these systems are strict about letting their kids use it.

I am not saying all of this so we “Take down Skynet”, but just to be informed.

The machines run our lives. We rely on them for everything. We carry that little black rock everywhere we go. Always connected to our friends and family, always reachable, always “on.”

That isn’t all bad. It’s a gift to know your people are safe. To be able to find information instantly. To have access to ideas that used to be locked behind gatekeepers.

However, we’re so chronically online. We never get time to fully disconnect. We rarely let the mind sit long enough to settle. Screens aren’t leaving our lives. They are melded with society.

We are, in many ways, better off with the free flow of information. Before all of this we had the printing press, information was really spread through word of mouth. Then books. Then television. I am sure there are some advances in between that I missed. All of those systems were centralized. There was always a funnel, somebody was deciding what was amplified.

You could argue that social media does the same thing now. Different funnel, same power. What gets recommended gets your attention. Maybe who ever is in office, or what’s trending, the funnel tilts to feed you that.

There is something to be said about the decentralization of it all. You choose who you follow. You can bypass the institutions. You can hear directly from people, not just anchors.

The answer is not to “delete everything” or “the internet is evil.” Like some immortal sin.

If you don’t choose how to use these apps, they choose for you.

That is why I keep one foot in the physical world. I write in a journal and read books. It grounds me. It helps me stay with one thought long enough to actually hear it.

Your attention is still yours, if you treat it like something worth protecting.