Facebook is an Addictive, Harmful Drug

This will be a bit of an exercise in preaching to the choir.

Facebook at least flirts with but mostly exhibits many of the characteristics of an addictive and harmful drug, yet it is still justified by many as a means for social interaction. Aside from the messenger app and the events section (and maybe certain groups), the value of facebook as a social interaction for me has dwindled. In fact, I think facebook is counterproductive to a healthy social life for me. Maybe you agree, which is why you are here instead of there.

Addictive and harmful drugs like meth destroy relationships, ruin people financially, waste a lot of time, and can threaten the lives of people that are addicted to them. Facebook is like a subtle, toned down version of meth. You would surely have to be glued to your phone for a while before you could say that you died from a facebook overdose. But, facebook does hurt you. You know this. I know this. No one talks about it, because it is hard to describe. There are these things called dopaminergic pathways that essentially determine your own personal definition of happiness. Using facebook every day creates a special pathway for dopamine to be released every time you get a notification, and those pathways eventually make you dependent on facebook to be happy.

Mental health is a subject I have studied as a patient, an amateur scientist, and a practitioner of cognitive behavioral therapy. My current working theory is that it is necessary for people like me who have a tendency to become depressed to cultivate the healing and growth of dopamine receptors and pathways in the brain. Doing this alongside careful journaling should create new methods for the brain to react to stimuli, essentially reprogramming the brain to be calmer and happier.

I have seen a bunch of different therapists, and most have helped me immensely in getting me to think clearly and make good decisions about my life. So, I'm combining a deep respect of therapy with a curious observation of what supplements, diet, exercise and attention to my own behavior can do to help my dopamine pathways function better. I am one of those people who can't take a compliment. I hope that one day I can say that I used to be one of those people. :)

Anyway, I guess this post turned out to be about more than just facebook. The reason I brought all that up is that to people like me who need to pay careful attention to how their brain copes with the various dopamine producing behaviors that we engage in each day, facebook is cancer.

I haven't been on facebook much at all this year, and I am so glad that I chose to do that. I finally have started to see success in my freelancing business, and I know that these two things are certainly related. Aside from the time I am saving from not using facebook, I actually have the blind confidence of someone who doesn't know about the success of all his peers.

When I see pictures of my old friends that I no longer know, I feel a bit sad and at worst jealous. When I see them succeeding, my self esteem plummets. I must be particularly sensitive to that for some reason, but I don't think I'm the only one.

Not seeing those success photos of others every day has reshaped how I view success for myself. I can actually feel good about progress that I make in my life now, because all of the noise has been eliminated.

I have a theory about facebook that you might find interesting if you made it this far. I wonder how many other people have thought of this, because once it occurred to me, it also occurred to me that it might actually be really obvious and I just didn't get it for the ten years I used facebook. The theory is that facebook is actually just like a yearbook, but one that gets updated every second. In high school, the function of the yearbook is to frame that single year of high school in the best light possible. Only the best pictures are shown, only the best articles are included, and only the best events are enshrined forever. Facebook took the concept of gazing with nostalgia at a high school yearbook, something that 15 years ago people would do maybe once a decade, and turned it into a daily habit for 2 billion people.

That alone is disturbing to me. It would make sense if a lot of people were benefiting from facebook, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Facebook is a kind of technological micro economy where the 1% advertisers profit from the complacent attention of the masses.

Sugar is another addictive and harmful drug that is for some reason still socially acceptable. Heart disease is the number one cause of death worldwide, and a huge contributor to that is sugar. Like facebook, sugar won't kill you overnight, but over time both of these things steal your life away bit by bit. Why do we accept the use of things that are so clearly harmful to us? Maybe it is simply because the immediacy of the harm is not clear, and the instant gratification that the drug offers is so addictive that we convince ourselves that these things are innocuous.

Please leave a comment describing your experiences with social media, sugar, and yearbooks. I appreciate that you took the time to read some of my thoughts. I want to hear your thoughts, especially if they are different from mine. Cheers.