Go to the supermarket and watch the parking lot first. Almost everybody driving in is looking at a phone. Inside, a three-year-old riding in a cart is glued to a screen. Somebody’s dancing in the aisle for a TikTok, and everybody else has to steer around them. Somebody else is arguing with a husband or a lawyer at the top of their voice, like the rest of us care. I see some version of this every single day, and it’s worst in the shopping malls.
Try to take the phone away from any of them and they go bonkers. I mean bonkers. It’s like you’re trying to take their baby away, and give some of them the choice and I think they’d hand over the baby first. I find it irritating, and I find it sad. I love the videos where cops are arresting somebody and the person yells, “How dare you take my phone!” The first thing they take is the phone. People will go to jail over a phone.
If a stage hypnotist got that result in a theater, we’d call it an act. On a phone we call it a Tuesday at the supermarket. It’s mass hypnosis. People are hypnotized by social media, and the companies that built the feeds knew exactly what they were doing.
Is social media designed to be addictive?
Yes, and the people who built it have said so out loud. In November 2017 Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, described the question the founders asked themselves: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” The answer, he said, was to “give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while,” through likes and comments. He called it “a social validation feedback loop” and said “you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
Then came the line that should have ended the debate. The people who built it, he said, “understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”
Aza Raskin invented infinite scroll, the feature that loads more posts as soon as you reach the bottom so you never reach a bottom at all. In February 2026 he testified at a trial against Meta in New Mexico and said he regrets it. A feed with no end has no natural moment for you to stop and ask whether you meant to still be there.
That’s the hypnotist’s trick. A steady rhythm, a narrowing of attention, and no signal that it’s over. Add a reward that arrives on an unpredictable schedule, a like here, a funny video there, a notification that might be important, and you’ve built the same machine that keeps people feeding a slot machine at 3 a.m.
If a stage hypnotist got that result in a theater, we’d call it an act. On a phone we call it a Tuesday. – Richard LoweShare on X
What has social media design done to people?
In March 2026 a jury in Los Angeles found Meta and YouTube negligent in a case brought by a young woman who said the platforms were built to hook her and that the addiction led to depression and other mental health problems. The jury awarded $6 million in compensatory and punitive damages. Both companies said they’d appeal. The features the case put in front of a jury were the ordinary ones everybody uses every day, the infinite scroll, the notifications and the recommendations.
The numbers on kids scare me more than any verdict. Pew Research surveyed American teenagers in the fall of 2025, and four in ten said they’re online “almost constantly,” up from 24 percent a decade earlier. About one teen in five said they’re on TikTok almost constantly, and about the same share said YouTube. In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General warned that adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of depression and anxiety symptoms.
I get angry every time I read those numbers. Would we let a toy company do this? These aren’t weak kids with no self-control. They’re children up against teams of engineers and psychologists whose job is to keep them scrolling, and the grown-ups who run those companies went home every night knowing it.
Why is social media so hard to put down?
Because it isn’t a fair fight, and it’s even less fair for some of us. I’m severely ADHD. My superpower is hyperfocus, and when it latches onto the right thing I can write a fifth of a book in a day. When it latches onto Twitter or Reddit, the hours are just gone. A feed that never ends is the perfect trap for a brain that doesn’t naturally stop.
Social media is a black hole of time. You open the app to post one thing, somebody comments, then somebody else does, and an hour later you’re still chatting when you should be working. I don’t want to know how many hours I’ve lost that way.
The same hyperfocus that eats hours on a feed is how I get my work done, and when it’s pointed at a book it can swallow a whole night. I’ll start on a chapter, look up, and there’s sunshine outside. Thirteen hours gone, and I notice only because I’m starving. Aim that at a feed and you get the same thirteen hours with nothing to show for them.
From inside the feed, you can’t see how little you get back. Hours of scrolling leave you with a vague sense of other people’s lives and a stack of opinions you didn’t ask for. As I said on The Impossible Puzzles Show, people liking you is not something you could spend. The likes feel like something. They pay nothing.
How do you break the spell of social media?
You take back the decision about when to open it. The difference between using social media and letting it use you is whether you decided to open the app or the app decided to interrupt you. Everything I do about it follows from that.
Facebook came off my phone a while ago, and my posts are scheduled months ahead, so I never have to open an app just to post something. Turn off notifications for everything except phone calls, and the app loses its best way to call you back.
I also unplugged my TV for a decade, and I don’t scroll feeds or read news that has no effect on my life. Does it affect me? No. Next. People ask how I get so much written, and they’re disappointed when that’s the answer. I wrote about it in what happened when I unplugged my TV, and the same rules work for a phone. Put it in another room when you write, check it at set times, and let people know you’ll answer when you check.
My phone doesn’t ring from 9 at night until 7 in the morning, either. I’m 65, and I don’t need to be answering the phone all the time. If it’s an emergency, they’ll call back, and if it’s a real emergency they should be calling 911.
How long could you go without checking? Kim Groshek spent thirty-five years in tech, then deactivated social media for six months and her phone for a year. She told me about it on Author Talks, and her idea of taking fifteen minutes a day to unplug is a good place to start if a whole year sounds impossible.
If you want the long version of how the platforms got into our heads, I wrote a book about it, Sins of the Internet. The rest of this series lives in the social media hub, including why social media sucks for anybody trying to be heard on it.
A stage hypnotist needs your permission before he can put you under. The feed never asked. Snap your fingers, look up from the screen, and count how many people in the room are still somewhere else. Then decide you won’t be one of them. If you’ve got a story that deserves your full attention, I can help you tell it.
