I have three children, two of whom are now adults. When we started having kids, we made a conscious decision not to let them have unfettered access to the Internet and, therefore, social media by handing them phones to keep with them at all times. We let them have old-school devices, but not mini-computers they could carry around with them everywhere they went.
This was not a popular decision. My children were often ridiculed for their retro 1990’s technology, but we held fast. Today, it has gotten much better, as we can buy purpose-built devices that eliminate or completely prevent social media on smartphones. So you can still have the useful things like navigation, camera, and music, but not the soul-sucking, brain-leaching clickbait apps.
I have been selling technology to large corporations for most of my life, and I distinctly remember being in a meeting at one of the large social platforms when I found out that the chief executive there also did not let his children have access to their app. I thought, that is interesting. Even they know how destructive this can be to the soul of our younger people. Now people have laughed at me for saying this, mostly pointing out that “everyone is doing it.”
However, the research is starting to pour in. Psychologists and behavioral scientists have been conducting multi-year longitudinal studies, and the phenomena of likes and swipes have existed long enough to begin generating real data demonstrating what many of us have suspected. This is not good. It does have a negative impact on people. It can have a similar effect to strong narcotics in influencing people’s behavior and motivation. In the next several years, more and more of these studies will start to release their findings. I will get some t-shirts that say, “I told you so.”
Anyway, one study caught my attention this morning. You can find that study here. This group in Germany was not focused on social media but rather on frequent, habitual hair pulling, which is commonly described as a nervous tic caused by stress. This may still be true; the study did not disprove that concept, but it did indicate that boredom was the strongest predictor of a hair-pulling episode. This habit, which the participants do not want to do and are trying to avoid, is mostly caused by periods of boredom.
I find this fascinating because the number-one excuse I hear people give when they are in a long period of doomscrolling is that they are “trying to relieve stress.” They blame stress for their need to decompress by watching endless streams of cat videos on TikTok, or by watching people record popular musical tracks over their mundane lives on short-form video. It is our way of ‘relieving stress.’ That is the excuse.
I have often questioned this excuse. I also fall victim to bouts of senseless doomscrolling, and when I start to feel bad about it, I use that as an excuse. However, that did not ring true to me as I said it, which is why this study caught my eye. The real reason is potentially boredom. We are falling back on this habit, a habit we know is destructive, not because we are dealing with stress, but because we have nothing better to do. We could sleep. We could exercise. We could do a project around the house. We could call loved ones, or perhaps talk to loved ones, but instead we glue ourselves to our social platform of choice.
It is really hard to admit to ourselves that we find the lives we live boring. What we worked so hard to obtain is not fulfilling enough, and now, after all is said and done, we sit on the couch endlessly triggering tiny dopamine hits. So we avoid the real issue and claim stress as our excuse. Perhaps we should ask ourselves: why am I feeling bored right now? What is missing? What could I do to get myself engaged back with my life? Sorry, I am not sure I have the answer here. I just found this research study compelling because I’ve caught myself using this fake-stress excuse more than a few times.
