The Rise and Fall of Everything We Once Held Dear
Social media in our pocket as the death of us all.
I have twin children. They just turned 8. With twins, all the things you thought would be hills to die on as a parent? Those “bedrock” elements of great parenting—No junk food! Reading books! No TV! Limited Screen Time! Macro-biotic! Locally Fair Sourced!—all go by the wayside. Raising twins is really about one thing as a parent—the absence of death on a day-to-day basis, both for yourself and your kids. Parents of “one at a time” children are free to have lots of perspectives about what great parenting is. I consider this sort of free time the root of much of the evil in the world. Find me a twin parent who has the bandwidth to complain about anything that is not a life-or-death issue!
However, it means I’m a terrible parent in my mind, in that my kids spend too much time on an iPad playing video games and watching YouTube Videos. These videos? They are about playing video games. They do not spend enough time reading books. They don’t have an attention span. I doubt that I am alone.
I read a lot of books as a kid. I don’t read a lot of books anymore. I wonder if books have staying power, as the modality by which crucial knowledge is conveyed. This is a written newsletter, and you are reading it. However, I got over a million views on TikTok in one week last week. This newsletter is still south of 1,000,000 views (I have about 80k reads a month, and am around 800,000 over the past 1.5 years). I am not sure if writing has the staying power of 15-second videos.
This is a little tongue-in-cheek—of course, we all prefer the finer things in life. The delight of caviar! The shimmer of gold! A lover’s embrace!
Except…also, maybe not? Have we eaten our future?1
“Middle-class people began to think of caviar as a delicacy they could afford. Sturgeon are a large, ponderous beast…incredibly easy to catch…in the industrial age of fishing…when you land a female, you don't just take home a belly full of caviar, you eliminate the future”
—Inga Saffron
Although gold prices have been at all-time highs, the same can not be said for rates of human intimacy…the youth of Gen Z are having vastly less sex than previous generations:
About three decades ago, more than half of teens said they’d had sex, according to a large government survey conducted every two years. By 2019, the share was 38%. In 2021, 30% of teens said they had ever had sex. That was the sharpest drop ever recorded by the survey.
To put this in context, those rates compare unfavorably to older adults up to age 70:
older adults are still sexually active. In a study in England, 86% of men and 60% of women aged 60–69 years reported being sexually active, as did 59% of men and 34% of women aged 70–79 years, and 31% of men and 14% of women aged 80 years or older2.
When sex has gone out of fashion, we have a problem for the future of humanity. Social relationships are crucial to the human experience and thanks to “social media” we have substituted real, actual human interaction with “social media”—as Cheetos are to food, social media is to socializing.
Establishing social relationships is one of the basic needs of human beings (Heaney & Israel, 2008). How this basic need is met can vary greatly. In particular, technological developments, such as computers, the Internet, and smartphones have created new ways for people to communicate with each other.
The more addicted we are to “social media,” the more our social relationships suffer3:
We are dissatisfied, we are addicted, and we are intellectually starved. Even once avid readers are reading a heck of a lot less:
The decline is greater among subgroups that tended to be more avid readers, particularly college graduates but also women and older Americans. College graduates read an average of about six fewer books in 2021 than they did between 2002 and 2016, 14.6 versus 21.1.
Is this a gentle vying for our attention? Or, perhaps, is it a slow sucking of the lifeblood from the veins of human experience. It comes at a shockingly low price—the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) metric is one that companies like Meta report. It’s the bounty on our attention:
Meta's ARPU at the end of 2022 was $39.63
Most of us are conditioned to “check” these “social” platforms daily:
What is the average time spent on Facebook per day in 2024? According to the statistics, the average person is spending 30.8 minutes per day on Facebook, with only 1.7% checking their accounts on their desktop computer (the rest of the visits are through a mobile device).
And of course, for Meta, we need to add all that Instagram time:
The average time spent on Instagram as of 2024 is 33 m per day. In 2019 the average time was 15 minutes.
So, it’s around 187.9 hours a year we spend, on average, just on products controlled by SizzleBerg.
That is $0.21/hour of our time.
In exchange, for the gift of grandparents being able to asynchronously view our children—the most virtuous use-case I can think of? I don’t read anywhere near as much, neither do you. My kids contribute to the the following YouTube statistics:
Currently the average US person spends 48.7 m per day watching Youtube videos and 87.7% of all Youtube views come from mobile devices.
In this regard, my children may be above average. My time spent getting to 1.1M views on TikTok last week contributed to:
the average TikTok session lasts 11 m and the total amount of time per day the average person spends on the app is 55.8 m.
And in exchange, for these gifts, we have all spent less time reading, socializing, making friends, having some of those friends turn into lovers, and having fewer children. Did we sell our souls, piecemeal? One moment at a time—and for pennies an hour?
I’m not into it, and neither are you, but you are probably reading this on your phone. I don’t know how we turn it around, or if we could, or should. I know a world of endless caviar for even a little bit means no caviar in the future. A world of the most successful videos means less time with a book or a loved one. I don’t know what to do about it. I do know, that I miss the time spent in the woods as a kid, and the time spent imagining a better future. I wish my kids would tolerate a story read, but their attention span may be shorter than mine was at their age.
We are further away from each other, and it’s easy to forget—once, we were close.
Saffron, I. (2002). Caviar: the strange history and uncertain future of the world's most coveted delicacy. Crown.
Steckenrider, J. (2023). Sexual activity of older adults: let's talk about it. The Lancet Healthy Longevity, 4(3), e96-e97.
Satici, B., Kayis, A.R. & Griffiths, M.D. Exploring the Association Between Social Media Addiction and Relationship Satisfaction: Psychological Distress as a Mediator. Int J Ment Health Addiction 21, 2037–2051 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-021-00658-0
Here's an idea: maybe what's replacing reading is writing! We probably all spend a lot more time writing every day than we did in the past, posting on Twitter, Facebook, Substack, etc. And maybe writing requires a more active and challenging kind of thinking than reading.
Your colleagues on Substack are now arguing that social media is a CAUSAL factor in the rise in anxiety. https://www.afterbabel.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic This line of research appears to be accelerating (Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, etc.). I'm starting to think that social media is like high-fructose corn syrup - fine for some, but harmful for others. Anyone vulnerable to the effects will be affected.