Are We Getting Tired of Social Media?
Lost Joy
“15 years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now, the real world is an escape from the internet." This tweet from 2017 perfectly captures what I believe is becoming increasingly real. Maybe it’s just my corner of reality, or my growing exhaustion and frustration with information overload, but I reckon a cultural shift is happening.
It may be subtle, and responding to it will be even harder, but we are gradually getting fed up and reaching our limit.
We’re getting tired. Tired of endless content and constant exposure to relentless marketing. Tired of scrolling through feeds that no longer satisfy what were never human needs. Tired of leaving social media with more issues and insecurities than we came with in the first place. Drained by digital realities and bombarded by information, we end up being too tired, too anxious, too disconnected, too lazy for real life.
I often find myself less interested in what I’m indulging in. It’s like nothing gives that same dopamine kick as it used to anymore. The limitlessness takes away from the thrill of it. Maybe infinite choice makes everything less interesting. Vividly, I remember going to the DVD rental shop as a child, and how special it was to rent a film to watch. That quickly faded with streaming platforms like Prime Video or Netflix becoming the standard. It’s just not quite the same experience anymore. In social media, I think we might be reaching a similar phenomenon. And there are a number of factors I’d like to discuss and offer my opinion on.
I write this from a gen z woman’s perspective, reflecting on my internet algorithm, hoping that what is now an anticipation and wider existing observation of the present and future might become gradually more evident.
The Invisible War
A little backstory: Basically, Silicon Valley has profoundly messed things up for us.
In the beginning, the big thing about Facebook was the ability to follow the people you knew or were interested in. That was exciting enough until the endless scroll, where content automatically and infinitely loads as the user scrolls down, was developed. But to trump that, ‘For You’ page came along which is a customized, algorithm-driven feed that shows content selected based on the user's interests and behaviour. So now, what we consume is mostly content of random people we’ve never seen or heard of. Didn’t ask for any of it: open an app and one thing comes after the next, no search, no context. Let the wonderous doomscrolling begin. That is captivating and all, but now it’s just impersonal.
It’s a silent invisible war. Except, we’re not fighting back. We don’t actively realize it’s happening. The opposite, we buy into it collectively, entirly. It’s a fight for our attention. Every tap on the screen is engineered to influence our minds, to keep us hooked and online. By manipulating human psychology, this is not accidental or the fault of individuals but a calculated business model which major tech companies profit from.
I believe that the endless scroll and the 'For You' feed are the main contributors to the development of social media fatigue.
Social media used to be a platform to connect. Kids went home from school and met their friends online. I remember my brother playing Minecraft with his friends for a while, being in touch that way. Nowadays we can take the social out of social media; it’s just media. It’s not connecting, instead it feeds us tons and tons of information that feel good momentarily but that don’t give us anything more. What was once a fascination has turned into apathy, a kind of exhaustion, replacing what once was pleasure with growing indifference.
I think humans aren’t built to see this much of other people. It was interesting for a while, and addicting of course, to get insight in other people’s lives and see we’re all kind of the same inside. But now I think it’s getting extreme, and we may even get a little bored. Like yeah, I don’t mind watching that Jacob Elordi Edit but was it necessary? Do I gain anything from it? Will I even remember it? No, no and nope. And yeah, I don’t mind watching the cool van life dude, and it might be inspiring to a good but certain extent, but stolen focus is stolen time and stolen creativity; and I don’t want to lose mine.
Brain Rot, Burnout.
Phones in general aren’t the problem. But they are the bridge to it. It’s short form content frying our brains, and we know it. ‘Brain rot’ was literally named Oxford Word of the Year in 2024. Our attention spans are so shortened that even social media isn’t doing the job anymore. Digital burnout it real. The constant flood of quick, shallow content overwhelms our brain’s capacity for deep focus and presence, leading to cognitive overload and a tendency to emotional numbness. The hypothesis is we’re so numb, we crave to feel real stuff again.
Evidence of Decline
As I contemplate all this, I find myself getting distracted by various forms of social media more than I’d like to admit. This makes me wonder whether my thoughts are more wishful than an objective observation, or even mere opinion. Nevertheless, I believe it’s worth considering: is social media slowly dying?
‘Yay’, I thought when reading an article on the decline of time spent on social media. I’m sure it has to do with a post covid pandemic decrease in the time spent home alone stuck to our phones, but there’s more to it: a recent study by the Financial Times shows that time spent on social media worldwide peaked in 2022 and has since dipped by nearly 10%.
What I’m getting at is hard to capture in numbers anyway because part of it is that we’re stuck in it. We don’t know how to stop. Not only that but we’re frankly addicted and love manythings about it. For example, I myself surely enjoy laughing over Instagram reels me and my brother and sister send each other. But that fun tends to overstay its welcome; turning into disappointment about how I’ve spent my time, and overstimulation.
It’s more a feeling that I believe we may be starting to experience. After years of social media overload, we’re getting frustrated. We keep scrolling, but something feels off. We don’t yet know what to do with that though. It's like hitting the snooze button repeatedly in the morning, each press on ‘snooze’ gives you a moment of relief or comfort, but it also adds to your stress and regret because you know you’ll have to get up eventually. We want to stop, we just can’t resist ‘just one more scroll’. Perhaps the wanting to stop is the start of a deeper cultural shift.
An Unavoidable Presence.
Even if we decide we want to win the war, it’s going to be difficult.
Being online is no longer a choice. The Internet is no longer a luxury but a basic utility, even an entity. It’s not you and your friend having a chat anymore, phones have become like a third person, shaping interactions and mediating conversation.
It’s a delight in moments when it isn’t an effort to leave the phones completely aside. Within friend groups, ‘phone towers’ have become a thing, a way of shifting focus to the present, but it doesn’t take long until someone logs on, even if just to start a Spotify jam or ask our good friend ChatGPT something. As undeniably super cool these features that the internet brings are, they add to the difficulty of distancing from any of it: it is probably quite nearly impossible to completely log off. From submitting assignments at Uni to ordering via QR-codes in cafés, usage is unavoidable. And those tempting medias are no more than a click or two away. Detaching is still possible, but in no way easy.
Phones are more or less an extended body part, chained to us or figuratively glued to our behinds. From step counts to the pressures of constant availability, we make our phones a part of our identity.
Two-Dimension FOMO
Digital fomo, the fear of missing out on anything relevant happening online, has long kept people wired to social media, anxious about not keeping up. However, I propose that this fomo is evolving into a two-dimensional experience, something like ‘two-dimension fomo.’ This phenomenon still involves the original fear of missing out but is now intensifying by a second layer: the growing awareness of what life one could be living if less time was spent online. This dual fomo combines the fear of missing social events or information with a simultaneous feeling of regret or longing for a different, possibly more fulfilling offline life.
Detox Desire
In recent years, trends like ‘social media detox’ have been circling around, never fully leaving us. Unlike other trends that come and go faster than you can keep up with their consumption, this longing to log off individually and collectively seems to be growing. People are tired of this kind of short-form consumption.
More importantly, I think people are starting to get pissed off with what it’s doing to them mentally: SkinnyTok we’re all aware of, and as much as it’s taken over, people are fighting back. How-to videos on how to detach are becoming more popular. For every harmful video, you might encounter a tryingly helpful one next.
I think that maybe, we’re starting to realize quietly but collectively that all the bullshit online is just that. The highlight reels people post are reduced and illustrated perfect bits of their lives. We’re getting realistic about how far from reality it is. Consuming all sorts of shite presented to ‘fix’ you isn’t going to get you the life that people present online. Nara Smith, someone so seemingly perfect and ever intact, will also have her moments.
Clean Girl trend is over; we’re embracing the messy. Isn’t that kind of what defines us too? I always wonder, wouldn’t it be dull if we’d all really comply with those ideals? If we’d all match that stupid standard we create, wouldn’t we then just crave the exact opposite?
Social media gives us insecurities we would never have even thought of. We’re exposed to other people’s most inner thoughts, more than we were ever supposed to. Remember the jawline trend a couple years ago? I’d never given this a second thought before, and before you know it, everyone’s buying gua sha stones to desperately conform.
Comparison truly is the thief of joy. I say ultimately, even if one doesn’t actively notice it, so is social media in many ways. Whether it’s stealing ourselves, our self-esteem, our time or our focus, it’s taking more away from us than it is giving us anything we ever really needed. Grass will always be greener, especially online. Maybe we’re maturing and starting to see that. Messy is cool now.
Social media isn’t curing loneliness anymore; it’s making it worse. Our escape has become the escape itself. We went online from wanting to leave the real world, but now the real world has become the escape system from the online one.
I think we’re experiencing a form of anemoia. Gen Z and younger are feeling nostalgia for a time or place we’ve never personally experienced. Somewhere inside us, we’re longing for a time before the online era. This is evident with detox trends but also with things like vinyls coming back in trend. Flip phones have also been a thing on social media.
Observing a shift toward longer forms, YouTube, for instance, never left but is making a come-back. Apart from such changes, trends are also technically leaving the internet. Although this isn’t new as such, it may still play a role: running clubs, booktok, knitting and more. Even full- on retreats, self-help books, set time limits, dimmed screens and such. Here we see the industry simply adapting to our latest desires and needs.
Artists are telling people to put their phones away at concerts and the influencers of today are preaching to de-influence their audience. ‘10 things to do instead of doomscrolling’ or ‘how to quit social media’ as some of what we scroll through now.
The fatigue is evident. We’re trying to escape, we’re just so deep in, we don’t realize it. Successful distancing is no picnic: algorithms are practically perfectly trimmed to our liking, preserving the temptation to get stuck online.
Whatever we get tired of, the next thing will be advertised in full length. No matter in what direction we move in, capitalism is moving there too.
Trend Prediction: Human Connection.
I intend to write about artificial intelligence in a different light, rather to draw attention to the long-term risks we’re so happily ignoring for short term pleasures. But in this instance, I’ve come to realize that maybe AI is pushing us back into real life in some ways…
Everyone, while loving it, fears AI. What is it capable of? Can we control it? When talking about the rising fatigue towards social media, I think it could help us get there faster.
We can already see the overflow of ai-generated videos filling our pages, getting harder to spot. Social media, despite promising connection, often leads to superficial interactions and a decline in deep, meaningful relationships. It has led to the decline in human connection. I think AI might boost it again. With everything becoming automated, won’t real stuff become cool again?
Videos created by artificial intelligence may still be new and exciting to us, but it will get mundane over time, just like social media is. The difference may get harder to spot, but I think it’s still less interesting.
As AI automation grows, authentic human moments may become even more valuable and rare. The only thing that cannot be replaced is human connection. And I believe it’s in our nature to crave it. Skills, tasks, even creativity AI will do better, but real innovation, empathy, touch, so much as eye contact and genuine real-life connection?
Be*******Real - and on What’s Cool Now.
Just as fascination turned into apathy, luxury won’t be material: it will be presence. The ideal will be time, will be privacy and authenticity. BeReal was an app that tried to go back to this, reflecting a widespread urge to return to genuine online moments, sharing real, unfiltered snapshots rather than polished personas.But if social media is already so fake, will AI even make a difference? Well, I hope so. I’d rather fall down the rabbit hole of people faking stuff than just fake stuff itself.
I believe in humanity that much: we desire to know the depths of other people, to see vulnerability, to see others make mistakes. We want real people. I think artificially generated content won’t give us the same thrill. Isn’t that also why music and storytelling and art is so powerful? It’s a way of expression, it connects us. Let’s us say things out loud we’re normally ashamed of, even if in the form of fiction, disguised in characters. I think we want more of that back.
If natural human shame and cringe become trendy, we could even enhance our creativity again.
The end of influencer culture? Social Media Surveillance Theory
Another minor aspect here is the shift in influencer culture. We’re reaching the end of the classic influencer. Instead, the quality of its effects debatable, news-fluencers, popculture-fluencers, and intellectual-fluencers are the new thing. With this shift, and with the growing pressure in polarizing times, social media surveillance (the pressure to comment on everything, express one’s standpoint etc) is increasing.
I’m aware that this is only one side of the internet. There’s the other side that’s deep down in social media’s rabbit holes: conspiracy theories, misinformation and polarization. No amount of social media shift will change that. People will keep living in their confirmation bias cycles, their echo chambers shaped and reinforced by algorithms designed to show them content that fits their existing beliefs. Education, independent thinking and conversation beyond one’s own informational bubbles need to become aspirational. For everyone. On -as well as offline.
So What’s Next?
Nothing changes if nothing changes. Can we change things? Should it really be up to the individual? Since these systems and platforms are built in a way that manipulates human psychology into watching endless feed, it’s unfair to put it on the individual to fix themselves. It shouldn’t be parents calling out their children for being on their phones too much. If it were easy to cut it out, we’d all succeed with the detox trend instead of uploading videos about it. It should be up to state legislators to do that for us. We’re already decades too late in protecting generations from the dangers of social media. Only now, Australia for example is planning the Online Safety Amendment (social media minimum age) Act 2024. Not that this is the answer or should be the norm; we need to move with the times of course, but we need to move. Just as we march the streets and raise our voices against climate change, genocide, and right- wing extremism, we must also march to reclaim our lives.
We want real life again.
Author: Ella Roth
“Ella’s Take On” is a space to explore whatever concerns, shapes, breaks or inspires us. From everyday thoughts to bigger questions, anything goes. Ella’s little collection of pieces and perspectives that invite reflection, curiosity, and conversation.