Why Social Media has Become So Stressful and Weary
Every now and then, Google Photos would notify me of photos I took at various points in my life, like 10 years ago, and on special occasions, like birthdays. When I look at the years between 2010 and 2015, I felt a sense of nostalgia looking at what I shared, those were the years of tweeting, blogging and daily vlogging. I loved watching all the vlogs on YouTube and posting mine as well.
During those years, sharing stuff on social media was actually enjoyable. Now it's just stressful and weary. Why is that so? A few reasons come to mind:
No longer about sharing, but all about feeding the algorithms – So many times I see, to be trending on Instagram or TikTok, and even YouTube, you need to produce videos that the platforms want (vs what you want) to get the views. Once we learn what works we change our content, we post stuff that we think will get us views, and sometimes in the process, lose ourselves. The time we take to make a video that trends might be time that we could have spent sharing something original and authentic.
All about selling something – In the past it wasn't a norm to be an influencer. You had to earn it. Now that word has been reduced to “little minions to help market stuff”. Marketers are at fault with this. They pay content creators to sell their products, and if you multiply that by the thousands, every other post we see is either someone on live, selling something, or endorsing something, and on and on. The “influencers” get so little while our social media feeds get swarmed with commercials masquerading as original content.
Short-form videos and doom scrolling ruined it – As a collective human race we need to check our attention span. Social media platforms are reinforcing our weakness with short-form videos. I know, it's a chick and egg problem, and these companies are just out to make money, and if our attention is for sale, why not? Every day I get on Instagram, TikTok and even YouTube shorts, I'm training my brain to not care about anything over 3 seconds to chase the next 3 seconds. I don't cultivate the habit of sitting with something longer and think about it.
Actually, some platforms are going in the path of good – like podcasts, reddit, and the original long-form YouTube videos, they are still gems of content sharing where you actually learn something from people around you.
So in 2026, I'm going to stop my brain rot and go back to my social media roots circa the 2010s and start blogging, vlogging, all with durations longer than a 15cm ruler. Slow down. My brain needs it.