And it frustrates me and depresses me and makes me hate the world and resent them. It feeds the part of me that hates the world and humanity by reminding me of what they’re like, and in a way that especially seems to be tuned to distort my perceptions into the worst possible form. Social media just seems to have that power. It makes everything look worse, it makes everything intolerable.

And maybe that is accurate. Maybe people really are that awful and stupid and unwilling to listen and hungry for senselessness. But if that is the case, it isn’t helping me live with them or with the world. It’s opening me up to more than I can handle.

I had to leave Facebook largely because I couldn’t handle the view it was giving me of the people in my life. And I could see how it was changing them and making them worse, distorting their perceptions. And I couldn’t handle watching it any more.

In some ways social media has been good, but it’s hard not to see it as a distorting universal evil, a structural change to human interaction that should never have come to exist.

To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of blogs or podcasts either. They have a lot of the same problems as social media in general. They democratize stupidity. Often very smart stupidity, often more a kind of imbalance than real foolishness. But it’s a bizzare environment that gives platforms to people and ideas that wouldn’t otherwise be able to to be heard, thrive, grow, or work in the real world. And maybe there’s a good reason for that. Maybe all those barriers serve a purpose. Maybe they act as a form of selection and testing on human ideas.

I suppose TV isn’t really all that different. And even books. And art. Social media just changes the structure for dissemination so greatly that it alters the rules of the whole game. It changes the way we experience and interact with the world. And it’s so new, but it’s so big and pervasive. It’s completely trashed all existing limitations and adaptations and restrictions we developed to deal with media.

And that’s a problem. Media has been a problem forever. Plato had a lot to say about it, a lot of concerns about its abuse. And it isn’t clear that we had fully appreciated or solved the problems he pointed out in his day, much less the problems arising in our own. The average American seems to be no more media savvy than the average Athenian.

The world, as I saw it not long ago, was a line, a spectrum. And spread across that spectrum were the various colors that make up the human race. All the different personalities and the approaches that define them, their clustering into different political and religious and cultural and philosophical perspectives and approaches and responses to the world. There were extremes at both ends that fell off into excess. But in the middle, thanks to the need to be at least sensible enough to survive, a large part of humanity rocked back and forth, keeping one another in a somewhat messy but fairly stable balance.

But at this moment, the extremes seem to have swallowed most of America. Almost every structure we have has been eroded as more and more of it has been swallowed by these extremes. And the more those extremes devour, the more they must spread. The extremism of one side invites and requires the extremism of the other to oppose it. Their strength invites response. The threat of one justifies the arming of the other. And it’s not clear that either is wrong. In fact there’s a good argument that the real problem is that they’re both right about almost everything.

It’s very much like an argument I often have with my children. They both make claims against the other, paint the other as having acted in bad faith, as being terrible, of their anger and response as being justified. And they’re both actually right. They’re both human, so of course that extremely likely! They are both being terrible to one another, they both have good reasons to be angry and hurt and threatened, their claims against each other and all valid. So what am I supposed to do? How are we supposed to resolve such a mutually valid conflict? Just let them fight and whichever can destroy the other successfullt gets what they want? Both have equally good claims against the other, so why not just let them move on to outright aggression, if that’s what they both seem to think is justified and both seem to be right. Go on, get what you want, fight to the death, destroy your sister. Then at least I won’t have to listen to this conflict any more and the argument will be over! If there isn’t any other way to settle the conflict, because both are fundamentally right about the other, then why not just get it over with, decide how the future will look and who gets to determine it, and have some peace?

That’s how I feel lately about our whole country. The coming conflict is inevitable. Both sides are right in their claims against the other. And they can’t both claim the right to see their way, their claim, carried out and the other destroyed. So they either need to separate and go their separate ways, or annihilate the other. Because the middle ground for negotiation and reconciliation is pretty much all gone.

We don’t share enough of our basic worldviews in common any more to hope for any kind of crossing between the extremes. Our entire mental frameworks are based upon incompatible interpretations of the world. It’s not merely the data, but the entire framework for gathering and interpreting the data. Discussion has become pointless. The only possible solution is practical and historical. Let the conflict happen. Let the test of ideas happen. And see how it goes. Maybe one side or another will prevail and prove to be closer to the truth, more workable, and maybe the other will lead to ruin. Maybe that will decide it. Maybe one side will have to actively cast down the other and prove their historical validity. That’s the empiricism of consequences. What is most corrupt, most foolish, will hopefully die and fail the fastest and be revealed in its suffering and disfunction.

The cost of any such process would be enormous. Whole generations crippled and destroyed. Marx, of course, would simply steel himself and argue that the ends justify the means, and the historical process will justify itself. The conflict is a necessary means to reveal the truth and chart the necessary path of the future. I would prefer that not to be the world I leave to my girls. But there’s so much rising stupidity and extremism and imbalance in the world, I don’t see what else the future can be.

Christianity seems like lost cause. What little of it was left has been swallowed either by conservatism or by liberalism. I recall when I was a kid in the 90s and evangelicals were complaining about how liberalism had swallowed up the mainline denominations. And I saw that they were largely right. But I was also very concerned about th eir response, which seem to be pushing Christianity into conservatism in order to bakance and right this wrong. And I kept complaining and kept complaining that conservatism and Christianity were not the same thing, and it was dangerous to identify and marry the two or seek to use the doctrines and methods of one for the benefit of the other. A historical knowledge of Christianity and philosophy, including politics, had clued me in by high school to the fact that every time the church wedded itself too closely to the political and philosophical powrs of its time it wasn’t an alliance that saved it, it was its doom. When the political party or philosophy inevitably fell, it took the church with it.

But my complaints weren’t shared by others, and things went further and further the way I warned. The election of Trump was the seal on it. Almost the entire middle ground was driven out of Christianity. The moderates that remained were pushed out into the liberal camp, embracing those philosophical extremes to fight the rightly perceived excesses of the religious and political right. The snake ate itself up from both ends and I found myself trying to argue simultaneously against both sides as they closed in and swallowed up what was left. Christianity became an extension of either the political right or political left, it’s identity and expression and beliefs defined and restricted and tested and maintained by the political ideology of their respective extremes. Anyone who betrayed the faith from within by daring to pollute the vision, question the mission, was failing to hold the line against the enemy and their existential threat to America, it’s citizens, and our faith. And no one was immune. Leader after leader fell and became merely the roadies and mouthpieces and extensions of the political left or political right. They became priests of the culture. And to my eyes there was absolutely no difference between the two. Both were corruptions and distortions and betrayals of the faith. Both were equally right in their claims against the other and utterly guilty and reprehensible. And I thought it was the duty of Christians not to give themselves to either, not to let either take the faith for themselves, to skirt the difficult middle that has to apply judgment to all categories through this most central and important category.

But politics has changed. It used to not actually represent as divided a category. The underlying worldview and defining narratives of most people was much closer, and differences were less extreme. Other categories represented larger gulfs of difference. And there was more variety within political parties, and more overlap. But that has changed a lot in the last couple decades. People see their party affiliation as a much more defining aspect of their identity than they used to. It divides and differentiates them more. The concept of party is doing more work than it used to in seperating us from one another. What each viewpoint represents has come to be something much larger and more full of content, including orthodox content (what it means to belong or not belong to the group) than it used to.

Maybe this is partly because other categories have declined and become less distinct and defining. Religion, place of origin (your hometown or state), family, all of these institutions have crumbled over time and become less significant parts of our identity and experience. So something had to take their place. Political party has slowly been slurping up those corner of meaning and powers and arenas that used to belong to other parts of our society. It’s slowly been absorbing them and subsuming them all under its unifying banner. It is becoming the arbiter for how we see and experience the world and our place and others’ places in it.

And social media gives us a new kind of forum, a new kind of environment to work that process out, one unlimited by the old restrictions of time and place and environment that existed before. A city might have a certain identity and history, but on an individual level it would be quite diverse, quite full of all the different types of people, the different personalities that make up the most fundamental structure of common differences among humans. And geographic proximity forced our alliance to be fairly accommodating of such differences. Our identity within the group could only extend so far, only be so restrictive, because it needed to be open enough for most people to fit into the middle so the city could continue to exist and work together. And survival would have a powerful selective effect on what arose and persisted. We had TV stations, but because the whole country had to share half a dozen channels, in order to succeed they had to figure out adaptations that would let them work for a large, varied audience. Journalistic impartiality, for example.

But in the new environment, all those restrictions and selective forces are gone. In fact they start to work in reverse. The more outside the norm something is, the more specific, the more tailored to your tastes and prejudices, the more easily it can be matched by search and algorhythm to you and profit. The market knows what you want and it has the ability to give it to you, period. Is that good for you? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe there was something good about a world that didn’t do that. Maybe there was something good about a world that restricted us and pushed back against us. Maybe having a world that just gives us what we want has caused us to lose the skills and adaptations that allowed us to survive and thrive and learn and compromise in a complex world.

There is, of course, some argument that in theory social media should actually help us. And it’s good enough in theory, and is probably true in some cases. But I think against that there are two arguments. First, that’s just not what people are like. We don’t want what’s good for us, we want what’s easy and pleasant. And if we have the option of candy over vegetables, we’ll almost always pick candy. Our increased access to food of all kinds could have made us the healthiest, most properly fed and balanced generation ever. There’s certainly an argument that that’s what should have happened, that there’s no reason it couldn’t. But that’s not what people did. Instead, we’re the fattest, most obese generation ever. To such an extreme that it’s become and overwhelming health crisis. That’s what we did with that new environment and opportunity. The old restrictions on our ability to get and eat food were removed. And we used the opportunity to ruin ourselves. It wasn’t something imposed on us it was something we imposed on ourselves and chose for ourselves. We just made a machine that gave us what we wanted. And what we wanted turned out not to be what was good for us.

Social media is the food industry of the mind. We’re all participants. Social media has removed all the old restrictions and difficulties and challenges, it’s changed the whole environment of ideas and how we encounter and test and adapt and react to the world. Its changed the ground rules for what’s possible. It’s created new ways to succeed, new paths around old barriers. And this is trumpeted as one of the great things about it. But it’s at least worth asking what it’s costing us, and what, having seen some of the practical results these last few years, taking away those restrictions and challenges and barriers has allowed through into our midst.

Both liberals and conservatives should be keely aware that there are some things they revile that could not have risen to their current prominence without the effect of social media. It’s lowered the barrier to entry for all kinds of things, and the most likely things that will get let in are things we want, that are agreeable to us. And the least likely to gain are those disagreeable but necessary realities, those challenges that develop our strength and flexibility. Those suffer in such an environment. They lose their advantage (which is often just practical livability) in a race that is defined by marketing appeal, by giving the customer what they want. It’s not in your interest as a news outlet to be fair or impartial or careful or circumspect with your words. In fact it’s a disadvantage in the competition for click-throughs. The more provocative, the more sensational, the more outrageous, the more it will command the news cycle and the attention of the customer. (And that’s part of the shift too, to an increased commodification of identity and ideology. And the things provided become less and less a service and more and more a product.) Nothing is so viral as outrage and nothing is so financially valuable nowadays as virality. Virality is fundamentally defined by how content makes you feel in control (or fear loss of control), how extreme the emotions it provokes are (valence), and how much it provokes you to a state of psychological and emotional arousal. So, dominance, valence, arousal.

The new market carefully selects the information that will define your world according to those criteria. That’s why outrage is the emotion de jeur. Outrage places you in a position of moral superiority, so you feel in control and want to share it (or you’re deathly afraid of losing control if you don’t react and act and share it; outrage has the advantage of both working in its favor). It obviously is tuned to provoke extreme emotions. You’re not curious or concerned, you’re outraged. The valence is extremely high. And it’s all about arousal. Outrage has a direct link to an actionable response; its emotional fulfillment, its release, is found in confrontation. You want the object of outrage stopped, you want it confronted, you are raised to a height of psychological arousal, your fight or flight response, so you can take action.

These three elements to virality aren’t something I made up, by the way, they’re the result of study by scientist and psychologists. And yes, cats and puppies and silly and stupid and fun memes are also viral. We’re complex beings, and often we want nice things too. But there’s a lot money and careers to be made off of fear and anger and outrage and provocation, especially when you’re looking for short term, sensational results. Fear is a most effective motivator when applied to the near term. In the long term it wears you down and exhaust you. Keeping your psychological arousal turned up to 10 all the time is hard on your body and mind. But if your main goal is just to get someone to go click or hover for a little while or share, or tune in again tomorrow or next week, well, it can be good enough. You can always mix in a little dominance and self-satisfaction, some optimism and goal-seeking, now and then to temper the porridge. But the good money is in outrage and provocations, and as I’ve said before, I find the arguments from both sides for their alarmist behavior equally credible.

I’m not arguing in the slightest that social media, or media in general, is a monoculture of fear or outrage or general emotional indulgence. I’m just arguing that in an environment where many barriers and limitations have been removed, that those approaches enjoy special advantages and the things that are good for us (but less immediately compelling) have special disadvantages. Very much like in the food industry. There’s a lot more out there than junk food. But junk food enjoys special advantages in such an environment as we have where we can just have what we want, and the whole ecosystem is tuned to remind us of it and give it to us.

Take this long, philosophical screed of mine, for instance. It’s actually one of the more raw and provocative things I’ve written. I’m often in a war with myself to balance and restrain myself and be thorough. And it’s probably quite boring. Few people will want to read it. And maybe that’s partly down to me as a writer, maybe that’s partly down to my material not being strong or compelling, but maybe part of it is also that it’s just very structurally disadvantaged in the current state of media.

Long articles like this, in another time and place, didn’t face such competition for attention and urgency, didn’t face such challenges of immediacy and sensation and presentation. You can see this trend even in the restaurant industry. Sure there are some amazing holes in the wall where one great cook makes great food. But they’re competing against restaurants that have staked out locations at the heart of passing traffic, spent millions in their buildouts and interiors, hired dozens of people to curate every step of the process, developed highly engineered food tuned to excite your interest (and likely enjoying the advantage of being stuffed with more salt, fat, and sugar than you could ever imagine fitting into a dish) and have amazing branding and advertising. How do you even get noticed when you’re up against that kind of finely tuned machine? As a customer, how do you resist such a siren call? It almost demands your wallet and your expanding waistline to pay it your respects. How can you not and avoid missing out?

I also recall a time when movies were much more slowly paced and edited. They took their time. Now we get a scene where it takes fourteen cuts in six seconds for Liam Neeson to jump over a fence (in Taken 2). And any time I watch an old TV show or movie with my kids I have to explain that there were different limitations to what you can do, and that’s why they don’t have all the crazy effects and the camera stays put more. And what do you often hear about CGI? The same as with the junk food. Crazier and crazier creations, but somehow it means less and less. Somehow the loss of restrictions eroded the reality of the film instead of enhancing it. Somehow the limitations before forced filmmakers to be more creative and put more thought into things. Again, that’s not to say that CGI is all bad, it’s just that we did with it what we did with everything when the work and limitations were removed, what we did with food and with media. We used it some to make great art and further our growth and creativity, but the easiest thing to do with it once it was freely available was to get lazy and give the customers what we wanted in the fastest, simplest way possible. And somehow that didn’t yield great results. It yielded junk food, and consumers fat and unimpressed by an endless buffet of the most amazing effects money could buy. Entitled consumers commenting and obsessing and complaining over every little facet of movies, and finding ways to commoditize their own reactions.

We made an industry out of reacting to our own meals and our own shopping trips and daily routines and petty compalints. We turned junk content into a behemoth industry. We made whole TV and radio shows out of just commenting on the news and making people afraid or outraged or angry or disillusioned with other people. And we made ourselves feel good about it, like we were actually doing something or accomplishing something by learning to resent and fear people we had never met and had limited knowledge of and little influence over.

In the old days you would hear about your own town, your own community or family, people you likely knew in a deeper way than merely as subjects of a for-profit sensation industry. And you could probably have some meaningful reaction to and influence over the things happening in your community. Your arousal was relatively informed, and your reaction, seeking resolution to your outrage, had a practical outlet. And your reaction was likely moderated and restrained by your need to continue to live in some sort of functional harmony with the other members of your family or community. And you had to put yourself at equal risk of scrutiny.

But the distance and anonymity of the internet, combined with its immediacy and it’s ability to pull together limited, carefully selected points of data from across a huge swath of the world and condense them to define and fill up your whole world, and its ability to provide a platform that specially favors the most extreme and provocative and sensational content that favors short term rewards and reactions changed all that.

All this is the gift of our expanding technology and media tailored to pander to our desires. And the result seems to be stress, separation, alienation, and disfunction. Why? It’s possible that our psychology and the internal structures of our mind, the things that help us judge evaluate information and determine our emotional reactions and subsequent actions was not designed for the kind of system we have created. It’s a vastly different system from how the world, and human society, works by nature and has worked for untold generations. It’s an entirely new paradigm, and a constantly changing paradigm. And it’s yanking us all over the place. Our young people are attempting suicide at startlingly high rates and reporting mental illnesses at a percentage unprecedented in human history, and all within the last ten years. And there seems to be a direct tie to technological and social and media changes rhat have occurred in just the last decade.

What, then, is the best prescription? I’ve been uncertain of that, but I’ve noticed a lot of people recognizing their stress and deciding to quit social media. I don’t think it’s fair to just simplify things too much and say it’s the fault of Facebook. There seems to be an invasion of junk media and junk food and junk politics and junk philosophy and all kinds of junk into all our lives in every area. But maybe Facebook (or comment boards or Reddit or Twitch or Twitter or YouTube or Pinterest) is where some people notice it most. And maybe pushing back against it there is the best place to start.

Maybe the best thing, if you’re being constantly infected by feelings and ideas that are specially selected for being viral, is to practice a little bit of social distancing. I did find that narrowing my scope to my more immediate world seemed to help. I focused more on the world actually around me, more on sorting out my own actual life and problems. The chaos nearest to me, and then the pain and chaos next nearest to me, in my home and neighborhood. What could I do about them, how could I make them better? And it made me wonder how much I was being distracted from that reality by social media, and whether it was actually a kind of escape from my own life and responsibilities.

I can’t say I have any certainty in this area, only speculation and questions. But my own experiments did help. I dropped off social media. I started aggressively filtering my other media too. Anything that seemed to be trying to take advantage of the structural problems I’ve mentioned here, I hid. I watched for mind viruses and I pulled away any time I saw their rear their heads. I tried to refocus my attention and effort and emotions. And it helped me stabilize. It made life more manageable. And when I came back recently, and started spending more time reading news online and watching media online because of the pandemic, it didn’t take long for me to start feeling stressed and unhappy and worried and angry again.

Maybe that means there’s just something wrong with me and how I’m using media. But maybe I also underestimated the inherent weaknesses and dangers I would be exposed to. I wasn’t a careless user. I had a much more curated intake than a lot of people. I was smart and thoughtful and self-aware, in my own estimation. I could handle myself. And yet somehow I ended up exactly like so many other people, especially young people.

So maybe I need to remember the lessons I learned before. Maybe I’m not ready to throw myself back in. Maybe I’m avoiding the world, maybe I’m depriving myself of something good. Maybe I’m actually being smart. I guess the proof is in the pudding.