Social media keeps getting worse

Wtf happened?

Nothing feels exciting anymore, yet we can't seem to pull ourselves away from our screens.

A select few people are getting tired of it.

Tired of the cute dances.

Tired of the immature pranks.

Tired of being robbed of your attention 10 seconds at a time.

Tired of the digital slot machine increasing anxiety and depression across the board.

Tired of saying you’ll "just check Instagram," then finding yourself an hour later having opened every social app at least 3 times. Attention hijacked.

Social media had so much potential.

But over the past 5 years, it's only gotten worse.

Now I'm not going to tell you to quit social media to go off and live in the woods. Instead, I'm going to show you how this enshittification of social media could lead to the end of the world (not joking or trying to be polarizing). Then, I'll show you what you can do about it.

How attention hacking may end the world (serious)

Social media is the fast food of socialization.

Porn is the fast food of intimacy.

Video games are the fast food of achievement.

Netflix is the fast food of entertainment.

Our brains evolved reward circuits for a hunter-gatherer environment.

When we would seek scarce resources like fat, sugar, and salt - our brain would increase dopamine levels to signal the importance of it to our survival.

Homo genus emerged around 2 million years ago.

Homo sapiens emerged around 300,000 years ago.

The Industrial Age started around 300 years ago (1/1000 of human evolution).

That's when fat, sugar, and salt started to become less scarce, because we could manufacture and distribute them rapidly.

In the 1950s, fast food chains started popping up. Then, the Golden Age of Television allowed the mass spread of information.

A bit later, the internet came along. It was incredible at the start, but in comes Google, Facebook, and other soon-to-be massive companies competing in a race to the top. Profit was the way to win the game. A poor incentive from the start.

Fast food companies had already been testing infinite combinations of fat, sugar, and salt to maximize pleasure for their customers and keep them coming back for more.

The internet companies followed suit, adopting an advertising model for monetization, and soon found that polarizing and inflammatory content captured the most attention, so they prioritized it. All they had to do was serve more of what users "liked," and the For You page was born.

Since media is the mass transfer of information, this leads to a society optimized for "one-marshmallow" thinking. You can either have one marshmallow now or two marshmallows later, and we can't help but choose now. Instant gratification. This is inherently entropic and degrades systems.

Short-form attention hacking content has no through-line. No greater purpose. No sense making. Thousands of meaningless ideas flood our mind and we are unable to make sense of the chaos, trapping us in a low-consciousness state.

The metacrisis: civilizational collapse

Daniel Schmachtenberger, who I believe to be one of the greatest thinkers of our time, created the concept of the "metacrisis."

Not just one crisis that threatens the world, but an interconnected web of global crises driven by three generator functions.

A "generator function" is a deep structural pattern that creates surface level problems. Think of them as root causes to problems. Treating symptoms without addressing the root cause is like mopping water while the faucet runs.

The three generator functions are:

• Rivalrous dynamics – Win-lose games where one party's gain requires another's loss. Think arms races, corporate competition, social media content, and academic publishing (hoarding data to publish first).

• Substrate consumption – "Substrate" is what something needs to exist, like soil for plants, attention for media, trust for markets. When systems consume their foundation faster than they can regenerate, that's bad. Think depleting top soil that took millennia to form and the attention economy consuming human cognitive capacity faster than it recovers.

• Exponential technology – Tools and systems that improve themselves at accelerating rates, outpacing human wisdom. Think AI doubling in capacity, automated weapons, and social media algorithms evolving faster than we can study their psychological impacts.

That was a mouthful.

How does this threaten civilization?

In Schmachtenberger's opinion, when these three things converge, there are two outcomes: Catastrophic collapse (nuclear war, unaligned AI, etc) or dystopian control (total surveillance, digital authoritarianism, etc).

However, there is a third outcome.

While I'd encourage you to research the metacrisis more, we're here to talk about social media.

What can we do about what social media has become?

And how is it aligned with getting civilization back on track?

The 3 Levels Of Social Media Content

Social media has changed my life.

I will be the last to tell you to quit.

If social media weren't around, my work/career would be significantly less meaningful.

That's why people get started, right? That's why the most sought-after career for young people is being a YouTuber? You know there's something here, but your lizard brain got addicted to the wrong side of social media, and now you want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The problem is that everyone with an internet connection can access social media.

Most people have not developed themselves to any meaningful degree, so when they start creating content, the internet is filled with level 1, low-consciousness thinking, characterized by conformity and following the script.

Level 1) The Trend Jackers

These are your typical influencers, personal brands, and creators.

They are often the loudest.

Every post is optimized for an isolated dopamine hit. They have zero memory of what they posted yesterday and they don't care. They're a master of hooks, thumbnails, and clickbait titles. They are content factories.

They post Thought McNuggets (fast food for the mind) and fortune cookie philosophy - which can easily be confused for wisdom, posturing as level 3. They post about whatever's trending, from cold plunges to the carnivore diet. They post pranks, dances, and ragebait because views and likes are the only things they care about.

They are incredibly skilled with attention mechanics but have stripped all meaning, value, and experience to achieve pure virality. These are the people who can and will be replaced with AI, because the trends are easily accessible and require no creative challenge.

AI didn't kill content creation. It drastically raised the bar.

This type of content is entropic. It is characterized by quick certainty. It doesn't require critical thought. A thousand ideas enter your mind throughout the day and steal your energy. It gets worse over time, not better.

Tips for this level:

• Pursue new interests

• Accomplish something hard

• Share your journey toward a goal

• Read long books and fix your attention span

• Create an aim for your brand that helps people improve

• Attempt to create something meaningful yet comprehensible

Level 2) The Brilliant Nobodies

These are the Substackers with 47 subscribers but brilliant writing.

The "thread boys" who explain complex topics but get zero traction.

The authors who whine and complain about how they can't sell books, but when you look at their marketing and sales, you understand exactly why.

Level 2 creators hate the algorithm.

They care about "authenticity" (whatever they mean by that), but don't care about impact. They complain about "idiots" going viral. They don't understand that shallow content has a place, but its value lies in educating people to a point of depth. They're too proud for level 1 tactics, but too jaded to even comprehend a level 3 perspective because they quietly think they are better than everyone.

You have useful ideas, but you don't really exist.

You despise AI, when you're the one who could benefit the most from it.

That's fine, and if you don't have the desire to be a creator, you don't need to take this to heart. But for the many who want meaningful work, turning against the very thing that can provide that is not wise.

It's counterintuitive, but merging level 1 with level 2 is one potential solution to create a meaningful impact on civilization at scale. Change starts on the individual level, and culture influences mass behavior, and media influences culture (hint: you are the media in today's world).

If you understand levels of psychological development, you understand that you don't leave prior levels. You transcend and include them. You still grab attention, but you do it in a more tasteful way.

Tips for this level:

• Study direct response marketing for the principles, not tactics

• Dumb down your ideas as a creative challenge without stripping their impact (most people are beginners)

• Create an offer and practice selling it. Get over your fear and toxic relationship with money

Level 3) The Value Creators

The written word as the primary type of media was probably required for democracy to work, because it required people to think well enough… and they were reading, which meant increased attention span of non-dopaminergic stuff, which also meant enough working memory to hear multiple perspectives. – Daniel Schmachtenberger

These are the creators who see social media as a tool to pursue their life's work.

All of their content has a through-line.

A frame. A mission. They have something meaningful to share, but they also understand that if they don't capture attention, that meaning won't be transmitted. That doesn't mean they have to do quick edits and post rage bait. Books, for example, can be very absorbing simply by telling a great story. Since you're posting on social media, there is a lot of knowledge and skill that must be acquired in order to do this well.

Think of James Clear, or Naval Ravikant, or Andrew Huberman. It would be difficult to argue that their contribution to humanity isn't overwhelmingly good. Of course they have bad takes and get things wrong, but that's not evil or destructive, it's human nature. Most of them would correct those errors and improve over time.

Their tweets and shorts are useful because they have a meaningful aim.

Clear and Huberman have written books. Naval focuses on the highest signal ideas he can. Huberman has a long-form podcast that requires invested attention.

In other words, their content is centropic. Unlike entropy, which leads to disorder and chaos, centropy leads to order and clarity.

Consumers must dedicate time, focus, and energy to reap the rewards that come from acquiring the knowledge these creators have to offer.

The examples above are famous people, but there are plenty making an honest living from small audiences. You probably follow a few of them.

Joining The Meaning Economy

Go do something great and your network will instantly emerge. – Naval Ravikant

Everyone's niche is self-actualization.

That may sound corny, but it's true.

The uniqueness stems from your story. Your path. The culmination of knowledge and interests you acquire to reach a higher level.

If you are here to help people, it is your obligation to pursue continuous improvement, because if you don't, entropy increases. You don't stay the same, your life slowly gets worse until it's incredibly difficult to dig yourself out of that hole. To low-consciousness people, this sounds like a drag, and they are waiting for the day when they can drown in instantly gratifying pleasure. They don't understand that continuous improvement makes life overwhelmingly more enjoyable than the opposite.

Your job is to share your point of view.

To strive to improve each domain of your life.

To expand your mind, build your body, nurture your spirit, and contribute back to the civilization you suck resources from via the modern form of value exchange - work, business, entrepreneurship.

Do something great.

Document your path.

Solve your own problems.

Sell the solution.

Find a crevice of reality that you deeply care about and dedicate your life to helping others learn, grow, and actualize. Take your weird interests and make them interesting to other people.

Become a node in this new, decentralized education system called the creator economy.

Have a mission. A transformation. Point A and point B. Anything in between is your "niche." I can talk about emotional management or spirituality or AI, because they all fall under the Future Proof mission.

Write short content that helps rather than hurts.

Write long content that educates, inspires, and pushes people toward better.

Create a product that attempts to solve the root cause. Write a book. Build a tool. Sell a program. There is a lot of hate around courses, but they are arguably the most life changing types of products because education is the precursor to behavior. Since anyone can become a level 1 creator, people can easily produce educational material without the required wisdom.

Create with intention. Create to serve. Understand that ideas, content, beliefs, and products are tools, not truth. Create more tools. If people interpret them as truth, they will learn their lesson at some point.

This shift from attention economy to meaning economy is already taking place.

It has started to surface in common discourse.

It's cliché, but the best time to start is now, because there is no other time to start.

– Dan