Quitting Social Media and The Clickbait News Cycle

Jul 13, 2020

"Observe the Masses, Do the Opposite" - James Caan

Me and my business partner always try to think about that things that don't ever change. It is only in this space where you can create and store real value overtime. This goes for everything in life - relationships, business, health and so on.

One thing that will never change is the benefits of a sound mind, body and soul.

The damages on societal health and productivity caused by social media are crystal clear now. And TBH, it's very old news but, it's slowly becoming more popular to just quit social media altogether. Delete the apps, delete your accounts, disconnect from the Matrix.

Sean Parker, one of the early founders of Facebook once said:

"a dopamine hit and a social validation feedback loop, that exploited a vulnerability in human psychology."

Also Chamath Palihapita, said a similar thing:

"We have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works"

Ouch. Read more about that here.

My business partner and best friend, introduced me to the wonderful Charlie Munger, many many years ago. After I heard his talk on the Misjudgements of Human Physiology, my life changed, I was never the same again. I started to see everything through this lense.

The long and short of it is: we are very vunerable to manipulation and bias. Humans are incredible but also deeply flawed.

I started to see these issues with social media back in 2013/2014. So in 2014 I deleted my Facebook account, then I created another one last year for business purposes (ads account, Facebook Groups).

I stopped using Instagram around the same time, then started using it again 2 years ago.

Even someone as concious as myself, I was constantly being pulled back into the machine.

So I made a vow to myself recently: to quit it altogether.

I've deleted every social media app off my phone and I've since deleted Facebook and Instagram.

I noticably feel a LOT better.

I stopped watching and reading the news years ago, because it literally would make me feel down and negative. I then realised that the incentives were the problem, the news doesn't make money the way it use to anymore.

Now everything is driven by Advertising Clicks. Thus they are incentivised to create highly engaging content, rather than the truth. Better than that, the traffic to these platforms is driven by social media shares.

And the algorithms on Facebook/Twitter are optimised for clicks/engagement - so what spreads faster and has the most clicks? Negativity & Chaos.

I recently said to myself: "well, I just use LinkedIn, it doesn't have any of these issues, there is still benefit in creating an audience"

But it does have the same issues. I'm finding myself checking my Notifications 5 times a day. So that's it. I'm OUT. As of today, I will only post updates here on my personal website.

If you want to stay in touch with me personally you should have my direct number for WhatsApp or my email address, if you don't, then we probably shouldn't stay in touch anyway.

I hope someone else reads this and gets the same benefit I have from quiting social media and the news.

All the best! Ash.