What do you actually think about kids my age using social media? Is it mostly a good thing or a bad thing? Also, do your own kids use it?
Wow, I wish my kids were here, but I think they got sick of me talking about this. That is such a good question.
I use social media on a very limited basis, and I only use Twitter, or X, or whatever you want to call it. When I use X, I basically don’t use the algorithm, I just follow the people I follow. In other words, there are some thinkers that I respect and I want to hear their opinions, so I follow them on Twitter. I’d say it’s almost like me going to a bookstore and just very selectively picking the books I want to read. I spend two minutes a year on Facebook and I still barely know how to use Instagram, it bores me. So I use Twitter as an opportunity to learn.
So social media could be, and in this case I’m referring to Twitter where I can control my algorithm, because again, I’m following I don’t know, 700 people, and at some point, I decided those people had something interesting I wanted to learn from them. It’s a source of news. For example, I follow newspapers from all over the world on Twitter. Why? Because I want to get a different perspective on the same news, because I learned not to trust just one news source that could be biased. This is how I’m using it.
When it comes to kids, I would argue that this is a question that requires a book, there are a lot of layers to this. I’m going to give you a more benevolent answer. Let’s say you follow Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Tony Robbins, and some other great thinkers on TikTok. And Warren Buffett becomes a TikToker and comes up with two or three videos a day that are 30 seconds long, and so does everybody else, people you actually respect. And you spend one hour a day looking at those videos.
I would argue that’s a waste of time. Here’s why.
Your retention is going to be zero. This is the problem, even with benevolent social media where there is good content that could make you a better person. Here’s what happens, and this is the problem with TikTok: you just watched a 30-second video that has some insights, and then right before you had time to process that information, you watched the next TikTok. You never had an opportunity to take that information, process it, and put it into your memory. If you watched 120 TikToks in one hour, even with great information, just because you watched so many of them, your retention is going to be very low. Therefore, I would argue that you want to limit how much time you spend on even “good” social media.
But there’s obviously plenty of bad social media, where it activates your lizard brain. You see that your friends are in the south of France and you feel jealousy. “Oh, look at the life they have.” This lizard brain is very difficult for us to overcome because the jealousy is always going to be there. You always think your friends are going to have a better life, that your life is not as exciting. And guess what? By doing this, you just made yourself a little bit less happy because you’re doing comparative analysis.
In addition to that, you have the algorithm. The algorithm figures out if you watched a lot of videos with, I’m just making this up, not picking a side, Tucker Carlson, it’s going to start feeding you only right-side propaganda. Or if it figures out that you like Rachel Maddow, it’s going to be left propaganda. Suddenly, you get exposed to the algorithm, the algorithm feeds you the news, and your understanding of the world changes. I would argue you want to be very careful how you use social media for these reasons.
I’ll tell you about my kids. My son put time controls on their social media. I know on an iPhone, and I’m sure Android has the same thing, you can put what’s called parental controls. But they actually, without my intervention, put parental controls on their phones to limit how much exposure they have. They knew that the lizard brain is stronger than them, so they put parental controls on themselves to limit how much they use social media.
There are times when I’ve spent too much time on X or Twitter myself and it becomes obsessive. I literally just delete it from my phone. Then, maybe two months later, I reinstall it.
Knowing that you are basically fighting an environment that’s stronger than you is a big deal. If you realize that the environment is stronger than you, then just try to create an environment where you don’t have to fight that. By the way, fighting that also consumes energy.
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