How Social Media Shortens Your Life

It's engineered to speed up your time

I. THE NORMALISATION OF AMNESIA

The most common noun in the English language is “time”. We talk obsessively about time because it’s the most important thing in the universe. Without it, nothing can happen. And yet most of us treat time as if it’s the least important thing. We kick up a fuss when tech giants steal our data, but we’ve been strangely nonchalant as those same companies carry out the greatest heist of our time in history.

One reason for our indifference is that the true scale of the theft has been hidden from us. Social media platforms have been stealing our time using a sneaky trick: they’ve been speeding up our sense of time — effectively shortening our lives — so we think we had less than we did, and don’t notice some of it was pilfered.

Every social media user has experienced the theft of their time. You may log on to quickly check your notifications, and before you know it, half an hour has gone by and you’re still on the platform, unable to account for where the time went. This phenomenon even has a name: the “30-minute ick factor”. It also has empirical support. Experiments have found that people using apps like TikTok and Instagram start to underestimate the time they’re on such platforms after just a few minutes of use, even when they’re explicitly told to keep track of time.

To understand how social media warps time, we must understand time perception, or chronoception. Even outside of our heads, time doesn’t move at a constant pace. It is, for instance, slowed by gravity. This is why the Earth’s core is 2.5 years younger than its surface. Just as massive objects can slow objective time, so weighty experiences can slow subjective time. It’s why people tend to overestimate the duration of earthquakes and accidents (or in fact any scary situation).

Generally, an event feels longer in the moment if it heightens awareness. But we seldom think of time in the moment; the majority of our sense of time is retrospective. And our sense of retrospective time is determined by awareness of the past: in other words, by memory. The more we remember of a certain period, the longer that period feels, and the slower time seems to have passed.

Sometimes an experience can seem brief in the moment but long in memory, and vice versa. A classic example is the “holiday paradox”: while on vacation, time speeds by because you’re so overwhelmed by new experiences that you don’t keep track of time. But when you return from your vacation, it suddenly feels longer in retrospect, because you made many strong memories, and each adds depth to the past.

Conversely, when you’re waiting at a boring airport, you keep checking the clock, and this acute awareness of time causes it to pass slowly in the moment. But since the wait is uneventful, you don’t make strong memories of the experience, and so in retrospect it seems brief.

Now, a sinister thing about social media is that it speeds up your time both in the moment and in retrospect. It does this by simultaneously impairing your awareness of the present and your memory of the past.

Try to recall what you saw on social media the last time you scrolled. You’ll notice you can barely remember any posts, even if you scrolled for hours. This phenomenon has been confirmed by studies, which have found that social media impairs both short-term and long-term memory. A social media feed is like the Lethe, the mythical river in whose waters lost souls sought absolution, and received it in the form of oblivion.

But what explains this “Lethe effect”? Theoretically, a social media feed should heighten awareness and memory, and dilate time, because it selects for content that’s exciting, outrageous, and scary. And yet we seldom remember such content. The reason for this discrepancy is simple: when every post is alarming, your brain quickly becomes desensitised, and starts to interpret alarming content as routine. And routine, being passive and therefore immemorable, speeds up time.

This is one way social media impairs awareness and memory. Unfortunately, there are many others, and, unlike this one, they’re not a result of mere circumstance, but of ruthless planning. Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, said: “The thought process that went into building these applications … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’”

Parker and other tech executives employ “attention engineers” to design interfaces and algorithms that warp your sense of time. To understand how they do this, we must look to the history of casino floor design.

II. THE GREATEST HEIST OF ALL TIME

In the 1970s, a man named Bill Friedman went from gambling addict to casino manager by studying the tricks used to manipulate him, and perfecting them. He eventually published his ideas about optimal casino design in several books, which would become bibles of the industry.

Friedman’s philosophy seems to have been borrowed from the retail industry. Supermarkets have long been designed like mazes, with everyday items like milk and eggs deep in the heart of the maze so you must pass by countless other products to access them. The purpose of this layout is to evoke the Gruen effect: the moment when a shopper loses track of what they entered the store for, and begins aimlessly wandering and impulse-buying.

Friedman argued for a similar strategy: to arrange casinos like mazes, where even the paths to toilets and exits would spiral and meander through rows of enticing games machines. Such an overwhelming environment would keep people distracted from themselves, so they’d remain instinctual rather than intentional, and hence compliant rather than resistant.

Friedman rejected open-plan designs, instead advocating for casinos to be sectioned into cubicles so players could only see their immediate surroundings. This was partly to restrict their awareness, but also to create constant FOMO: players would hear excited hoots and cheers coming from a nearby cubicle, and go searching for the cause of the commotion. In doing so, they’d wander further into the maze.

A key component of Friedman’s mazes was for pathways to have as few right-angle turns as possible. This is because sharp bends jolt pedestrians into awareness, since a decision must now be made to change direction. And when someone has to decide where to go, they’re liable to think about the time and whether they should in fact be heading for the exit. Thus, Friedman advocated for curvilinear paths that had no discernible corners, beginnings, or ends, and could thus be perpetually navigated on autopilot.

Friedman’s methods of keeping people playing by keeping them passive and distracted didn’t just revolutionise casinos around the world. Many of his techniques would later resurface in social media design, where they’ve proved even more successful at hindering awareness.

For instance, in the early days of social media, it was possible to reach the end of a feed. These ends acted much like right-angle turns, snapping the scroller out of autopilot by forcing them to change course. Soon, however, the feeds were made “curvilinear” by the infinite scroll and autoplay function. We now know that these features impair awareness and memory by lulling people into passivity.

Further, just as Friedman’s casinos were made like mazes to maximise wandering and getting lost, so social media platforms have increasingly become labyrinthine to trap people in them. The Gruen effect is now commonly elicited online similarly to the real world: by continually placing distractions in people’s way. Every webpage is littered with links, each a path to another maze. And many of these links are deliberately placed where they don’t belong; search results are sneakily scattered with recommendations unrelated to your search, and personal notifications often have generic news links hiding among them. The goal is to alienate you from your own intentions, so you lose track of where you were, and when you were.

But what makes social media even more disorienting than a casino is that our feeds are not just mazes in space, but also in time.

III. THE LABYRINTH OF SHATTERED HOURS

The opposite of a maze is a route, and a route through time is a story. This is because stories are linear and syntagmatic — each moment of the tale semantically follows from the previous — and this collective meaningfulness anchors the whole thing in memory. This is why studies have consistently found that people are much better at memorising information when it’s presented in narrative form.

The memorable and sequential nature of stories makes them good timekeepers. As such, the way we make sense of time is through emplotment: by turning time into stories. It’s why research finds that people who are similarly engaged in a story will tend to converge in their estimates of how much time has elapsed. If we can’t turn a duration into a story, we struggle to keep track of it.

Now here’s the issue: your social media feed resists emplotment because it’s the opposite of a story. It’s a chronological maze. It has no beginning, middle, or end, and each post is unrelated to the next, so that scrolling is like trying to read a book in a windstorm, the pages constantly flapping, abruptly switching the current scene with an unrelated one, so you can never connect the dots into a coherent and memorable narrative.

Thus, not only do you forget time while scrolling through posts, but you also forget the posts themselves. We have no problem recounting the plot of a good book we read or movie we saw last year, yet we can barely remember what we saw on social media yesterday.

Despite not having much memory of your social media feed, you may have a vague sense that you at least enjoy scrolling. This, too, is likely a trick. Research suggests that people judge an experience as being more enjoyable if they believe they underestimated its duration. In other words, not only does time fly when we’re having fun, but we also believe we had fun if time flies. So, by speeding up time on social media, attention engineers don’t just make you waste more time, they might also reduce your likelihood of regretting it.

But even if you do regret it, social media excels at making you return. A physical casino can only warp your time while you’re within its walls. Social media is always within arm’s reach. And it has ways of making you reach for it.

Friedman’s cubicles were designed to spark FOMO by letting you hear the cheers and roars of excited players but without letting you see the cause — unless you entered. Similarly, the push notifications of social media platforms periodically tease you with what you’re missing out on, and the only way for you to find out more is to re-enter the maze. The result of having your day punctuated by these notifications is that your attention is constantly intercutting between the real world and the virtual one, so that your life becomes a book in a windstorm just like your feed.

This creates problems of its own. Continually dividing your attention between two worlds means you can never fully settle in either, creating constant anxiety and stress. And when attention is constantly switching between concurrent tasks, it imposes a “switch-cost effect” that can make people lose track of time. Thus, by constantly interrupting you, social media platforms can impair your awareness and shorten your days even while you’re not on them, so that you end up scrolling through the real world as shallowly as the virtual one.

It would be bad enough if this disorientation were only costing us time. But it can also cost us our health too. Social media appears to disrupt young people’s sleep cycles and lead to mental health problems. Further, when people have their sleep continually disrupted, it can have cascading effects on their body’s ability to keep time, causing, for instance, puberty to begin sooner. This may help explain why children, particularly girls, are experiencing puberty earlier than they used to.

As well as potentially speeding up puberty, screentime also seems to speed up ageing. A recent study of 7212 adults tracked various biomarkers of body age, such as muscle mass and telomere length, and found that those who spent more time staring at screens had aged faster, even when controlling for physical inactivity. This effect might partly be due to confounding (people with high screentime are likely to have other unhealthy habits) but it’s also a predictable result of the stress, disorientation, and hyposomnia inflicted by living out of sync with reality.

Ultimately, social media doesn’t just threaten the quantity of your time, but also the quality. And it doesn’t just accelerate your experienced life, but potentially also your actual, biological life.

Now that we understand this, we can try to do something about it. Fortunately, there are ways to not only prevent further theft of our lives, but to take time back.

IV. TAKING TIME BACK

The simplest way to escape the tech giants’ control is to stop using their platforms. Research suggests abstaining from social media can lead to immediate time dilation, particularly for compulsive users. Further, according to a study of 35,000 people, quitting social media tended to slightly improve perceived mental health after just a few weeks.

However, that same study also found that the time people saved by quitting social media was often just spent browsing other apps, which are increasingly emulating the time-warping features of social media.

Take, for instance, chatbots. They are inherently mazelike; not only do they frequently hallucinate red herrings, but they’re also prone to “verbosity compensation”, which means they frequently ramble and equivocate in their responses, raising more questions with every answer, and creating a kind of verbal Gruen effect. They also have a tendency to validate users’ delusions, leading them further down deceptive and dangerous rabbit-holes.

Chatbots are also becoming curvilinear, increasingly ending their answers with a question or an offer for further help to create a kind of conversational infinite scroll. And now, Meta and others plan to have their chatbots message you unprompted — the AI equivalent of the enticing calls from Friedman’s cubicles. These developments pose problems because there is emerging evidence that chatbots, when used carelessly, can impair awareness and memory just like social media.

The deeper problem, then, is not social media or chatbots. It’s curvilinear mazes. If we can avoid following smooth spirals to nowhere, and instead take sharp turns to clear destinations, we can stay aware and keep track of time. We could even learn to use social media and chatbots — two incredibly useful technologies — in a way that enriches our lives rather than impoverishes them.

We’ve already learned the techniques that attention engineers use to speed up time. So, if we can adopt the opposite techniques, we might just be able to slow time, and in so doing, experience longer, richer lives.

Curvilinear mazes speed up time because little within them sticks out to attention or into memory. So what does stick out and in? Salient stimuli: surprises, stories, (strong) sentiments, and selections. Social media gives you the illusion of these things, but it’s actually their killer.

The “stories” on your feed are really just hints of stories that collectively form an incoherent jumble. Any “sentiments” become dulled when your feed is full of ragebait and scaremongering, while the “surprises” cease to surprise when you’re seeing twenty a minute. And the “selections” you make on social media, such as deciding when to scroll, are instinctual rather than intentional — there are no right-angle turns in your feed, and you’re just following the gently snaking path.

Slowing time begins with refusing these ersatz experiences, for only the real thing is weighty enough to anchor itself in memory. Fortunately, there are simple ways to experience authentic salience.

For instance, when faced with a choice of experiences, choose the option that’s most likely to lead to a good story. Read books instead of scrolling social media feeds. Go on adventures instead of staying home. The more stories you experience, the richer your memory will be.

Focus too on the sentiments these stories inspire. The simplest way to strengthen a feeling is to savour experiences. So stop idly scrolling through life as if it’s a feed, and learn to focus your attention on the here and now. People who practice mindfulness tend to have a slower experience of time.

Be deliberate not just in your experiences, but also your actions. Make a habit of resisting habit, choose a life of choices. Continually question why you’re doing things, and stop when you don’t have a good answer. Instead of instinctively checking your phone every five minutes, only pull it out when you have a clear idea what you want to see, otherwise keep it in your pocket. The more you avoid living on autopilot, the more of life you’ll remember.

And when you take a right-angle turn off the curvilinear path, you’ll also open yourself up to the greatest time dilator of all: surprise. We tend to remember novel experiences much more than repeated ones. It’s why time seems to speed up as we age; as we grow older, fewer of our experiences are new, so fewer stick in memory. It’s also why old people tend to remember their early lives better than their adult lives.

The power of new experiences to stick in our memory would explain why studies have consistently found evidence for the oddball effect, a phenomenon where a surprising stimulus presented among predictable stimuli is perceived to last longer. Recent research has found that the stimulus that immediately follows the surprising stimulus is also perceived to last longer, suggesting novel experiences slow time by heightening awareness.

And these novel experiences don’t have to mean great upheavals of your life; they can be as simple as periodically rearranging your living room, or taking a different route to work, or trying a different restaurant. Even small breaks in routine can form richer memories and slow time.

So there you have it. To make life feel longer, choose experiences that are novel over familiar, intentional over habitual, narrative over disjointed, and emotional over neutral.

There is, however, one problem. While these heuristics can make life more memorable, they are themselves easy to forget. Time erodes all things, including the desire to make the most of it. You could come away from this essay determined to live your best life, only for the feeling to fade hours later as life’s myriad distractions reassert themselves, returning you to living as forgetfully and fleetingly as you did before.

The problem, then, is not just that time passes us by; we pass time by, because we’d rather do other things than worry about it. So how do we keep ourselves committed to a long and memorable life? How do we remember to remember?

V. REMEMBERING TO REMEMBER

Maintaining a memorable life requires maintaining a memory of why you want one. The ancient Buddhists would internalise a sense of time’s preciousness through maranasati — reflecting on their own mortality — by meditating in charnel houses, surrounded by corpses. Similarly, in Ancient Rome and medieval Europe, people would often keep memento mori — reminders of life’s transience — such as skulls, urns, hourglasses, and wilted flowers.

Modern research is starting to confirm what the ancients had long known; that reminding yourself that you’ll die doesn’t typically increase anxiety for the future (it might actually reduce it), but it does increase appreciation for the present. Without remembering our own impermanence, we’re liable to live as if we’d never die, and hence, die as if we’d never lived.

I don’t fancy meditating in graveyards, or lugging a human skull around, so I make my own memento mori from words I can repeat to myself.

If years were letters, the average human lifespan would not be longer than this sentence.

That was one.

The key is to place your memos in the places you most need to see them. If you spend too much time on social media, then social media-based memento mori, such as Buddhism or Stoicism accounts, are good reminders to stop wasting time.

Earlier this year I discovered an unforgettable memento mori on social media.

I’d found myself on YouTube, without a clear memory of how I’d got there. I realised I’d been on autopilot, my hands hijacked by habit. And so, to wrest back control, I decided to rebel against myself: Instead of searching for what I wanted to watch, such as “cute baby donkey”, I searched for “terminal cancer patients.” And before I could concoct a reason not to click on the first result, I clicked.

The video featured a man called Ollie who’d just been told that he has three months to live. He broke down in tears as he mourned his future, where, like most of us, he’d stored the majority of his life.

From the comments, I discovered he was already dead. I wanted to remember him. The surprise and emotional impact of his video made him memorable enough, but to carve him deeper in my brain, I decided to learn his story. I watched his uploads in their default, reverse-chronological order, so that he gradually grew healthier and naiver, until he was just a bright-eyed hobbyist sharing his passion for his airsoft hobby, oblivious to his fate.

For the next few weeks, whenever I found myself on YouTube, I only allowed myself the company of terminal cancer patients. They often spoke of how abruptly they fell ill. They regretted how little they’d appreciated their time while they still had it. They lamented that the future they’d been sacrificing the present for had turned out to be a mirage.

Some videos were particularly memorable; Charlotte Eades, diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour at just 16, resolving to make the most of her remaining days. Daryl Leaf, in his hospital bed, showing us the urn his ashes would be kept in. Donna Mason trying to keep in good spirits mere hours before she was euthanised.

They’re all dead now. But their ghosts live forever online, eternally terminally ill. And, from my forced interest in them, they constantly haunt my video recommendations, so that, whenever I visit YouTube to procrastinate, they suddenly materialise to warn me: make the most of every moment, for the universe doesn’t owe you a tomorrow.

The key to maintaining a memorable life is to fill your feeds, and life, with these right-angle turns.

And it’s not the just the warnings of the dead you should heed; it’s also the warnings of the unborn. Genetically, there are far more people that could’ve been born instead of you than there are atoms in the universe. And yet, you are one of the mere 8 billion of us that are here now. To be alive is to possess an unfathomably rare gift; treat your time in this world with the gratitude it deserves.

Seneca once wrote, “Life is short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.” Social media makes you do all three. But you have the choice to do the opposite, and to expand time, for living long is not just about maximising the days in your life, but also the life in your days.

This moment is the youngest you’ll ever be. It’s a moment your future-selves will wish they could have back. Don’t waste it scrolling through posts you won’t even remember tomorrow.

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