5 Counter-Intuitive Truths I Learned After a Year Without Social Media
Introduction: The Unicycle in Your Pocket
If you've ever felt mentally drained after an hour of scrolling, you're not alone. The constant influx of information, opinions, and notifications can feel overwhelming. About a year ago, I decided to conduct an experiment: I quit social media completely(There has been adverse effects too - will write on it on a different blog). My goal was to see what would change, and the results were more surprising than I could have anticipated. This isn't an argument for why everyone should quit, but a reflection on the most impactful lessons I learned.
The core realization is this: social media is like a unicycle. It's an interesting device that you can balance on for a short, wobbly ride, but as a tool, it is not an instrument for long or deep journeys.
What follows are the five most counter-intuitive truths I discovered after stepping off that unicycle and learning to travel differently.
1. You're Trading "Mental Mileage" for Instant Gratification
The primary currency of social media is the quick, unsatisfying reward. You see a video, get a one or two-second hit of interest, and if you don't, the promise that the next swipe will deliver keeps you hooked. You get a ping from friend - OH! a meme! Funny! OH! This politician said this, he did that! This system is designed to provide just enough satisfaction to keep you engaged, but never enough to feel truly fulfilled.
This is a form of "low mental mileage." Like a car that goes from 0 to 100 in 3 seconds but burns through fuel, it offers rapid acceleration with no real substance. Contrast this with the "high mileage" of an activity like reading a book. A dense book might require patience and effort; it can take 50 pages just to pick up speed. But that slow, deliberate journey provides far more mental "nutrition." While social media is a unicycle for short trips around the block, a book can transport your mind from one continent to another, from one universe to another. It delivers value that fundamentally changes you. The platforms we use, however, are built on a different premise entirely, one that creates an insatiable demand for content.
"The game of social media is basically to keep you permanently unhappy so that you continue spending time on social media with the hope of finding happiness."
2. The Content Machine Runs on a "Hamster Wheel"
That insatiable demand for low-mileage content creates relentless pressure on creators to constantly produce material to feed the algorithm. I have followed many small creators, seen how they struggle to grow in this environment - I know this feeling well. It’s been described as a "hamster wheel": a small creature running endlessly just to keep the wheel spinning. To find enough material, creators are often forced to "scrape the bottom of the barrel."
This results in a feed clogged with low-quality fuel: a random meme someone shared, an insult someone gave, comments from random ministers and spokespersons, and endless content about "who exposed whom" or "who humiliated whom." The machine needs material, and it doesn't care about the quality.
An unfortunate side effect of this relentless churn is the unintentional amplification of toxic or cheap voices. When a politician delivers hate speech, they want coverage. The content machine, in its desperate need for something to talk about, obliges. Even while criticizing the speech, the hamster wheel will end up helping him, giving that politician exactly the attention he desires to achieve his political goals. This entire system, built for speed and reaction, fundamentally alters how we learn.
3. Your Brain Needs to Struggle to Truly Remember
The hamster wheel’s need for constant, simple content has fostered a culture of simplification, summaries, and bullet points. This feels efficient, but it actually damages our ability to learn and remember things deeply.
I experienced the opposite while reading Consider Phlebas, a dense book with a powerful message that I don't think I'll ever forget. The author didn't just state his point on a single page. Instead, he wove small clues throughout the narrative. This forced my brain to "wrestle" with the text and hold onto disparate threads. As I read the story’s climax, my own mind began connecting the dots: "Oh, that little thing that happened there is actually related to this thing... and this thing is related to that third thing... and these three things together are actually connected to this."
When the final revelation came, it wasn't something I was told; it was a conclusion my own mind assembled. That cognitive effort made the lesson an unforgettable part of my personality. The struggle is the point. When your brain works to process complexity, it embeds that knowledge more deeply. But the social media ecosystem isn't optimized for deep processing; it's optimized for tribal signaling.
"Effort has value. If your brain has to work harder, then it is good for your brain... Life is not a race. Unfortunately, social media has turned us all into racers."
4. We've Entered an Age of "Topic Tribalism"
The pressure to simplify and react has shifted the purpose of content creation. It used to be primarily about informing an audience. Today, it has largely devolved into what the literary authors calls "Topic Tribalism," a phenomenon where content is made not to inform, but to signal one's identity within a specific tribe be it political, religious, or ideological.
Audiences no longer come to learn something new. They arrive having already consumed dozens of articles and videos on a topic, and they demand proof that a creator is still "one of us." If the creator stays silent on a key issue, it’s seen as a betrayal of the tribe.
This dynamic is non-conducive to good journalism or discourse. The hamster wheel’s demand for instant, constant output is hostile to the patient work of informing citizens so they can make better decisions. Instead, its primary function becomes reinforcing tribal solidarity, replacing active learning with passive validation.
5. You Learn by Doing, Not by Watching
A common fear when considering leaving social media is losing a primary source of entertainment. But the alternative is far more rewarding: actually doing things. Pick up a hands-on hobby, whether it's origami, learning to Video edits, development, or voice acting.
The social media era has perfected the art of passive learning. You can watch 150 videos on a topic and feel like you've learned a lot, but without having actually done anything, you haven't acquired a skill. You've simply fallen down a rabbit hole of content consumption, creating the illusion of progress.
Same goes for Tutorial Hell that developers like you and me face, early on in the career. DO STUFF. Don't just see how it's done. Knowing what to do is worth dime a dozen, it's about who actually does stuff.
True learning comes from wrestling with the subject matter yourself. No matter the skill, it's better to learn it by actually performing the task. You learn by doing.
Conclusion: Step Off the Racetrack
Stepping away from social media revealed that these five truths are not separate phenomena but parts of a single, interlocking system. The content "Hamster Wheel" demands a constant supply of "Low Mental Mileage" fuel, which incentivizes an oversimplification that harms our ability to remember. This, in turn, fosters "Topic Tribalism" as an engagement shortcut, replacing the slow, hard work of real learning with the passive consumption of watching.
The most profound lesson is that the struggle to understand, the effort to create, and the patience to learn are not obstacles to be optimized away they are the very processes that make us smarter, wiser, and more capable.
If our attention is the fuel for the hamster wheel, what could you build if you took it back?