How Social Media Shortens Your Life

It's engineered to speed up your time

Gurwinder Aug 03, 2025

I truly like this essay from Gruwinder. Please read the whole essay: 
https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/how-social-media-shortens-your-life

For copyright reasons ;-) , I’ll only post the first few paragraphs here. Please make sure to read the entire essay.

The essay:

"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.
..."

Please read the whole essay: 
https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/how-social-media-shortens-your-life

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"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."

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And finally:

"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."