In my previous article I outlined one aspect of anti-social media’s mechanism – the push to constantly publish something, anything. However, their harmful effect is much, much deeper – and unfortunately much more powerful.

To properly describe this, we need to go back in time. And quite substantially – to the beginnings of humans, of homo sapiens. The topic isn’t as simple as it might seem, because when our ancestors appeared on Earth is a surprisingly debatable question. On one hand, fossils anatomically consistent with modern humans date back as far as 315,000 years. On the other hand, other scholars argue that although these might have been biologically (genetically even) corresponding to homo sapiens, they didn’t match the definition in terms of behaviors – that is, the appropriate level of thinking manifested in creating suitable artifacts – tools, art, etc. However, the most “conservative” estimate of these skeptics places the beginning of humans on Earth at about 50,000 years ago, as that’s when artifacts appear in excavations that leave no doubt about the level of their creators.

Working with this pessimistic value – 50,000 years of humanity – means that for tens of thousands of years, people lived in a certain specific way, and it’s precisely this way of life that shaped our psychology. We could add that even assuming the previous 250,000 years were “almost-humans,” considering the continuity of the evolutionary process, it was their way of life that shaped not only our current psychology but even the structure of our brain.

What was that life like? Aside from evaluating whether it was a “nice” life or not (especially from today’s perspective), it was a life with the following characteristic features:

  • Large families – typically, a woman during her lifetime had more than 6 children, unless she died during one of the childbirths
  • Strong blood ties – clans, tribes, etc.
  • Territorial stability – very few people traveled further than to the neighboring village
  • Social stability – the same people – most often forming one or several clans, lived in the same area for hundreds of years, resulting in people mostly interacting daily with the same individuals for most of their lives – changes in “personnel composition” resulted mainly from natural processes (births and deaths).
  • Stability of occupations – people mostly did roughly the same thing their entire lives, of course improving at it to some degree. This occupation was largely determined by the occupation of their parents, therefore usually was not the result of their own choice.

So for most of this time – for tens, hundreds of thousands of years – the average person lived in a large family, part of a clan/tribe, in the area of a smaller or larger village that they knew since childhood, among people they knew. After mastering basic skills (walking, eating, speaking), they took part in their parents’ work – if a girl, the mother’s; if a boy, the father’s. And having mastered from them the skills appropriate for gender and profile, they performed them until the end of their life. And if they did it reasonably well, they had a permanent place in the social structure of their village and clan.

This is exactly the kind of life that formed us. We find traces of this in our psychology, for example, in phenomena such as group dynamics or Dunbar’s number. Groups numbering more than a dozen or so people are unable to maintain cohesion and break down into subgroups – that’s a “trace” of the family size typical for 99.9996% of human history. We can personally know (recognize faces, know who they are, etc.) about 250 people at one time – that’s a “trace” of the size of a village with its “adjacencies.”

But these traces are more than just numbers, the sizes of these groups. It’s also something else – patterns, ways of interaction. Returning to the first example, a significant feature of group process is that the same sets of roles occur in groups regardless of culture, profession, social position, or education of people. Generally, I consider psychology to be a pseudoscience, but this thing is actually quite well-researched – i.e., group dynamics consistently work the same way in many studies conducted in different countries. At the same time, those studies also indicate that adapting to a group is a stressful process, which is understandable because from this long evolutionary perspective, forming a completely new group of people who didn’t know each other before was a rare event. And this is in turn meant this was not an event our brains were trained for from the evolutionary perspective. Instead, they were trained in maintaining a spot in an existing group.

Thus, for the overwhelming majority of human history, people spent most of their lives in a stable community where they had their place. This place stemmed primarily from the position of their parents in the community, but of course, there was a kind of competition (which also involved various rituals of passage – “transition to adulthood”). However, that competition was limited to that small community in which the person lived, and also regulated by the rules established in their culture.

Changes in the community were very slow and somewhat natural – some died, others were born. Even more slowly changed the rules and principles governing life, customs and morality, the principles that needed to be followed to cope. These remained unchanged for centuries.

At the same time, people knew individuals from their family and village much more “truly” – it wasn’t the case that they only saw their “enhanced,” public version. It’s hard to pretend to be someone you’re not in front of people you interact with your entire life in a relatively small area. At the same time, because of this, people knew that others weren’t perfect either, that they had worse moments, that something didn’t work out for them, and so on. So the picture of what others’ lives could be like was more realistic.

In summary: people evolved over tens or actually hundreds of thousands of years to live in stable communities, with clear, predictable rules, where the scale of comparing oneself to others was limited both by the size of the group and by culturally determined possibilities of potential advancement, and, on top of that, these comparisons were more truthful.

Meanwhile, the technical era – if counting from the wider implementation of machines and the first mechanical transport (railways) – has only lasted about 200 years, which is 0.4% of that time. The Internet era – counting not from its invention but from its popularization – is about 24 years, while anti-social media only emerged about 14 years ago. These numbers are 0,048% and 0,028% respectively – and that, I emphasize, is using a very conservative assumption as to how long humans have existed on Earth. If we consider the earlier period of formation of thinking, psychology, and even simply the human brain, the current period is imperceptibly small.

And it’s worth emphasizing that although technical changes have been ongoing for 200 years until the end of the 1960s traditional social forms (family) were still maintained. Put more simply, the degradation was already happening, but not on the scale it is now. And 70 years is too little for people to evolutionarily change their psychological construction.

So we’ve now reached a stage where in so-called developed societies, humans formed over millennia for stability, for finding their place in a small community, collide with a world where none of this exists! It’s exactly the opposite – few people know their neighbors, but everyone compares themselves to everyone else, and the model is influencers flaunting real or – more often – fake success. Instead of the natural process of finding one’s place in a local community, developing at a pace to which we are organically adapted, we have constant pressure to be “the best in the world” – which is, of course, impossible for the overwhelming majority of people. Thus, it puts these people in a position of eternal unhappiness, eternal unfulfillment, and dissatisfaction with themselves.

The effects? 15-year-olds comparing themselves to the most famous peers from around the world both in terms of beauty and achievements, which drives them into depression. A 25-year-old I knew personally who was in depression because he compared himself with global “success stories” and feel like a failure. And in a local community, normal from the perspective of how humans are built, each of them would be quite satisfied with their position and achievements.

Anti-social media deepen this problem in many ways. First, they flaunt images of the lives of “influencers” – people allegedly achieving stunning success, leading perfect lives, traveling the world in private jets, living in luxurious villas. Interestingly, the most popular among them are those who promise others they’ll teach them how to achieve such “success” – that is, how to become such an “influencer.”

It’s worth noting that this entire “upper echelon” of anti-social media, these most popular “creators,” don’t actually create anything, don’t build anything, don’t contribute any value to civilization. It resembles the behavior of mice from the final phase of Calhoun’s “mouse utopia” experiment which only showed each other how beautiful their fur was. Here too, we only have flaunting of one’s beauty and ostentatious consumption.

What’s worse, a significant part of all this is simply fake. Plastic surgeries and “beautifying” filters have been standard for a long time. Currently, “influencers” rent film studios that allow them to pretend they live in a luxury apartment. There are even studios mimicking private jets that can be rented by the hour to take photos pretending status and wealth. However, people who later watch these videos often aren’t aware of this.

And this fakery isn’t limited to the absolute “top from America” – it’s used by tens of thousands of content “creators.” And in Poland too, people rent apartments through AirBnB to shoot reels there. We also already have special kitchens in larger cities for shooting reels about cooking (a very popular niche): of course those are nor regular, designer, beautiful kitchens, polished to a shine by studio staff between recordings. Then we have millions of women frustrated that their kitchen or apartment doesn’t look like that. And in their own way, this “average” content is more harmful because its simulation of real life seems more authentic and less unattainable, though such a kitchen is just as unreal as a flight on a private jet built of plywood in a studio.

Artificial intelligence, which is increasingly entering anti-social media, adds a new level of fakery – faces and silhouettes will no longer just be “enhanced” with filters; now the entire environment, and even the characters themselves, can be entirely generated by AI. Thus, a completely unreal world is created, and therefore even more unattainable for the average person, but at the same time increasingly better at pretending to be such attainable reality – and therefore even more destructive.

This is much more harmful than the old reports of the lives of stars and princesses in tabloids. Firstly, because tabloids were read by a relatively small part of society. Secondly, no one had illusions they could live like a princess – it was a different world. Meanwhile, “influencers” pretend they are “just like us,” that anyone can achieve what they have. Thirdly, tabloids were read – the process of reading and viewing photos doesn’t affect emotions and people’s psyche in general as strongly as moving images saturated with intense colors from a glowing screen (in this respect, Instagram, TikTok, etc., are far more toxic than LinkedIn). And fourthly, even if someone read a tabloid, they didn’t do it many times a day, every day, from morning till night. But now everyone has a “smartphone” in their hand for many hours a day. Combined with the prevalence of anti-social media, this creates constant pressure on every user, constantly showing them how crappy their life is.

As a result, a system has emerged that, on one hand, bombards people with unrealistic models and expectations, and on the other, increasingly takes away what gave support for millennia – a stable local community where everyone could find their place. It’s no wonder, then, that the result is an epidemic of mental health problems, the scale of which in younger generations is already alarming.

Worse yet, there doesn’t seem to be a way out of this situation. Anti-social media have already become too important a part of social and professional life to completely break free from them. The possibility of living without them has already become a luxury available only to the few wealthy enough not to need them – or to those who decide to completely reject modern civilization and go somewhere into the wilderness. And artificial intelligence, although it can serve as a kind of buffer between us and the toxic system of anti-social media, simultaneously deepens the problem by introducing a new level of artificiality and fakery.

Maybe, however, AI will “finish off” anti-social media completely, to a level where there will no longer be any real content there, and an awakening will occur? I doubt it – but one can hope.

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