Up until two years ago, okay maybe three, we still thought of the feed as something we used. A little app on the phone. Something you opened when you were bored in the autorickshaw, something you closed when you got to office. A small distracting tool… or was it?
That is no longer what the feed is.
I think the social media feed is the longest-running psychological experiment ever conducted on the human species, and most of the people in it are unpaid subjects who have not been told they are subjects. Two and a half billion people scroll for an average of more than two hours a day. The number went up again this year. It will go up again next year. By 2028, the average urban Indian under 35 will spend more waking hours looking at a feed than looking at any human face, including the face of the person they share a bed with.
Okay. So what is the social media feed (will refer to as just 'feed' henceforth) actually doing.
It is training a small, very fast loop in your nervous system. The loop has three steps. Anticipation, novelty, partial reward. You feel a flicker of want, you swipe, the feed gives you something almost-but-not-quite what you wanted, and you swipe again. The "almost" is the trick. If the feed gave you exactly what you wanted, you would put the phone down. If it gave you nothing you wanted, you would also put it down. The feed has been engineered, with billions of dollars of optimisation, to give you the precise blend of hit-and-miss that keeps the loop alive without ever closing it.
The loop does something to you over time. It is the slow flattening of your capacity to want anything else. The signal-to-noise ratio of your own desires goes down. You used to know what you wanted to read on a Sunday afternoon. Now you do not know, and you also do not know that you do not know. You reach for the phone before you figure out what you want to really do or could have chosen to do.
There is also a particular kind of tiredness this produces. You sit down to read. The book is good but your capacity to receive the book has dramatically reduced. The book sits there, and you sit there, and nothing happens, and after a few minutes you reach for the phone again, because that is now where the feeling is. The book is out of your attention by a system that does not need you to enjoy it.
The cost is not the time you spend on the feed. The cost is the rewiring of your brain. Two hours a day on the feed is not just two hours not-doing-something-else. It is two hours of a specific kind of training. At the end of the day, our brain is trainable. Whatever you do for two hours a day for ten years becomes who you are. You did not know you were signing up for this.
But the truth is, the feed is not the worst part. The worst part is what happens to the parts of your day where the feed is not present.
You are at dinner with someone you love. The phone is in your pocket. You have not taken it out. But even while discussing the menu or to look up a dish, you immediately take out the phone to search but spend a second or two to skim through the notification drawer and probably opening Whatsapp to type a quick reply. Even if you're not doing that, there are a hundred things running slowly, and rapidly at the back of your mind. The Slack notification could be something urgent, the number of views your story collected, what were the dishes an influencer posted about the restaurant you were dining at. The feed is in the room with you, even when the phone is in your pocket. This is the deeper damage. You have been trained to be elsewhere. You can be physically present with another person and your nervous system can still be inside the feed. The dinner is happening to half of you. The person opposite you is having dinner with half of someone.
It's likely that by 2029, the most-cited reason for romantic separation among urban Indian couples in their thirties will be a sentence that sounds like he was never really here or he was zoned out. This could already be the most-discussed thing in private therapy notes, I strongly guess.
By 2030, "feed-induced anhedonia (the inability to experience pleasure from activities that usually bring joy)" will be a recognised clinical category. It will appear in the diagnostic manuals, the way "internet addiction disorder" tried and failed to a decade ago. This time it will stick, because the group is now too large to ignore.
So. What do you do?
You do not "use the feed less," or "delete the app." That phrase is a fucking trap. Moderation is not really the answer. The answer is structural. The feed cannot be in your bedroom. The feed cannot be in your morning routine. The feed cannot be on the phone you carry through the day.
This week, before next Sunday, do this. For three full days, the feed lives on a separate device. May be just the laptop but not in your hand or in your pocket. If you live with someone, hand them the phone in the evening and let them keep it until morning. Notice what your hand does for the first eight hours. The hand will reach. The hand will reach into the empty pocket. You will catch yourself reaching into a pocket that has nothing in it.
Please, realise this. The dopamine-hitting loop is something that was built by other people, paid for by other people, optimised against your slow human attention by other people, and installed in your nervous system through a small device you carry willingly. You did not consent to the loop. You consented to an app.
Look at the people who are still actually present in a room. Watch them for a week. They are slower. They look at faces longer. They do not finish their sentences in a hurry. Just the untrained mind, the one you had before the app.
Remember, the social media feed is training you. And the training is not free.