Maybe social media isn't the problem

Ever since I reported on the news that reducing social media use might not improve mental health as much as we may have thought, it's all I have been thinking about. I've been doing my best to use social media less often lately, and I have had moments throughout the past few weeks where I've wondered why spending less time on Twitter didn't fix most of my problems.

What I did start to notice instead, however, is that the less I turned to social media to avoid my real life emotions, the more I began to seek out other ways to do the exact same thing. I've been reading more. I've been playing more video games. I haven't been online interacting with the digital social landscape as much, but that hasn't actually made me feel any less sad or anxious or burnt out.

And it makes so much sense now that I've looked into this and other studies producing similar results. For many of us, social media isn't why we're feeling bad. We're spending more time on social media because we're already feeling bad -- and it's just not doing much, if anything at all, to make us feel better. Because for many of us, it might not be the cause, but rather, the effect. The symptom, not the disease. The compulsion, not the obsession.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that the worse I feel, the more I'm tempted to hop onto Twitter or Instagram or TikTok. The better I feel, the less tempting these apps become. TikTok, for example, does not determine whether or not I have a good day. I spend more or less time on TikTok depending on how I'm feeling that day, almost without fail.

Social media isn't great for us, but maybe it's not as bad for us as we once thought. Maybe it has just become, for many people, another form of escapism that isn't actually solving any of our problems.