Before and After the Scroll
I’ve been reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, and one point he makes with striking clarity is his recommendation that children avoid social media entirely until at least sixteen. Even then, he treats sixteen not as a celebratory threshold but as the bare minimum — like the age at which one is technically allowed to drive, though no one believes the roads are safer for it. His argument made me pause and look back at my own relationship with social media, wondering whether it has shaped my life in any truly consequential way or whether it merely hovered at the edges, like a faint background noise I never quite noticed.
In many respects, I was fortunate. I belonged to what now feels like the last cohort before the “anxious generation,” the final wave of childhood that unfolded without the constant hum of notifications and algorithmic seduction. My early digital life was almost pastoral in comparison: I got my first computer at seven, my first phone at fourteen, and my first smartphone at eighteen — an age when one is theoretically capable of making decisions, though not necessarily good ones.
When I created a Facebook account at sixteen, the platform was still a kind of digital village square. My entire online world consisted of classmates, school gossip, and the occasional blurry photo from a birthday party. It was small, local, and almost quaint — like a provincial town before the arrival of a highway. Later on, there was a period when I was genuinely addicted to Facebook. Checking this platform several times per day became a reflex, a way to fill the micro‑silences of life. In 2016, though, I deleted my Facebook account and never returned, as if closing a door that had been left ajar for too long.
Unfortunately, I repeated the cycle once more when I created an Instagram profile in 2020, only to delete it a year later. Instagram felt like Facebook’s glamorous cousin — beautiful, curated, and somehow more exhausting. It wasn’t just the material things that made me feel inadequate; it was also the emotional tableaux, the family portraits, the mothers and fathers smiling in soft afternoon light. Instagram has a way of making you long for things you never had, or never had in that particular way. And I realised, with a mixture of humour and self‑preservation, that I don’t have the constitution for a place where other people’s family dynamics come with filters.
Today, the only platform where I have an account is LinkedIn. I check it a few times a week, never compulsively, never with that familiar tug of dependency. As long as my relationship with it stays this measured and non‑habitual, I consider it perfectly acceptable — a tool rather than a temptation, a digital filing cabinet rather than a psychological battleground.
The only digital relationship I’m still unsure how to navigate is YouTube. I spend a considerable amount of time on the platform, fully aware that its recommendation system keeps me inside filter bubbles and echo chambers. YouTube feels particularly dangerous in this regard: It doesn’t simply show us what we’ve already watched — it anticipates what we already believe, like a psychic with a questionable moral compass. The algorithm nudges us toward videos that confirm our worldview, reinforcing our assumptions rather than challenging them. It’s the intellectual equivalent of eating only hummus and guacamole: tasty and familiar, yet suspiciously lacking in vitamins. And while I’m conscious of this dynamic, I haven’t yet figured out how to manage it in a way that feels genuinely healthy. YouTube is the one platform that still seduces me — not with social validation, but with the illusion of knowledge, the promise of endless learning that sometimes turns into endless scrolling. It is, in short, my digital vice: respectable enough to justify, dangerous enough to worry about.
However, I have to be honest: I’m not entirely convinced that my offline intellectual life is the heroic alternative I sometimes pretend it is. Yes, I read about five books per month, but I mostly read books I already suspect I’ll like. I attend lectures, but usually the ones that align neatly with my existing interests, my familiar intellectual terrain. In other words, I curate my offline world with the same careful selectivity that algorithms perform online — only I do it manually, with the smug satisfaction of someone who believes they are above algorithmic influence. It’s a comforting illusion, but an illusion nonetheless.
Sometimes I wonder how much genuine breadth I possess. I like to imagine myself as a wide‑ranging, open‑minded person, strolling through the world with philosophical curiosity and a willingness to be surprised. But if I’m honest, I’m more like a well‑trained homing pigeon: I reliably return to the same intellectual rooftops, the same historical periods, the same moral questions, the same authors whose ideas feel like home (e.g., Jonathan Haidt). My “open‑mindedness” often resembles a beautifully decorated room with the windows politely closed.
And so I ask myself: How open-minded am I, really? How much wideness and openness will I ever possess? Perhaps the offline world is not inherently more expansive — it simply flatters us by letting us believe that we are the ones in charge of our selection. The algorithm is replaced by preference, the feed by habit, the echo chamber by taste. It’s all very dignified, very analogue, very human — but not necessarily more diverse.
Still, there’s something charming about this self‑awareness. It’s comforting to know that even without algorithms, I am perfectly capable of building my own little echo chambers. And perhaps that is its own form of openness, the willingness to see the limits of one’s curiosity, to acknowledge them with humility, and to keep nudging them outward, even if only by a few centimetres at a time. In the end, Haidt’s warning about early exposure to social media circles back to a greater truth: Whether online or offline, the real challenge for everyone is recognising the algorithms in our minds. And if we can see that — if we can name our own tendencies, laugh at them, and gently push against them — then maybe we are doing better than we think.
