It’s cliche at this point to say social media can have some negative consequences. After all of the reports, documentaries, and books published about the harm social media does to our mental health, it’s surprising to meet someone who doesn’t know about the downside of scrolling Facebook or TikTok.
Last May, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released an advisory on social media and youth mental health. He expressed concern that we are in a “youth mental health crisis” with social media potentially contributing to this crisis.
His concern is well-founded. According to the HHS, increased social media use among adolescents increases their chances of experiencing depression, anxiety, and worsened body image.
These negative consequences affect adults too. In a 2021 study, researchers monitored the mental health of 5,000+ adults with an average age of 56. None were depressed at the beginning of the study. But when asked about their mental health at a later date, those who used social media were more likely to report symptoms of depression.
Beyond social media’s harm of the individual we see that it also impacts society at large. Social media has catered misinformation and hyperpolarizing content to all of our timelines. As a result, we see things like pizzagate – where a basementless restaurant was accused of trafficking children out of its basement. This conspiracy theory eventually inspired a man to show up to the restaurant with a gun to investigate this imaginary basement.
Many people have offered solutions to mitigate social media’s harm (Tristan Harris is one great source for these solutions). But I’d like to offer something counterintuitive.
The Game of Black-and-White
Though it may sound a bit insensitive, I propose we start by laughing at ourselves. People are always repeating history. After doing it so often, at some point we have to develop a sense of humor about it. In this case, we repeated history again by thinking we could introduce new technology without serious downsides.
When cars were introduced, the convenience was countered by pollution and horrific car accidents. When TV became popular, the consistent entertainment was countered by a loss of active leisure. And when breakthroughs were made in nuclear science, it wasn’t long before these breakthroughs produced the most destructive weapon we’ve ever seen.
In The Book, Alan Watts describes this phenomenon as The Game of Black-and-White. Seemingly drawing from the Chinese philosophy Taoism, he explains that opposites are interdependent and that nothing can exist without contrast. Light and dark, sound and silence, pleasure and pain, space and matter, and all else rely on their opposites for existence.
For us, this means we can’t perceive anything without contrast. This of course applies to pleasant and unpleasant situations – we can’t know one without the other. When we fail to realize this, the Game of Black-and-White turns into the Game of Black-versus-White. As Watts describes, this leads to frustration:
But the game, “White must win” is no longer a game. It is a fight – a fight haunted by a sense of chronic frustration, because we are doing something as crazy as trying to keep the mountains and get rid of the valleys.
Page 35 of Alan Watts’ The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Every time we try to solve problems with new technology, we find unexpected negative consequences. Eventually, we ought to catch ourselves repeating old mistakes and laugh at the hubris of our tendencies.
The Solution
The solution is to realize there isn’t one. Black needs white, up needs down, pleasure needs pain, etc. When we understand this, we understand we can’t escape negative outcomes, we can only choose which ones to deal with. Or, as economist Thomas Sowell put it:
There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.
Thomas Sowell
Sowell has some controversial takes, but this isn’t one of them. There is no cheating The Game of Black-and-White, even in less obvious cases. For instance, the introduction of Penicillin has been life-saving and miraculous for humanity overall. But it has come with the downside of overpopulation and the risk of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Now, the upside and downside here are hardly equal. My guess is we’d all rather deal with overpopulation than the bubonic plague. But there’s no denying the negative consequences of even the most overwhelmingly positive changes. When we improve medicine, we trade natural population control for improved health. It’s a worthwhile trade, but it’s a trade nonetheless.
When we understand that all “solutions” are really trade-offs, we can stop being surprised by negative consequences. In fact, if we’re skilled, we can even anticipate negative consequences.
Imagine if instead of naively thinking that adding a ‘like’ button to Facebook would only make people cheer each other on, Facebook developers considered what the downsides could be. It’s not hard to imagine that the brilliant people working there could have predicted the harm such a feature would have on self-esteem. After anticipating such consequences, developers could consider the trade-offs being made and adjust their plan accordingly.
This method of decision-making requires more reflection and skepticism. Adopting it means less excitement for innovation, but also less devastation from unexpected consequences. The upside makes it a worthwhile trade-off.