We’re Using Social Media Wrong

Stop mindlessly consuming and start thinking again.

Remember when social media felt like, well, social? It was about connecting with friends, sharing life updates, maybe finding old classmates. Simple, right? That promise feels like a lifetime ago. Today, your feed isn’t a social space. It’s a combat zone. Brands shouting. News outlets screaming. And an endless parade of professional outrage.

We wade into this mess every single day. We treat it like essential air, scrolling endlessly, consuming whatever pops up. We claim we want connection, but we drown in commentary. We crave understanding, but we settle for headlines. Here’s the brutal truth: We’re taking it all too seriously while barely engaging our brains.

Someone posts a wild claim. A headline designed purely to enrage or shock flashes past. A trending topic dominates everything. And what happens? Millions of people instantly form an opinion. They don’t click through. They don’t read past the first paragraph. They certainly don’t question if the source is credible. Or if the whole thing might be entirely untrue.

They see it. They believe it. Then they spread it. Like a digital virus of half-truths and manufactured fury. You think you’re informed? You’re just infected.

Imagine you ate nothing but gas station pizza and sugary soda. Your body would revolt. Your health would tank. We all get that about physical food. But when it comes to information, we act like our minds are invincible trash cans. We binge on sensationalized garbage. We gorge on biased soundbites. We consume the mental equivalent of expired convenience store snacks, day in and day out.

And we wonder why we feel anxious, angry, and constantly confused about the world? You are what you consume. And most of us are consuming junk. We scroll through this digital buffet of mental junk food, convinced we're staying informed. We're not. We're just getting sicker.

Think about this for a second. What if Facebook was the Facebook Community? Twitter, the Twitter Community? The language changes everything. You’d think of people first. Your friends. Your family. Other actual humans. The focus shifts from faceless algorithms pushing content to genuine human interaction. That’s what social media was supposed to be.

But now? It’s a blended slurry. Your aunt’s vacation photos sit next to a breaking news alert about a global crisis, a targeted ad for socks, and a corporation announcing a new product. And we mentally process all of it with roughly the same weight. It’s utterly insane. We need boundaries. A space for actual social connection. A distinct space for news. A separate channel for corporate messages. Mixing them all together in one firehose of content is a recipe for mental disaster. It tricks your brain into treating opinions like facts and marketing like reality.

Not every piece of news demands your outrage. Not every trending hashtag requires your hot take. You don’t need to have an opinion on everything. It’s okay to sit something out. Most importantly: reading a single article or a thread of tweets does not make you an expert. It doesn’t even make you particularly knowledgeable. It makes you someone who read one thing.

If you genuinely want to understand a complex issue, dig deeper. Find original sources. Read multiple perspectives, not just the ones that confirm what you already think. Talk to people who actually know things about it. Otherwise, just admit you don’t know the full story. Because you don’t. And that’s perfectly fine.

Some things are worth fighting for, worth understanding deeply. Most of the noise online isn’t. The real power lies in knowing when to disengage. When to scroll past. When to say, "That's not my circus." Be mindful of what you feed your mind. Be critical of what you read. And for the love of your sanity, stop believing everything the internet tells you. Reclaim your attention. Reclaim your calm. It starts with questioning the feed.