5th of December 2025 | 5 min read
When social media worship turns into progress gridlock
The Limits of Attention
In a culture obsessed with likes, followers, and viral moments, opting out of social media is often treated as a liability. Not being present online raises eyebrows. It invites suspicion. People assume you must be behind, disconnected, or somehow unwilling to play the game. Yet for some of us, staying off these platforms is not a rejection of progress. It is a deliberate choice in favor of depth, focus, and sustainability.
I am often asked how it is possible to operate professionally without a social media presence. The question is rarely hostile, but it is almost always framed as disbelief. As if success without constant posting were an exception that needs explaining. My response usually comes in the form of another question. How many meaningful relationships can one person realistically maintain? Anthropologists refer to the Dunbar Number, which suggests a cognitive limit of roughly 150 stable social connections. Beyond that, relationships lose depth. Context fades. Trust weakens. Now imagine a more concrete scenario. Imagine 1,000 followers standing in front of your house. Not abstract numbers on a screen, but real people. They want your attention, your response, your time. They expect consistency. They expect access. No one would claim that situation is manageable. Yet online, we are encouraged to believe this is not only normal, but desirable.
This disconnect matters because social media does more than offer connection. It reshapes expectations. It teaches us, subtly but persistently, that reach matters more than trust, that visibility matters more than continuity, and that scale matters more than substance. Those assumptions rarely survive contact with real creative, entrepreneurial, or intellectual work. This is not an argument against social media as such. These platforms can be useful tools. They can amplify ideas, connect people across borders, and help certain projects find an audience quickly. The problem begins when social media stops being a tool and becomes a belief system. When visibility is treated as proof of value, progress itself begins to stall.
The Economics of Distraction
Social media presents itself as a space for connection and innovation. In practice, its incentives often push in the opposite direction. Algorithms are designed to maximize engagement, not understanding. Content that provokes strong reactions spreads faster than content that invites reflection. Over time, this dynamic favors simplification, outrage, and repetition. The cost is not only lower-quality discourse. It is a narrowing of what gets created in the first place. Ideas that require time, ambiguity, or context struggle to survive in an environment optimized for immediacy. Work that cannot be reduced to a headline or a short clip is quietly filtered out, not because it lacks value, but because it does not perform well.
This pressure shows up clearly in creative fields. When algorithms reward familiarity, creators are nudged toward repeating what already works. Risk becomes expensive. Originality becomes inefficient. I have seen talented people abandon promising directions not because they were failing, but because the work did not “read” well online. The feedback was not “this isn’t good,” but silence. Silence is hard to argue with. Platforms also reinforce echo chambers. Users are shown more of what aligns with their existing views, while dissenting or complex perspectives are deprioritized. Debate gives way to groupthink. Innovation depends on friction. On disagreement. On slow refinement. When everything is optimized for affirmation, progress becomes shallow.
Attention itself is another casualty. Social media trains us to respond quickly and constantly. Notifications fragment focus. The habit of checking replaces the habit of thinking. Long-term projects do not survive this environment easily. They require boredom, frustration, false starts, and long stretches where nothing looks impressive from the outside. A system built around interruption is poorly suited to that kind of work. The loss is not just personal productivity. It is collective capacity. When large numbers of people operate in a permanent state of distraction, society becomes very good at reacting and very poor at planning.
The Price of Being Visible
Online, success is often measured in followers, likes, and shares. These metrics are easy to track and easy to compare. They are also deeply misleading. They reward popularity, not expertise. Visibility, not contribution. Performance, not progress. Consider a simple probability exercise. If a thousand people flip a coin ten times, someone will almost certainly land heads every time. That outcome looks remarkable, but it is also inevitable. Social media works the same way. Among millions of users posting relentlessly, a small number will rise quickly. Often this happens because of timing, luck, or highly polarizing content. These individuals are held up as proof that the system works.
What is rarely discussed is the other side of the experiment. The 999 people who flipped the same coins, followed the same advice, and invested the same energy, but disappeared quietly. Their experience does not fit the narrative, so it is ignored. This is classic survivorship bias. We learn from the visible winners and mistake rarity for replicability. The result is a feedback loop. More people chase the same outcome. More content floods the system. Attention becomes scarcer. The probability of meaningful engagement declines even further. And still, the message persists: try harder, post more, stay visible.
This is where social media begins to resemble a coercive system rather than a neutral platform. Attention is the product. Time is the cost. The pressure is subtle, but constant. Even when engagement is positive, it trains the brain to seek validation externally. Over time, motivation shifts. The question becomes not “Is this meaningful?” but “Will this perform?” Stepping away, at that point, feels less like a choice and more like disappearance.
Reclaiming Depth in a Noisy World
None of this means that social media has no value. For certain goals, it can be extremely effective. A local business that needs awareness quickly. A campaign that depends on mass participation. An early-stage project that benefits more from reach than depth. Social media excels at broadcasting. What it does not do well is sustain complexity. The problem arises when its success in some contexts is treated as proof of necessity in all contexts. Its reward structure favors constant output, emotional intensity, and personal branding. For people engaged in long-term, interdisciplinary, or mentorship-driven work, those incentives often clash directly with reality.
Influencing, for example, is not a side activity. It is a full-time job. It requires continuous production, constant engagement, and ongoing relevance management. That time comes from somewhere. Every hour spent feeding the algorithm is an hour not spent building, thinking, mentoring, or creating. I have never run out of ideas or projects. If anything, the opposite has been true. The constraint has always been time. There is also an opportunity cost that rarely gets acknowledged. Choosing visibility often means choosing against work that unfolds slowly, privately, or outside public attention. Some ideas need incubation, not exposure.
Once a certain level of visibility is reached, disengaging becomes difficult. The pressure to maintain relevance can trap people in cycles of performance that are hard to exit without loss. At that point, social media stops being optional. The deeper issue is not whether social media is good or bad. It is whether we have confused means with ends. Platforms are increasingly treated as proof of legitimacy rather than as tools. This narrows our definition of success and blinds us to alternatives. History offers perspective. Businesses, artists, and innovators operated successfully for centuries without social media. Even today, many impactful projects grow quietly through trusted networks, sustained effort, and real-world collaboration. Their progress is slower to see, but often more durable.
When social media is worshipped, progress becomes performative. Energy is spent signaling activity rather than doing the work itself. When it is used selectively, or not at all, space opens up for focus, depth, and relationships that are not mediated by metrics. Social media can amplify progress. It cannot replace it. It works well for some goals and some people. For others, it introduces friction, distraction, and a false sense of necessity. Recognizing this is not resistance to modernity. It is an attempt to restore balance. True progress depends on substance rather than visibility, on sustained effort rather than constant exposure. When we stop treating social media as a universal requirement, we allow more ways of working, creating, and contributing to coexist. That plurality, not uniform participation in the same platforms, is what keeps progress moving forward.
