CHOOSE LIFE, NOT MEANINGLESS RETWEETS!

Is this you? If so you need to get off social media FAST!

Heavy social media users are a bunch of sad losers who are harming themselves, and they clog the internet  because they have very little going on in their real lives. 

This is the finding of a survey published in the Economist, our favourite Neoliberal rag:

According to a survey...by the Royal Society for Public Health, Britons aged 14-24 believe that Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter have detrimental effects on their wellbeing. On average, they reported that these social networks gave them extra scope for self-expression and community-building. But they also said that the platforms exacerbated anxiety and depression, deprived them of sleep, exposed them to bullying and created worries about their body image and “FOMO” (“fear of missing out”). Academic studies have found that these problems tend to be particularly severe among frequent users.

This is understandable as the popularity of most social media platforms derives from exploiting the psychologically weak, thus exacerbating their mental failings:

Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, has admitted that the product works by "exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology". Indeed, an experiment by five neuroscientists in 2014 concluded that Facebook triggers the same impulsive part of the brain as gambling and substance abuse. Yet it is difficult to prove that obsessing over likes and comments causes mental illness, rather than the other way around. The most convincing effort was a survey that tracked a group of 5,208 Americans between 2013 and 2015. It found that an increase in Facebook activity was associated with a future decrease in reported mental health. 

The survey found that the more people used social media the more unhappy they were. 

For example, self-identified "sad" Facebook users spent an average of 45 minutes a day on the platform while "happy" users only spent 20 minutes.

With Twitter, "happy users" averaged 21 minutes with "sad users" putting their real lives on hold for 53 minutes a day. 

See the full results below.

So, what do we learn from this? Mainly that our culture is now driven by mass mental dysfunction and that most of the people driving Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are sad, pathetic losers who probably also masturbate too much and have bad physical posture. 

In fact, in real terms most of them no doubt resemble the creatures you find living under a stone. 

Good techno cancels out the bad.

It is for creatures like this this that euthanasia will one day be normalised with "mercy killings" carried out by a race of compassionate robots, while the real people take their kids to the park or go for an ice-cream along the sea front. In the meantime there is always suicide.

If only you had switched off the computer sooner!