Freya India writes today on not only how social makes us feel, but how it degrades us as people.

Over time I’m becoming convinced that our most pressing concern isn’t that social media makes us feel worse about ourselves. It’s that social media makes us worse people. […]

“We talk constantly about what like, follow and comment metrics do to our self-esteem—but don’t they also make us so shallow? We hate when people judge us by numbers on a screen, but aren’t we doing it all the time, to everyone else, even subconsciously? […]

“We also complain, constantly, about how inauthentic everyone is, how people are always performing and how this fakeness makes us feel insecure and inferior. But what about being fake ourselves? It’s so easy to be dishonest now. We can so easily disguise our vanity as virtue. Here’s a post about Palestine where I’m posing! I’m standing up for conservative values—with a hot selfie of me at a protest! People on all sides pretend their platforms are about political causes and activism when really they just provide perfect opportunities to constantly talk about themselves.”

“And actually, paradoxically, I think all this is a major part of the mental health crisis. This feeling that we are all becoming worse. Our loss of empathy, our lack of regard for others, our neurotic obsession with our own image—it’s taking a toll. […] The conversation can no longer just be about how bad social media is for our mental health. It has to be how bad it is for our humanity.”

“Modernity mined culture of its customs, denied the importance of families, made a mockery of generational wisdom—and then left the door wide open for companies to crawl in and decide what we value. What did we expect when we took down the traditions? When we uprooted our communities? And allowed a generation to be raised by algorithms and the role models it generates for them? And these platforms are always just there, too, reminding us constantly, daily, hourly, that it’s okay to have so little regard for other people. Of course we can all be cruel and selfish and insincere sometimes—but never before in history have we had a portable machine here to promote it. To indulge it. To reward our self-obsession and rename it personal branding, to protect our vanity as #selfexpression, to defend our basest desires “because you owe it to yourself”!”