Stoic #3: How Stoicism Can Help Us Navigate the Social Media
If Seneca or Marcus Aurelius still lives, this is how they would handle social media.
In the third series of Stoic, I will explain how to apply the principles of Stoic Philosophy to navigate modern life, mainly when dealing with social media. As social media is a crucial component of modern society, it is essential to understand how to handle it properly.
Before we go further, you can read the previous posts on Stoic about Prospective Retrospection and Negative Visualization.
The Internet has been one of our best innovations, enabling us to connect with more people than ever before. The Internet also provides more access to information that overflows the world we live in. It was much harder for Stoics to find and learn from each other in the past since they were scattered across different locations. Before the Internet came along, the past Stoics would have gone through life without encountering another fellow Stoics in their lifetime.
With the advent of the Internet, Stoic philosophy gained much popularity, leading to the current Stoic Renaissance. Prominent figures such as Ryan Holiday, Massimo Pigliucci, Donald Robertson, and William B. Irvine have been discussing and spreading the teachings of Stoicism to many people.
Unfortunately, the innovation of the Internet also comes with some drawbacks that we could not anticipate before. It disseminates misinformation and disinformation that can harm our well-being. The Internet plays a key role in polluting the information environment, especially with social media. This phenomenon would definitely trouble the stoic.
As we know, the primary objective of the stoic is to have a good life. Such a life would be comprised of good days, leaving us to wonder, “What makes a day good?”
According to Stoics, a good day would be one where you experience a few negative and abundant positive emotions, including delight, awe, and joy. Eventually, a good day would direct us into a time well spent.
Time well spent
Some argue that time well spent is when our days are spent pleasantly. Still, the stoic has an opposite argument, as pleasant is associated with pleasure. Stoics do not like pleasure because they know it has the power to lead us all far away astray. They knew that pleasure, after a time, would lead us to a miserable experience. For example, the devastating life of a drug addict.
But it doesn’t mean you can’t spend some moments doing something pleasant, like spending time with your loved ones, walking in the park, cooking and enjoying your meal, or helping people in need.
Additionally, time well spent involves doing something unpleasant, such as a workout. A workout is considered an unpleasant activity because we challenge ourselves to do something hard that demands much power to overcome obstacles, including lifting heavier weights, running for longer distances, moving faster, and surviving through pain and suffering. On doing it, we know it is a part of self-improvement that can make us stronger and help us prepare for any life challenges that may come to our lives.
Time squandered
The opposite of time well spent is time squandered. It is when we pass the time mindlessly, without any set of goals and directions involving something like playing a slot machine, consuming alcohol, using drugs, watching random videos on YouTube, playing games, and mindlessly scrolling through social media.
As the time is a precious limited commodity, why would anyone spend the time mindlessly?
It is because an easy way out.
Allow me to explain.
To have time well spent, you need a vision to know what time well spent is according to your values. It requires an effort to do that many people are reluctant to spend. On top of it, even if you know your vision, there’s a chance that you might not be able to attain it. It’s a risk many people don’t want to take. This risk can be daunting, and many avoid it altogether by not setting any goals or visions for their time. Instead, they may resort to mindlessly scrolling through social media or engaging in other unfulfilling activities, which may feel good at the moment but ultimately lead to regret and dissatisfaction.
How YouTube tricks us
If Seneca were still alive, he would remind us of the danger of spending time online, particularly on YouTube. This is not to say that YouTube is all bad, but we need to understand how spending time mindlessly on YouTube will prevent us away from a time well spent to time squandered.
We are all the victims of YouTube's scrolling algorithm.
We move from one cute kitten video to another and another without us noticing. Thanks to YouTube's auto-suggest feature, another video is queued in line even before we finish a video, making us drown for hours in the pool of random videos we mindlessly watch.
YouTube studies our watching behavior so we can stay on YouTube for a longer time. We pay for our time on YouTube while they make millions of dollars from advertisers by tricking us into watching more videos daily.
I'm not saying you should stop watching YouTube videos, but ask yourself if watching some random YouTube videos is a time well spent. If the answer is no, then you know that is not how you spend your time.
What Stoic says about social media
Practicing Stoicism doesn't preclude us from having fun. Seneca had been known as both a partygoer and a giver. Such behavior is compatible if we spend the bulk of our time wisely. The trick is we have to understand how to draw a line appropriately.
Stoics knew that humans are social animals. We seek approval from others. It hurts if, as a result, people disapprove of us, but in turn, we feel good if they admire us. Unless we are careful with approval-seeking behavior, we will live our lives chasing approval from others. It can be dangerous for our well-being because we are not honest with ourselves. It is also a never-ending game.
The stoic did care about what other people think of them. But, they are good at selecting which people they listen to. Epictetus cares about what Musonius thinks of him. Ryan Holiday would care about what Marcus Aurelius thinks of him. I would care about what Marcus Aurelius and Ryan Holiday feel about me. The Stoic is selective in narrowing the noise. They don't allow random society to tell them what to do or feel. They have a small group of people they admire to listen to.
When we use social media like Instagram or X, our social desire for approval looms large. We might post about our parties last night on Instagram or our luxury vacations in Amalfi, Italy. We paint the prettiest pictures of our lives there even though they contradict our reality. Similarly, on X, we spend 280 characters to show how much we care about the world.
Without realizing it, we engage in an activity called virtue signaling. By artificially building our false images on social media, we seek approval from others, give us comments and likes, and make us feel good to keep doing it all over again like a rat on cocaine. As we crave more approvals, our followers grow largely; we no longer seek approval from our friends or family; we seek approval from random strangers.
Isn't it sad that random strangers are steering our wheels and deciding where we should go? We don't notice that we have been hijacked. We no longer know what time well-spent means because we no longer sit in the driver's seat. This can have a profound impact on how we spend our time.
Social media fasting
We know how noisy the Internet is. It may have been a while since the last time we gave our thoughts a chance to fully immerse ourselves in a full life experience without social media coming into the picture. It is time to regain that consciousness back in place.
It's time for you to experiment by doing social media fast. Uninstall all social media on your phone, such as Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, TikTok, etc. I had done it last year for 10 days when I was doing Vipassana Meditation. I also have another plan to do it later as well.
Try for a week and see how it feels.
Notice where your time will be spent when social media is no longer at the tip of your thumb. You may be spending more time walking at the park, eating your lunch/dinner mindfully without having to check your IG if someone likes your posts, reading more books, practicing your singing, connecting with friends in real life, and reflecting on what is the improved version of would be like.
It might be your first step to move toward a time well spent. You might completely remove your social media life and take full control of your life.