Escape the Feed
I recently spoke about this with friends, and I thought I would write it down to cristallize it and help others.
For the past 4 or 5 years, I've gradually eradicated all the feeds from my life, and it's done me an enormous amount of good.
The Problem
When people talk about smartphone addiction, social media addiction, or internet addiction, I think these days 99% of it is feeds. By feeds, I mean any kind of interface that gives you more and more content to consume, usually using a recommendation algorithm. The infinite aspect of it is important.
I still remember the early days of facebook/twitter/others, when your "feed" or homepage was just a list of your friends' posts, and when you were all caught up, that was it. Then, the feeds became infinite, recommending you things that had less and less to do with your actual social network, and more and more to do with keeping you engaged. The same thing happened when YouTube changed the homepage from a subscriptions list to random algorithmic recommendations.
When I was using these feeds (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, ...), I would often spend hours scrolling or watching, after planning to spend only a few minutes. I remember many evenings when I ended up angry at myself for wasting so much time, especially since (in retrospect) the content was mostly useless.
The reason this happens to us is because of novelty. Each piece of content is a new bit of information for the brain to process. The constant novelty keeps us anticipating the next thing. And there will always be a next thing, thanks to the sheer volume of content uploaded per minute. This anticipation is (in my experience) what keeps us hooked since it drives us to scroll down, or click on the next video. This is related to dopamine, which plays a role in motivation and gives you that "I want it" feeling, especially when the next outcome is random (see gambling addiction, Skinner boxes, ...). I'm not a neuroscience expert, so I won't go into more detail on the science for now.
The Solution(s)
So how can we escape? Well, the most radical solutions include going fully offline, getting rid of your phone, using a "dumb" phone, etc. The problem is, phones and the internet can be genuinely useful. On top of that, they can be a straight up requirement for jobs or other aspects of life. The approach I've taken is more realistic, but still impartial: keep the phone, remove all feeds.
In some cases, this can mean getting rid of your account or app entirely. I've done this for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and probably others I don't remember. They just weren't giving me anything of value, so I dropped them.
In other cases, it's not so easy. For example, I follow and participate in communities on YouTube that bring me a lot of genuine joy and/or knowledge. For a long time YouTube was the last place where I was still engaging with a feed. The YouTube recommendation algorithm is insidious. It often recommends videos that are useful, and can highlight niche artistic content that would have been hard to find otherwise. But in the end, the content itself is not the problem. The algorithm is. The infinite loop is. There are ways to use YouTube without engaging with the algorithm: NewPipe, FreeTube, the Unhook browser extension. Give them a shot!
I'm repeating myself here, but the content is not the problem. The algorithms are.
It can be easy to rationalize your use of a certain feed with something like "I found this really useful recipe the other day!" or "This recommended music video is very artistic!". These are genuinely good outcomes, but how many useless/stupid/controversial/inflammatory things did you have to scroll through to reach them? Is it really worth it in the long run? Worth the time? Worth the accumulated mental cost?
Besides, there will always be content you'll miss out on, whether you engage with the feed or not. There are other ways to discover things, like recommendations from friends or random people online.
Be nice to yourself. Escape the feed.
Resources
Edit: PewDiePie made a video about this topic that pretty much matches up with my experience https://youtu.be/5nL-Eq1lpDU