Social media as the unhealthiest form of recreation #

I think social media is the unhealthiest form of recreation. It has this virality and normality that people don't consider it as unhealthy(similar to my previous article on how Caffeine is normalised). When you contrast it against other forms of recreation... this becomes clear. Contrasted against anime(even if it's rubbish) anime still commands an unbroken attention span of 20 minutes. The same can be said of cartoons. Meanwhile social media wrecks your attention span. This goes doubly so for movies, and triply so for books, comic books and graphic novels.

Even compared to video gaming, which I think is one of those activities that can become all-consuming in a person's life... I think gaming is a more productive form of recreation as you're a willing actor within the game which is itself a kind of activity, and I also think it commands a high unbroken attention span. This is especially true for some genres(Puzzle games, Strategy games etc).

With the way Social Media absolutely wrecks attention spans, is normalised and with how long people spend on it... I think it's far more unhealthy than even gaming(which gaming I think is easy to demonise in this regard).

And then you also have other forms of recreation... walks, hiking, playing board games, playing classical games like tennis and football... I'll skip over these as it should be trivial how they are healthier.

As a proxy measurement, I will use the amount of time people spend on a smartphone to be roughly how long they spend on social media, as I think most social media is consumed via smartphone(see links for source). It is 4 hours and 37 minutes on average. I think that's pretty unhealthy...

Regarding the title, it's an oxymoron. There's obviously more unhealthy forms of recreation. Drug abuse, alcohol abuse, chain smoking etc... I've skipped over these because they're obviously bad for health.

Links #

Smartphone usage stats

Published on 2025/06/02