Hi friends 👋
We’re finally here. This is one of the bigger pieces of that change I’ve been talking about for a while. Meet Intersection.
So, I’ve been sending you emails [almost] every Sunday for more than three years, and during this time, things have changed. Hell, I have changed, and so did my newsletter.
During the past few months, I was getting the feeling that the content creation side of the newsletter, which by the way is now called Pulse again, needs a different type of attention and ends up building this pressure for me to write, which sometimes doesn’t happen, as this is not my fulltime job, and that can hold the curation side of it back. It does causes anxiety as well, but that’s for another day.
So, I decided to spin off the creation side of Pulse under the name Intersection, exploring the intersections of media, technology, and business with longer and more in-depth pieces.
Now, let’s get to today’s intersection: social media and our [mental] health
There is a widespread belief that social media is unhealthy and can have adverse side effects on our mental health, which I totally understand and sometimes agree with. However, there’s another argument against that, which can be pretty difficult to ignore: what if the problem isn’t social media? What if we are the problem, and social media is merely a tool or a reflection of our reality?
To be fair, both sides have compelling arguments, and here I’d like to look at a few examples of them.
On the one hand, there are people like Mark Miller, a philosopher of cognition, and Ben White, a neuroscience researcher, who believe that the unrealistic world presented on social media can give us a distorted sense of our environment and ourselves — and that’s quite unhealthy.
On the other end of the spectrum, many people, such as Mark Manson, the American writer and blogger, believe that social media has not corrupted us. In fact, it’s only revealing who we always were.
So, let’s have a look at the different sides of the argument.
Social media, anxiety, self-image — and the illusion
In an article, Mark Miller and Ben White explain how social media causes anxiety and distress using a new theory known as predictive processing. In this theory, the brain is considered a ‘prediction engine.’ This engine constantly attempts to predict the sensory signals it receives from the world to minimise the ‘prediction error’ between those predictions and the incoming signal (the reality). Over time, this creates a ‘generative model’ of our understanding of the statistical regularities in our environment that’s used to generate those predictions.
This mental model works to minimise the prediction errors in two ways:
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updating the generative model, or
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behaving in a way that brings the world more in line with the prediction it’s had.
Either way, the plan is to move from uncertainty to certainty to keep well and safe.
An example would be this: to be considered healthy, the body temperature is expected to be 37℃. A shift from that to either side is an error in
