I’m probably part of the first generation that grew up on the internet. I created my first social media account - Facebook when I was in middle school. I had heard about Orkut before that but never bothered to create an account because my understanding was that it was meant for ‘older people’, Facebook was the hip thing.

And as they say the rest is history. Posting on your friends walls, checking to see if your crush was online, posting awkward selfies, oh and not to mention there was no ‘mobile app’. Everything was through desktop/laptop. It started innocent enough, social media was a way to stay in touch with your friends, post photos, play Farmville and write emo stuff on your wall.

Even back then, sometimes social media would become too much for me and I was a frequent ‘deactivator’, taking breaks from social media for no apparent reason. If only I knew what a cluster fuck it was going to turn into in the next few years. Fast forward a few years, Instagram was the rage, Facebook was just for ‘boomers’ now. Instagram was the first mobile first social media app. Around this time, something started changing, suddenly social media wasn’t just to stay in touch with your friends, it was all about pages, interests and communities. Communities of people you never met in real life, it was based on shared interests.

Your newsfeed was then hijacked by savvy marketers from corporations, ‘funny’ pages fighting for your attention, PR firms of celebrities, everyone was trying to sell your something. Your click meant dollars for Facebook and for everyone else on the platform. The first influencers were starting to rise.

You didn’t even realize you weren’t getting any posts from your friends on your timeline, those were demoted on your timeline. The algorithm was taking over, infinite scroll was being introduced, just imagine, you’d never ever run out of content to consume! All of this realization is in hindsight, at the time you didn’t even realize what was happening.

Posts became increasingly polarizing as people pushed their own agendas. Internet users realized, for better or worse, that their online posts were having real-life repercussions.

You were the victim, when you were a teenager you innocently signed up because you wanted to chat with your crush and post stupid song lyrics on your wall. But now, you are a dollar amount, a number on a screen, a data point to be optimized.

You just can’t go on an any newsfeed without being triggered now, I don’t know if it is just me who is being too sensitive but I can’t take all of the information being thrown my way. Yes yes, I understand there are things I should care about and raise my voice but at the end of the day there is only so much that you can be fed before you vomit. It is nauseating to scroll social media today, the toxicity, the drama, the vile comments, abuse, racism, ‘dark’ jokes, echo chambers all of this paints a pretty grim picture of the world. You know the worst part? I still can’t stop scrolling, I know its affecting me but I can’t stop. I have been conditioned to get those dopamine hits for a greater part of the last decade.

I miss the innocence of the early social media days, maybe its just me wearing the rose tinted glasses of nostalgia. But I can’t be the only one who thinks something has to change here. Certainly none of this looks sustainable.

It worries me to see younger folks get into social media in its current state. Being the first generation, we were the lab rats but now it has been optimally weaponized to draw maximum blood.