About a week ago, on my day off from work, I was in a car with a friend and we were stuck in traffic when something interesting happened.

When we hit the traffic, my friend instantly took out his phone and opened Instagram to watch some videos. It was interesting because we weren’t even fully stopped when he pulled out his phone from his pocket and he did that while still driving.

I was worried about our safety at that time but what concerned me more later was that is social media, specially short and random material like those on Instagram, making us impatient? I was interested in that and tried to watch my friends more carefully. Most of them had YouTube and Instagram installed on their phones and I realized how much people are addicted to these materials.

And I tried to further my semi-investigation by trying to show them a longer video, about 20 minutes long, and surprisingly they got impatient about 8 minutes in. They also have problem watching movies, I realized. Can’t put away their phones without constantly checking their notifications, messaging people, or even checking short videos. WHILE WATCHING THE MOVIE!

This semi-experiment made me concerned because I like to watch these random short videos sometimes. Of course I don’t have Instagram or any other social network on my devices so I think I’m less affected but it still made me worried.

So now I try to watch less of these videos, read more books and articles, and watch movies without checking my phone. I try to avoid opening YouTube links, avoid random short meaningless material, and even write more to take my mind off things.

It’s really worrying how toxic these social networks can be. Aside from the material we see on them, the impact they have on our brain is stressing.