I was thinking about social media and validation earlier. There's only so much social validation/attention to go around. Before social media, a person couldn't get all that much. Social media makes it seem like that's hundreds of times as much to be given, and people live in a dream world where they post things and all these people read it and are blown away by it (by likes). In reality, it's just people looking at it for two seconds and clicking like. This must be a core point of it, to give a simulation of social interaction and validation, and to give it to so many people. It lifts them, but in an artificial way so that it doesn't motivate them to do actual good and useful things. I hijacks this system. Maybe it's good to be depressed or lonely, frustrated, etc. and then respond to that with actions that actually fix the problems.
I was thinking about social media and validation earlier. There's only so much social validation/attention to go around. Before social media, a person couldn't get all that much. Social media makes it seem like that's hundreds of times as much to be given, and people live in a dream world where they post things and all these people read it and are blown away by it (by likes). In reality, it's just people looking at it for two seconds and clicking *like*. This must be a core point of it, to give a simulation of social interaction and validation, and to give it to so many people. It lifts them, but in an artificial way so that it doesn't motivate them to do actual good and useful things. I hijacks this system. Maybe it's good to be depressed or lonely, frustrated, etc. and then respond to that with actions that actually fix the problems.
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