Facebook OG Sean Parker is starting to regret social network he helped create

What’s the first thing you check when waking up in the morning? Let me guess. Your phone. It might be just to see the time but those pretty notifications caught your eye and now you are in the social media vortex.

There’s nothing you can do about it, you have to check your timeline. It has become habitual to have the social media demons reap your poor little unknowing soul.

I might sound crazy, but I’m right. An app tricks you every day to double tap on your phone screen, or post a status about something insignificant to the rest of the world.

We upload videos of ourselves hoping that someone out there will like it. It’s actual insanity, posting to the same timeline expecting different results, and it makes us feel terrible inside.

You don’t believe me, huh?

After speaking about accelerating cancer innovation at an Axios event, founding president of Facebook, Sean Parker, admitted that his social media platform exploits human psychology.

He lowkey didn’t know his life hacking creation would drastically affect everyone’s lives. Parker is concerned for our children. In the Axios report, he said,

“When Facebook was getting going, I had these people who would come up to me and they would say, ‘I’m not on social media.’ And I would say, ‘OK. You know, you will be.’ And then they would say, ‘No, no, no. I value my real-life interactions. I value the moment. I value presence. I value intimacy.’ And I would say, … ‘We’ll get you eventually.'”

Parker continued,

“I don’t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and … it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other … It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

Research studies know exactly what social media apps like Facebook are doing to our brain. It’s actually fucking up our mental health.

A recent study found that “real-world social networks were positively associated with overall well-being and the use of Facebook was negatively associated with overall well-being.”

Authors of the study Holly B. Shakya and Nicholas A. Christakis found that most measures of Facebook use in one year predicted a decrease in mental health in a later year.

The study also concluded that, “Both liking others’ content and clicking links significantly predicted a subsequent reduction in self-reported physical health, mental health, and life satisfaction.”

It’s no wonder, Parker feels like “a conscientious objector.” He should really feel like an evil genius. Parker also claimed that he and the other founders, Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom, knew that we were creating something addictive.

They wanted to create something that “consumes as much of your time and conscious attention as possible.” Parker told Axios,

“The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'”

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Together they were able to create something that “sort of gives you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you … more likes and comments,” said Parker.

Jesus, we are playing ourselves. Parker calls it the “social-validation feedback loop” that’s fucking up our psyche – seeking validation through a like or a comment.

Let’s not get sucked into the social media vortex. Not even the president of Facebook wants us to. Go outside and turn up with your friends. Actually, call that friend whose pics you’ve been liking.

Life is too short homies, live it up.