Hear, hear. I probably warped your clap count by clapping dozens of times.

One point you missed - social media is different from any other media source we've ever had in history because of its similarity to a firehose, and its ability to mutate incredibly fast.

Consider Mike, who is preaching a similar message at the same time as Jesus. Both Mike and Jesus die with a handful of followers and only generations later do we understand that Jesus' message went viral, and Mike's message didn't. Mike is long dead and has no chance to iterate on his message - "Blessed are the cheesemakers".

Fast forward to 2021. Now Mike puts out some memes, and knows in minutes whether they are successful or not. He can even try ten different versions at the same time and see which performs. Instead of waiting generations, he waits minutes.

It's like COVID in the body of an AIDS patient - the message mutates at an astonishing rate until a highly potent package is arrived at.

It might be that humans simply can't handle it. I feel I am aware of the problem and yet I can easily lose an hour when I click on some reddit or Twitter link.

If I were a drinker and I lost big chunks of time to it, my friends would be recommending I get help. But everyone I know experiences the "lost time to social media" phenomenon.

I'm really not sure how we are supposed to deal with this, to be honest. Banning social media seems an obvious non-starter, but we can't be relying on the very people who make money from clicks to try to encourage us not to click.