Short form video is a cancer of the mind
If you don't yet feel disgust when you see people (or yourself) watching SFV, you should. Here's some research if you need it.
I previously wrote how short form video, TikTok and Instagram in particular, are intellectual poison (and even more so for the youth).
Academics have since published new research here, and it’s worth talking about because it confirms the intuition many have felt. I didn’t need a research report to make my previous post (although I did link to some citations) because I walk around and observe things with my eyes which are plainly true, but it’s good to see social scientists spend more time here.
Anyway, this report systematically reviews and analyzes 71 studies involving over 98,000 participants to examine how short-form video (SFV) use (across popular platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts) affects cognitive and mental health outcomes.
The findings provide a comprehensive overview of SFV’s impact on attention, emotional health, and broader behavioral implications, here are just a few items I pulled from the report (emphasis mine).
SFV use is linked to poorer cognitive performance, with the strongest deficits in attention and inhibitory control, suggesting users struggle to focus and suppress impulses.
Frequent exposure to fast-paced, highly rewarding SFV content may rewire attention systems, fostering “rapid disengagement” from tasks that are slower or require sustained effort, reducing cognitive endurance over time.
SFV use is associated with poorer overall mental health, with the strongest links to stress and anxiety, indicating consistent emotional strain among heavier users.
Heavy SFV use reinforces impulsive engagement loops driven by dopamine rewards, contributing to compulsive scrolling and difficulty disengaging, patterns resembling behavioral addiction.
Short-form video consumption is associated with poorer sleep quality, especially when used at night, due to overstimulation and blue light disrupting melatonin, which can worsen mood and cognitive functioning.
Higher SFV use correlates with increased loneliness and reduced life satisfaction, as digital interactions replace real-world social connection for some users.
Negative effects occur across both youth and adults, meaning the cognitive and emotional risks of SFV use are not limited to developing brains; adults experience similar declines and mental health associations.
If you just read just the parts I highlighted, all this is indistinguishable from an addiction to a hard drug. Now consider how many kids (and adults!) use these applications (reasonable estimate of use of under 40 cohort in America is ~75-80%) and you begin to understand and appreciate the scale of the issue. When combined with the amount of propaganda, financial FOMO/envy, and political outrage delivered through them it’s compounded worse than you can imagine. It’s even helping tear young men and women apart.
There is just so little of redeemable value using SFV. You can’t imagine someone like a future Nobel prize-winning scientist or acclaimed author spending much if any time here, it’s truly a media format for anesthetized, demoralized and nihilistic people, not those who change the world or even just live a present life.
Separately but related, UC San Diego just released a new report documenting a “steep decline in the academic preparedness” of its freshmen. The number of entering students needing remedial math has exploded from 1/100 to 1/8. It’s so bad they had to create a second remedial class covering elementary and middle school math skills in addition to the one covering gaps from high school.
As a Twitter user pointed out, you can pretty clearly see the growth of when remedial math took off x-major from the report coincides with the release of Instagram reels:
You could definitely say it’s a combination of things, including the pandemic, but combined with the data above and common sense on what we already know about SFV habits, these things are not a coincidence. It’s an unbelievable amount of cope to believe otherwise.
If we have kids I wouldn’t let them near short form video apps. I don’t personally have these on my phone and have developed a pretty strong disgust reflex seeing anyone use them. It’s just such an incredible waste of one’s life. Get some hobbies. Go out and socialize without phones. Watch a movie on a large screen or at home uninterrupted. Read a book.
This is your life, and it’s ending one moment at a time. Don’t waste more than is absolutely necessary staring at your mobile device, it’s killing your creativity and draining your potential. You can feel the negative aura of people who can’t put them down when you’re around them. And I know you still likely want to use computers. That’s great, the solution is return to how we used them in the 90s: compute at your workstation, then leave it there and be present while away. This is healthy behavior, the phone is what makes it compulsive and such a bad habit.
As Noah Smith said, so many of our issues are probably from the phones. And it’s quite clearly the silly short form video apps in particular that are the issue with the most people, and the dose certainly makes the poison (people are spending hours per day on them). We weren’t meant to live like this, glued to tiny devices passively consuming video in unergonomic positions like degenerate addicts. Future humans will wonder what we were thinking.
Short-form video is like beer: one or two is great, then suddenly you’re ten deep, half-conscious, scrolling in a digital fugue state until you wake up nauseous and ashamed—only to reach for the very thing that positively wrecked you just to feel normal again.
Once in awhile someone will send me a clip that's worth watching, but most SFV I see is dumb and marginally entertaining at best. Like the reason people watch it is the same reason George Costanza gives ty NBC exec who asks why anyone would watch a show about nothing. "Because it's on."