misery, inc: how news feeds exploit your brain chemistry and how to break free

Misery not only loves company, it's profitable. And today's social media made it a multi-billion dollar business by hijacking a quirk of our brain chemistry.

You probably don’t feel great about the state of the world today. Yes, that was meant as a statement rather than a question. Globally, we are all more stressed out, anxious, and pessimistic than we have been in a very long time. As much as a third of humanity says they haven’t had so much as positive experience the day before when asked. Yet this is in stark contrast with facts and figures showing that this is, objectively, far from the worst time to be alive and what we’re experiencing now is just a realignment. We’ll definitely be in history books but certainly not as one of the darkest chapters. But this prompts the question of why exactly we’re so miserable.

Like with almost all bad things in our lives right now, the answer is predatory attention-seeking. News, social media, and politics are full of awful stories. Tune in to your local news to hear how everything in your home is just waiting to kill you. Tune in to national news to learn why the country you live in is about to collapse, its economy is on the verge of failure. Listen to an overzealous politicians’ stump speech and you’ll be told that your government is ran by either lunatics or Satanic child-eating pedophiles who are actually in league with a cabal of alien lizard demon Jews. (American politics are fun, aren’t they?) And social media… Whoo boy.

Conspiracy theories thrive across Facebook, driven by pages Meta is well aware are self-radicalization engines but refuses to shut down. Instagram is now routinely filled with countless snake oil scams from health and fitness influencers leading their fans into aggressive science denial for a profit. Twitter under Elon Musk routinely boosts fascists, posts big brands’ ad content next to straight up Nazi propaganda, and has recently threatened to sue a Jewish group monitoring anti-Semitism for lost revenue because they highlighted these predicaments in ways that got the attention of major news sites that then proceeded to dig deeper and say that Nazis are bad.

Oh, good, so TikTok is safe, right? Unfortunately, no. If you happen to make it through certain videos without immediately swiping past them enough times, you’ll get a front row seat to toxic gender warriors about as likable as a surprise rectal search offering tutorials on how to be a narcissistic nightmare to future partners, or ridiculing those who do while offering advice every bit as terrible from the other side of the spectrum. Even if you weren’t on the dating market, an hour of this will either want to make you seriously consider staying single forever, or fall to your knees and thank whatever you want to thank for a relationship that’s (hopefully) keeping you off dating apps.

why your brain makes you watch junk

Now, at this point, you might be wondering why anyone would watch and read things that make them miserable and angry. Why not just close and uninstall the app? Well, it really isn’t as simple as that because you’re going to be undermined in those efforts by your own brain. No, really. Your mind is very much a pessimist that sees its job not as keeping you happy and mentally healthy, but alive and aware. A molecule known as neurotensin determines if your memories are encoded as positive or negative, and the brain might be predisposed towards assigning more memories as negative because it skimps out on emitting neurotensin when it can.

Basically, what that means is that your brain evolved in such a way that punishment or fear takes less work to process and encode than rewards and fun. It sounds bizarre at first blush, but consider that being far more aware of negative experiences along with just a touch of paranoia would increase your chances of survival in a dangerous world full of poisonous plants, predators, and equally brainy competitors, and therefore, the improved odds of passing on genes for these predispositions to your offspring. Who would also be more likely to survive and also pass on these genes. Fast forward a few thousand generations, and slight pessimism is now humanity’s default setting.

Drama, fear, stories about threats real and imagined, conspiracies that paint us as the targets, scandals, and tales of misery, woe, and recrimination tug at our lizard brains, the emotional stress they create triggering the same circuits that are responsible for our pessimistic lean. We feel compelled to rubberneck and follow along even if we’re loath to admit it in public as our survival instinct kicks in. Are we in danger? Should we be worried? How do we avoid the same problems? Is there anything we can learn from this so if this does happen to us, we make out better? In many cases, fear even forms the impenetrable bedrock of people’s political beliefs and worldviews.

Even more insidiously, we’re also often attracted to what’s been often called “trauma porn,” or a genre of stories centered around people’s worst life experiences through a mix of our innate empathy and the aforementioned pessimistic drive. We both feel for the subjects of the stories — especially if they’re firsthand accounts by the authors — and captivated by wondering how we would handle a similarly terrible situation as our survival mode kicks in under the surface. Worse yet, few of these stories have happy endings and often manage to re-traumatize its writers and subjects every time they go viral or get media coverage to both monetize and weaponize these tales.

breaking the misery cycle with one simple trick

Now, we can address the next big question. Why sell fear, hate, and misery? Money is the first obvious answer, of course, but there’s more to it. It’s also a lack of empathy, a profound indifference to long term consequences, and an incentive structure where truth is immediately discarded in favor of easy ad dollars because this is the only way to get enough revenue to keep the lights on and investors at bay. Media outlets know that fear and outrage get clicks, that getting people to subscribe for premium access is extremely difficult, and that if revenue falls short of aggressive expectations, even a profitable outlet could find itself making painful cuts.

Meanwhile, algorithms that insert ads into your feed see that you’re clicking away on fear and anxiety inducing headlines, and disproportionately interact with conspiracy theories whether you agree or not, and keep this content coming. Not because it’s a good idea, or good for you, but because it makes money for the people who own the platform and expect figures to justify the desired market value of their investments. In other words, your brain’s pessimistic nature and focus on survival over mental health is being exploited thousands of times every day to make money via ads thrown at you while your attention is held captive.

But that does mean that it’s relatively simple to break this pattern. Don’t click. Don’t watch. Don’t engage. Install an ad blocker. Financially support writers and creators who try to educate and entertain you rather than terrify and propagandize you on a regular basis. If the appeal to pessimism and fear no longer makes for steadily rising profits, it will be abandoned for something else. To reach the people responsible for turning the news into an orgy of misery, paranoia, and exploitation you need to speak in the one and only language they actually understand: money. And according to the research, your mental health will be all the better for it in every possible way.

Even more encouraging, it seems that we’re already realizing and internalizing these lessons. On Meta’s answer to The Platform Formally Known As Twitter, Threads, a lot of users encourage each other to swiftly block and mute the professional trolls and agitators who have infested every other platform and are profiting from making their followers angry and miserable. Large, centralized social media platforms seem to be entering decline and their counterparts focused on building communities and group chats are taking off. After over a decade being scared and exploited for clicks, we’re starting to push back. All we need to do now is to push back even harder.

See: Li, H., Namburi, P. et al. (2022) Neurotensin orchestrates valence assignment in the amygdala. Nature 608, 586–592 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04964-y

Faulhaber, M. E. et al. (2023). The Effect of Self-Monitoring Limited Social Media Use on Psychological Well-Being. Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 4(2: Summer 2023). DOI: 10.1037/tmb0000111