The world is waiting for your participation

Extractive economics. Would we be better off without TikTok? Without Facebook or Instagram?

Congress is considering banning TikTok because the Chinese government has access to the detailed personal data of 150 million Americans. Imagine, life without TikTok!

Put aside for a moment the debate of whether TikTok is a national security concern. Seriously, what would happen if TikTok was banned? If TikTok (or indeed any other social media platform) didn’t exist, would we be better, or worse, off?

Extractive economics

A forced sale of TikTok would be worth somewhere between $40 billion and $100 billion. But why is TikTok worth $40-$100 billion?

It’s not the technology or the algorithm. $40-$100 billion is the value of the time and attention of 150 million Americans give to the platform, an average of 95 minutes per day (over 1.5 hours). The average user opens the TikTok app 8 times per day. That is what advertisers are willing to pay for: extracting 95 minutes a day from 150 million people. Remember, TikTok’s customers are not the users, the advertisers are. If you’re paying for it, you are not the customer, you are the product. Social media (and media in general) is simply a vehicle for transferring people’s time and attention from themselves to influencers and advertisers.

What would happen if TikTok didn’t exist? The 95 minutes a day would be given back to users. To extend it further to other other social media companies:

• Facebook extracts an average of 33 minutes each day from people.

• Youtube takes an average of 19 minutes daily.

• Users spend an average of 30 minutes per day on Snapchat.

• Instagram users are spending an average of 29 minutes on the platform daily

• Pinterest users are on only 14.2 minutes every day.

• An average person spends 2 hours and 31 minutes daily on social media.

The average American adult’s screen time is 8.5 hours a day. The average teen’s daily screen time is 9 hours.¹ MIT professor Alan Lightman talks us voluntarily becoming “prisoner(s) of the wired world.” He says,

“We have let ourselves be pushed along by the wave of technology and prosperity without looking to see where we are going. Little by little, our world, we have lost our silences, the needed time for contemplation, the open spaces in our minds, the privacies we once had.”

According to Professor Lightman, the ability to hear one’s inner self is “true freedom.” As any SOFF alumni knows, this interior freedom is the whole point of Financial Freedom. The more valuable social media companies get, the greater poverty of what we really want: the ownership of our own time and attention.

Avoiding discomfort by staying busy

It’s hard to get off social media, or to drastically cut screen time. I know: even though I largely went off social media five years ago, I still spend 7-8 hours a day in front of a TV, computer screen, mobile phone, or tablet.

I contrast that to when I was a kid, my parents restricted me to 30 minutes of TV a day, and there were no other screens. Imagine this: 70 years ago, there was no such thing as a screen.² And now we spend more than half our waking lives in front of one.

I use screens to avoid discomfort. Even beyond the digital world, I stay busy because means I don’t have to be present to uncomfortable feelings inside myself.³ I think most people do too. Blaise Pascal’s once wrote, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” We constantly have to doing something. We watch TV shows, or listen to podcasts, or read articles, or play sports, shop, work, dig in the garden, read, go on hikes. All of these things are types of engagement, which is on one level a good thing. But all of these things are also ways to avoid coming face to face with ourselves.

A lot of my students say that if they achieved FF, they would just be. “Being instead of doing” sounds like a very nice thing. But just being without doing is much more difficult and uncomfortable than we want to admit; what we really want is to replace one set of doing with another set of doing. Our addiction to doing is the desire to avoid having to be at home with ourselves.

If we stopped everything, and literally did nothing, we’d encounter what the Buddhist psychotherapist Mark Epstein calls, the normal everyday trauma of feeling like one doesn’t belong, is separate, and isn’t safe. We’ll do anything to avoid that. But go through that, all the way through, there is a prize. My friends who do ten-day meditation retreats talk about the waves of physical, emotional, mental discomfort that comes from just sitting. Boredom. Panic attacks. Resurfacing uncomfortable memories. Physical pain. One friend said that, after a few days, she wanted to crawl out of her skin. And on the other side, clarity. Presence. A sense of being outside time, mental activity, and emotional sensation. Joy. A promise to continue meditating. A backsliding from that promise. After all, the entertainment of digital world beckons, the distracting busyness of base reality calls (haha).

What is wealth?

If we’re spending 8 hours a day on a screen, what are we not doing? What were we doing before that has been lost?

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, radical educator Paolo Freire makes that point that more police stations does not mean more safety, more hospitals doesn’t mean better health, and a bigger army doesn’t mean more national security. This sounds obvious, yet we constantly build more police stations, hospitals, and armies thinking it will give us more safety, health, and national security.⁴

Following that, more economic activity doesn’t mean more wealth. A toxic spill in Ohio actually creates jobs and more spending. So will more cancer treatments for those affected. But an increase in our national monetary wealth does not mean we’re actually wealthier. More examples:

• Sending your child to daycare creates more GDP, but raising your child at home does not.

• Buying new clothes or the latest iPhone creates more GDP but taking care of your current one does not.

• Going on a vacation to take a break from your high stress job creates more GDP, but living simply and stepping off the hamster wheel does not.⁵

Just because something can be monetized doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good. In fact, what creates “value” for companies is often something extracted from people. Buying or using the product is often just converting our unmonetized time, presence, and attention (labor or consumption) into money, and giving it to a large multi-national corporation which will do something you have ethical objections to (child labor in Asia, toxic dumping in Africa, autocratic dictatorships in both, environmental degradation everywhere). As Professor Lightman says, we’re being carried on this wave of technology and “prosperity” without looking to see where we are going.

99% of everything that is made ends up in landfill after 6 months. We’re spending our lives making trash. Just to avoid and distract ourselves from what’s really happening inside.

Off the screen

If all of social media disappeared tomorrow, Americans would have 2.5 more hours a day for themselves. And about a trillion dollars of market cap would be wiped out. Would losing that trillion dollars be a net loss for society, or a net gain?

For the last 10 years, I’ve had a commitment to be outside 2.5 hours a day (oddly equivalent to what the average person spends on social media). Have a dog that demands a lot of exercise helps: we go on three walks a day.

I chose 2.5 hours because it is 10% of the day, and I wanted to commit to 10% of every day being outside. It’s mostly worked. Lately, I’ve been thinking of committing to limiting screen time to 5 hours a day. That’s 20% of my day. Spending five hours a day is a lot compared to my 30 minutes a day as a child, but a step down from the 8 hours a day I’m doing now.

If you were to set a minimum of time to spend outside every day, how long would it be? Or a maximum amount of time to be in front of a device? The point of these disciplines is not a pious exercise of the morally superior. Nor are they virtuous in themselves. No, instead they are ways of creating space for what you really want: a sense of deep, embodied aliveness in the world. A connection with the mystery of the world around us. My friend and Methodist minister Jimmy Marsh makes the distinction between “good fruit” and “bad fruit.” He says that we have “a deep hunger for something we do not know. We’re eating bad fruit and wondering why we’re not satiated. It’s time we ate good fruit.” The disciplines are a way of not eating bad fruit, so you still have appetite for good fruit.

My friend Patricia Ryan Madson describes the joys of limitation in Japanese tea:

"Those who study the Japanese tea ceremony learn the concept of “tea talk.” Guests know that inside the teahouse one must speak only about what is inside the house. Even polite discussion of the news, social or political events, or personal issues is forbidden, including complaining about the heat or mentioning any discomfort. Instead, the guest is invited to pay attention to the detail of what is present at that moment—the scroll in the alcove, the flower in the vase, the kind of sweet that was chosen to be served along with the bitter, frothy green tea. What is spoken is meant to be a reminder of the unique character of the event. The tea saying Ichi go, ichi ei means “One time, one meeting.” This particular gathering will never happen again. Live it now. Savor the detail."

Choose the limitations that create the most joy. Get off the device.⁶ Limit TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. Delete Twitter. Do nothing and feel your discomfort. Get outside. Savor the detail.

Stop eating the bad fruit so you can eat the good fruit. Live it now. The world waiting for your participation.

1. Janis Whitlock, director of the Cornell Research Program on Self-Injury and Recovery, says young people are “in a cauldron of stimulus that they can’t get away from, or don’t want to get away from, or don’t know how to get away from.” Same with adults?

2. Astoundingly, 30 years ago, people used to go to work before computers and email.

3. In FF1, we talk about it as hypoarousal.

4. And, most importantly for Freire, more schools doesn’t mean better education.

5. Nerd talk: interestingly, spending in all these examples also creates a taxable event for the government, but not spending creates no tax revenue.

6. Ironic!