That title probably sounds dramatic. Maybe it is. But spend an hour scrolling through social media and tell me I’m completely wrong.

Social media was supposed to connect us. It was going to democratize information, expose us to new ideas, allow ordinary people to communicate with people all over the world, and give individuals and small businesses access to audiences that were once available only to large corporations. And to be fair, it has done all of those things.

I’ve benefited from social media myself. It helped me build my business, reach people all over the world, share information, sell products, and make connections I never would have made otherwise. So this isn’t coming from someone who thinks technology is evil or wishes we could return to 1985. Although some days 1985 doesn’t sound too bad.

The problem isn’t that social media created the worst aspects of human nature. The problem is that it created a business model that rewards them.

Anger gets attention. Outrage gets attention. Fear gets attention. Conflict gets attention. Narcissism gets attention. Humiliation gets attention. Extreme opinions get attention. Nuance? Not so much. “I can understand both sides of this issue and I need more information before forming an opinion” isn’t exactly going viral.

The algorithms aren’t designed to make you wiser, happier, healthier, or more thoughtful. They’re designed to keep you engaged. And unfortunately, some of the easiest ways to keep human beings engaged are to piss them off, frighten them, make them jealous, or give them someone to hate. We’ve essentially constructed a gigantic psychological experiment and handed the controls to algorithms whose primary objective is to make sure we don’t put our phones down.

One of the strangest things about social media is how much of life has become a performance. People don’t just go on vacation anymore. They have to document the vacation. They don’t just eat a meal. They photograph it. They don’t just work out. They have to make sure everyone knows they worked out. They don’t just help someone. Sometimes they film themselves helping someone so millions of strangers can see what a compassionate person they are.

We’ve reached the point where people can barely experience something without simultaneously thinking about how the experience will look online. I say this as someone who has posted thousands of times over the years. I’ve promoted workouts, articles, products, dogs, meals, opinions, and probably plenty of other things nobody needed to see. I’m not standing outside the phenomenon pretending I’m above it. I’ve participated in it. That’s partly why I recognize how ridiculous it can become.

There have always been narcissistic people. Social media didn’t invent narcissism. What it did was give narcissism analytics. Now you can measure exactly how much attention you received. Likes. Followers. Views. Shares. Comments. Your popularity has a scoreboard.

And once attention becomes measurable, people inevitably start optimizing for it. The incentive is no longer simply to have something worthwhile to say. The incentive is to say whatever generates the greatest reaction. That helps explain why social media increasingly rewards extremes. Being reasonable doesn’t generate nearly as much engagement as being furious. A person saying, “This is a complicated issue” isn’t particularly interesting. A person screaming, “EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS A LIE!” has a promising career ahead of them.

Another bizarre development is the disappearance of intellectual humility. People used to be able to say, “I don’t know.” That’s apparently unacceptable now. Everyone has an immediate opinion about economics, war, medicine, nutrition, hormones, psychology, relationships, artificial intelligence, geopolitics, investing, and whatever else happens to be trending that afternoon.

People who couldn’t find Ukraine on a map suddenly become experts on Eastern European geopolitics. Someone reads three posts about testosterone and is ready to correct an endocrinologist. Someone buys Bitcoin on Tuesday and by Friday is explaining monetary policy. Social media has confused access to information with possession of knowledge. Those aren’t the same thing. Having Google and a smartphone doesn’t automatically make you educated. Sometimes it simply allows you to become wrong much faster.

Possibly the most destructive feature of social media is that anger has become recreational. People actually go online looking for something to be pissed off about. And there’s always something available.

Some idiot somewhere said something stupid today. That’s guaranteed. There are billions of people on the planet. If you search hard enough, you can find an offensive opinion about virtually anything. Thirty years ago, the village idiot irritated the village. Now the village idiot has 700,000 followers.

Worse, algorithms can place that person’s most ridiculous statement directly in front of millions of people because millions of angry reactions are fantastic for engagement. The result is that the most obnoxious fraction of society can occupy a completely disproportionate amount of our attention.

Spend enough time online and you can start believing everyone hates each other. Then you leave the house. You go to the grocery store. You walk your dogs. You talk to your neighbors. Someone holds the door open for you. You joke with a stranger. And suddenly you remember that most people are actually pretty normal. Social media isn’t necessarily showing us reality. It’s showing us the parts of reality most likely to keep us staring at the screen.

Perhaps nothing has suffered more in the social-media era than nuanced thinking. Everything has to fit into a tribe. Left or right. Pro or anti. Hero or villain. Good or evil. Agree with me completely or you’re the enemy.

But almost every important subject is more complicated than that. Intelligent people should be capable of holding two seemingly contradictory thoughts simultaneously. You can support something while criticizing aspects of it. You can disagree with someone without thinking they’re an evil person. You can change your mind when new information becomes available.

That’s called thinking.

But social media frequently punishes that kind of thinking because tribalism is much easier to market. Pick a team. Wear the jersey. Repeat the slogans. Attack the other side. Congratulations. You no longer have to think.

Here’s another great irony. We have access to more information than any humans who have ever lived. And increasingly, we don’t have the attention span to consume it.

A book is too long. An article is too long. A ten-minute video is too long. Give me the 30-second clip. Actually, make it 15 seconds. And put captions on it because apparently listening for 15 seconds requires too much concentration.

We’ve created an incredible library containing virtually the accumulated knowledge of human civilization and then trained ourselves to swipe away if something doesn’t entertain us within three seconds. That’s progress?

Social media also allows us to compare our ordinary lives with everyone else’s highlight reels. Someone has a better house. Someone has a better body. Someone makes more money. Someone takes better vacations. Someone’s relationship looks perfect. Someone’s kids are accomplishing more.

Of course, you’re not seeing their actual life. You’re seeing the advertisement for their life. You don’t see the arguments, insecurity, debt, loneliness, health problems, failures, boredom, or dysfunction unless those things can also be turned into content. Then people compare that carefully curated presentation with their own unedited reality and wonder why they feel inadequate. What could possibly go wrong?

Another unfortunate development is the elevation of being famous for being famous. There was a time when recognition was generally the byproduct of accomplishing something. You became a great musician, athlete, writer, scientist, entrepreneur, actor, or whatever else, and recognition followed the achievement.

Now attention itself can be the achievement. The goal is to become an influencer. Influencing what? Apparently that’s a secondary consideration.

I’m not criticizing everyone who makes a living online. There are plenty of knowledgeable people producing excellent material. But we’ve also created an economy in which being attractive, controversial, outrageous, or simply willing to expose every detail of your life can be more lucrative than developing genuine expertise. That’s a strange incentive structure for a civilization.

Despite everything I’ve written here, I don’t think social media itself is inherently bad. A hammer can build a house or smash a window. The technology is extraordinarily powerful. I’ve learned from people online. I’ve met interesting people. I’ve built a business through it. I’ve discovered books, music, training information, investment ideas, charities, and countless other worthwhile things.

There is enormous value there. The problem is how the platforms are structured and how willingly we’ve allowed them to structure us in return. When attention is the commodity, whatever captures the most attention becomes valuable. Unfortunately, what captures human attention isn’t always what improves human beings.

For most of human history, you had absolutely no idea what millions of strangers thought about everything. And somehow civilization survived.

Maybe we weren’t designed to process the opinions, arguments, tragedies, accomplishments, vacations, political views, physiques, meals, relationships, and nervous breakdowns of thousands of people every day. Maybe knowing what everyone thinks about everything isn’t enlightenment. Maybe it’s noise.

And maybe one of the healthiest things a person can do occasionally is put the phone down, go outside, spend time with people they actually care about, exercise, read a book, walk the dogs, and remember that the physical world still exists.

Social media didn’t create stupidity, narcissism, tribalism, insecurity, jealousy, or hatred. Human beings brought all of that with us.

Social media simply figured out how to monetize it.

And maybe Western civilization isn’t declining because people no longer have access to information.

Maybe we’re declining because everyone has access to everyone else’s opinion, all day, every day.