Taylor Lorenz

Or maybe you're using it in a positive way, right?

But if you're using it in a negative way, it's the behavior that you're engaged in because of some root issue.

And I think that's what's so important to note is that cause.

Because this has been a very studied area.

Again, there are people like Alice Marwick, Candace Odgers, who people can look up.

I highly suggest reading their work on this.

These are people that have studied this stuff for literal decades since the early 2000s.

So I think of this guy, Ian Anderson, who is a habit researcher at Caltech and it's him and I can't remember his colleague.

They did this great big study that came out last fall where they studied this idea of addiction and they studied kind of how it was affecting use.

And again, this is a guy who has a PhD in like habit behavior.

Like there are people that like study this stuff for a living and they were really interested in this.

And what they found is that actually the more that a user believed that they were addicted to a platform, the harder it was for them to moderate their own use.

And, you know, so I think that we get all these narratives and we convince ourselves like, oh, I'm so addicted to Instagram, so addicted to Instagram.

What I would tell people is like that narrative that you're telling yourself actually makes it harder for you to take control.

We all have bad habits.

We all have

unhealthy behaviors, things we want to change.

We want to go to the gym more.

We want to eat less sweets.

We want to whatever.