The great digital fatigue: How digital burnout is changing social media use

7/14/2026 at 12:32:50 PM

Its strange for me. Some years ago, I only thought that the younger kids/adults was had the "separation anxiety" when it came to social media, but I have a 40 year old sister in law that is purely obsessed and it is crazy. I'm a big tech person but I know how to put my phone down. Heck most of the time I don't even have it on me.

by charltonraven

7/14/2026 at 1:19:05 PM

My partner was for a bit. She deleted Instagram and started reading books again. This was surprisingly difficult to pick up again after a year of Instagram apparently. It does form very bad habits.

by cryo32

7/14/2026 at 12:44:18 PM

Understand that social media endorphin-inducing algorithm optimizers, have made these sites optimized for _all_ ages, so it should not be a surprise. Very few of us are immune.

by da-x

7/14/2026 at 1:09:15 PM

The biggest culprits are the senior citizens. They are the most addicted to social media.

by reactordev

7/14/2026 at 2:14:00 PM

My MIL in her 70s has been staying with us for the past month or so and her phone habits are bonkers. I rarely use my phone at home, have young kids that are small-screen free; so we tend to engage in conversations and activities during family time, or even just watch big-screens movies/TV as a family. The MIL is glued to the phone/tablet and constantly wants to talk to everyone about it like it’s a shared experience. “Who’s this lady in the photo with Janet?” Like we know or care, maybe ask Janet or just scroll on. Anyways I don’t criticize her directly but my wife has even become annoyed by it and I’ve asked her to have a etiquette conversation with her or give her feedback some way because I can’t stand it for another month lol.

by conductr

7/14/2026 at 3:03:38 PM

Yup, my parents (mainly dad) are the same, reading social media, putting the speakers on, falling for all of the AI generated stuff, rage bait, etc, and broadcasting it to the world because idk, they still seek engagement and interaction I suppose.

But at least it's only part of their day.

by Cthulhu_

7/14/2026 at 2:23:38 PM

[dead]

by reactordev

7/14/2026 at 2:16:25 PM

Anecdata here but my 60-something year old mother acts like a sullen teenager around my kids/her grandchildren. She just scrolls endlessly on her phone until my father/her husband calls her out on it.

It's maddening and sad.

by RationPhantoms

7/14/2026 at 3:36:08 PM

I agree, and I think it’s due to the decline of executive cognition and the behavioral training of the TV generation. They believe the news, and grew up in a time when trust was aplenty.

by warshinder

7/14/2026 at 12:56:10 PM

Agreed.I am a victim of doom scrolling

by charltonraven

7/14/2026 at 3:36:36 PM

Similar experiences. Many people are surprised when I do have the phone wiht me in person during walks, at meetings, etc. In the sea of digitals, I find peace in writing with pen/paper.

by Brajeshwar

7/14/2026 at 1:21:27 PM

I have noticed the same.

Silencing all notifications and checking it on a timer is a big step.

by j45

7/14/2026 at 1:44:12 PM

Yes! My phone is alway on silent and it kills when I look at my phone 5 hours later and have missed calls, but WELP lol

by charltonraven

7/14/2026 at 2:19:17 PM

There aren't many things that can't wait an hour.

By notifications I mean the ones that aren't phone calls.

You know, the social media updates, the emails, the instant messaging that thinks it's more important than whatever you're doing.

Notification silencing can be selective and blissful.

Interruptions can be the enemy of productivity that everyone is chasing.

by j45

7/14/2026 at 11:48:55 AM

Social media isn't "social" anymore. It's algorithmically designed to keep you scrolling. Burnout is inevitable.

by TomMasz

7/14/2026 at 12:12:02 PM

big normie social media yes, but people still have hella actual conversations on bluesky and mastodon and (i think) they use chronological fields by default

by gnoll_of_gozag

7/14/2026 at 6:30:46 PM

i switched from twitter to bluesky and the first thing i noticed was the feed looking really boring so i almost quit. turns out the default is following only but then i found a great third party feed at [foryou.club] and now i can use it without getting bored. thank god for spacecowboy and their gaming pc.

by tancop

7/14/2026 at 12:39:02 PM

And then, tomorrow, it will be some other social media platform because someone said something wrong on one of those. Because they have to. Not because they need to.

by assimpleaspossi

7/14/2026 at 1:24:44 PM

Say what you mean and you might be better received.

by peaseagee

7/14/2026 at 1:26:13 PM

[flagged]

by assimpleaspossi

7/14/2026 at 2:03:04 PM

I'm pretty sure "don't be snarky" is one of the first 5 sentences on the site rules.

by Guthwine

7/14/2026 at 1:14:39 PM

What?

by inigyou

7/14/2026 at 1:19:22 PM

You heard me.

by assimpleaspossi

7/14/2026 at 1:32:51 PM

yeah but what you're saying is unclear.

for instance, when you say because they have to, not because they need to...

"have to" and "need to" mean the same thing, so i'm left with the choice of concluding your post is just mush or asking you to rephrase what you're trying to say in a way that's intelligible.

by pasquinelli

7/14/2026 at 1:42:14 PM

Perhaps I should have written "because they feel they have to and not because they need to."

by assimpleaspossi

7/14/2026 at 2:33:16 PM

that's the second half of the comment. Can you also explain the first half?

by inigyou

7/14/2026 at 12:36:50 PM

I know many people who say they're "off" social media but they're still scrolling. They may post less or not at all, but the algorithm still has them.

by weagle05

7/14/2026 at 7:00:18 PM

I don't post at all and delete it periodically.

The concerning thing is you still feel the `itch` of like... I can't just sit here and stare out the window or listen to this boring person or whatever event. So even with social media deleted my brain reaches out for something: Hacker News or Zillow or even stock market tickers get swapped in as the void-fillers.

I wonder if life was always sort of boring and lacked meaning and people used to just sit in that reality patiently or if modern life has siphoned meaning off of it so we have had to replace it with these mindless activities.

by ericmcer

7/14/2026 at 12:52:02 PM

Related (should've been source at): "Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media" 12-jul-2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48879902 183 comments

by HelloUsername

7/14/2026 at 12:15:03 PM

> "More than half (51%) of participants indicated that maintaining an online presence feels like work."

Well, because it is. Social media turned most of its users into digital beggars.

by q8zd3

7/14/2026 at 12:57:54 PM

One of the most insidious aspects of social media is how the reward and discoverability mechanisms train users to become their own marketing department. It's most obvious on LinkedIn, where your presence is materially tied to career growth, but each platform does it in its own way.

by cryptopian

7/14/2026 at 12:50:23 PM

Digital beggars whose activity is enriching platform holders much more than what they themselves get out of it.

by account42

7/14/2026 at 1:12:49 PM

This has been happening since a long time before digital became a thing. Remember Fagin from Oliver Twist?

by kijin

7/14/2026 at 12:41:49 PM

Burnout is a symptom of prolonged unsustainable engagement.

I think it is a false narrative to say that the majority of people who are leaving platforms were overcommitted to that extent.

I think it is the simple fact that the platforms no longer provide enough to justify sticking around,

People came for the pie, stayed for the pie, and left when the vendors started serving cardboard wrapped razor blades and tried to convince you it was still a pie.

by Lerc

7/14/2026 at 1:55:54 PM

I am on a path to recovery from social media addiction (Twitter/x > Instagram > Youtube Shorts). Here is what has worked for me so far - 1. Uninstall the apps, but replace them with mobile browser views. All these services have functional web views that will feed your withdrawal, but adds friction to slowly wind you out. 2. Desktop/laptop (that you use for studying/working) - modify you /etc/hosts and map x.com to localhost. 3. Leave phone in the car when you get back home from work.

by a1000regrets

7/14/2026 at 2:00:19 PM

1) Mobile browser views: I do this too, for extra friction don't store your password in your mobile browser and force yourself to type it manually when logging in.

by soramimo

7/14/2026 at 3:44:17 PM

An additional suggestion would be to use uBlock Origin on a deskop/laptop and add the sites to the block list, which is what I did.

by galleywest200

7/14/2026 at 11:57:31 AM

I hope we can reach a point where there's enough research on the negative effects of social media (or more specifically which features of it e.g. scrolling videos) that we can inform people from a young age.

by daveydave

7/14/2026 at 12:06:45 PM

There is more than enough research.

https://thehighwire.com/news/metas-internal-research-proves-...

But nothing's going to change as long as we continue pretending that billionaires hoarding pieces of "special" paper (or numbers in a bank account) are less mentally ill than people hoarding pieces of regular paper (or other things).

by callmeal

7/14/2026 at 2:09:41 PM

If you're poor, you're crazy.

If you're rich, well, you're just eccentric.

Because you can pay your way, mainly.

by lazide

7/14/2026 at 12:36:24 PM

You think billionaires are hoarders because the shares they own become worth a lot of money when they build successful companies?

by qup

7/14/2026 at 12:51:06 PM

Circular definition. Number go up = "successful".

A non-hoarding economy would look very different, be far more exciting and inventive, and wouldn't be staging an ecological suicide run.

by TheOtherHobbes

7/14/2026 at 12:43:55 PM

It's like playing cookie clicker except the higher your number goes up the more social status you and power you have.

by datadrivenangel

7/14/2026 at 1:03:05 PM

And like cookie clicker, once you're watching the number going up long term, it's hard for your mind to accept a point at which you have "enough".

by cryptopian

7/14/2026 at 12:24:20 PM

>But nothing's going to change as long as we continue pretending that billionaires hoarding pieces of "special" paper (or numbers in a bank account) are less mentally ill than people hoarding pieces of regular paper (or other things).

Wut

by high_na_euv

7/14/2026 at 1:17:11 PM

We agreed that people have more or less power depending on this silly thing called "dollars", and because we agreed they have power, they have power. It's pretty weird how we did that even though them having so much power is massively detrimental to human civilization.

by inigyou

7/14/2026 at 1:19:12 PM

He's talking about money

by dexterdog

7/14/2026 at 11:32:04 AM

Everything happens "quietly" these days...

by Retr0id

7/14/2026 at 2:10:20 PM

Claudely

by N_Lens

7/14/2026 at 12:44:27 PM

Chat apps have already replaced socialapps like FB long ago and the companies know it. Meta has FB Messenger and WhatsApp.

by high_5

7/14/2026 at 11:35:35 AM

Social media not adequatly defined in this article. It's hysteria, a buzzword.

The article is just noise without specifying what they're talking about

by bcjdjsndon

7/14/2026 at 11:40:48 AM

Hysteria is not adequately defined in this comment. It's social media, a buzzword.

This comment is just noise without specifying what they're talking about.

by inigyou

7/14/2026 at 11:46:35 AM

> The word hysteria originates from the Greek word for uterus, hystera.

The way you use the term hysteria feels wrong to me.

by bflesch

7/14/2026 at 11:58:51 AM

In 2026, expecting articles about social media to contain a definition of the term ‘social media’ is so peculiar as to seem disingenuous. Can you perhaps explain exactly what you think is so ambiguous about how they use the term that we can’t just assume the common meaning?

by bunderbunder

7/14/2026 at 12:18:17 PM

What's missing for me is that they never seem to mention which social media platforms in particular these statements are directed at.

There are many social media platforms, some of them similar, but some are also vastly different from each other (e.g. Hacker News vs. TikTok)

Making statements about all of social media without such clarifications makes them pretty unreliable for me.

by rob-lag

7/14/2026 at 12:24:51 PM

Even HN has a clout score, and seeing it move up/down, or slapping that up/down arrow, can trigger the same dopamine as social media by MegaCorp.

by alistairSH

7/14/2026 at 12:28:33 PM

And the content discovery algorithm is tuned to please the masses, the users drive the algorithm which promotes or buries the content for everyone else. I think the moment you use a socially driven algorithm to show/hide content from users is when you're planted firmly in social media territory.

by close04

7/14/2026 at 1:00:45 PM

It's why I prefer not to get bogged down in litigation over what counts as social media. It's far more productive to look at the individual mechanisms that make web platforms bad for socialising.

by cryptopian

7/14/2026 at 1:11:53 PM

Agreed. For me, "social media" is just any website/app that allows users to contribute content and make comments.

HN is absolutely "social media", as it Facebook and WhatsApp.

With that said, I do believe social media platforms exist on a spectrum of "mostly benign, maybe even useful" to "mostly harmful" with closed groups/forums well to the benign end, targeted subjects with heavy moderation somewhere to the benign end of the spectrum (HN falls here), and "free for all" well to the "harmful" end (this is where most of Meta lives).

by alistairSH

7/14/2026 at 7:51:31 PM

[flagged]

by hnisnotbenign

7/14/2026 at 1:03:28 PM

I’m not sure how much it makes sense to pick this nit for a public opinion survey of this nature. The survey is being sent to people who mostly won’t think of the term in such precise ways, and even in social sciences it’s considered poor form to try to measure more precisely than your noise floor permits.

That said, I would assume most respondents have a more popular conception of the term. That’s going to be inherently a little fuzzy, but implies implies sites like X, Facebook and TikTok count, that Reddit is marginal, and that more “oldschool” things like webforums, chat services and even Hacker News are out.

by bunderbunder

7/14/2026 at 12:20:37 PM

Exactly

by bcjdjsndon

7/14/2026 at 12:20:02 PM

Some people fear paedos talking to kids, others fear kids watching bad videos or reading bad comments. They are two vastly different complaints.

One is about communications, the other is a more general concern about content that could extend to and audiovisual form.

Yet another definition is essentially a synonym for tiktok. Or sometimes they mean just twitter.

The UK online safety act leans heavily towards communication (ie comments or DMs, hence Wikipedia being caught up in it)

> assume the common meaning?

Which is? Point me to a defintion

by bcjdjsndon

7/14/2026 at 12:05:53 PM

> "Political content is pushing users toward the exit"

The culture war is exhausting. The idealist dream of some sort of Athenian public deliberation has been overwritten by ragebait. It's both very effective at meeting social media goals (getting people to spend too much time online arguing with strangers), and political goals (Project 2025; the Hungarian/Russian/American conserviative project CPAC; whatever it is that Musk is doing with X; Cambridge Analytica; and so on).

by pjc50

7/14/2026 at 12:08:37 PM

My facebook seems to have trained itself to never give me "political content".

Still, I open it about once per week to check for events at my favorite saturday evening hang outs, look at some cat photos and close it.

by nottorp

7/14/2026 at 12:45:32 PM

I never had a Facebook account till about 10 years ago when I went to a funeral and found out about relatives who had one and encouraged me to join them there. I did but, today, they might post there three or four times a year to show vacation pictures and that's it. I, too, only look at it once every week or two in case there's an event that happened but that's maybe once a year.

by assimpleaspossi

7/14/2026 at 1:37:35 PM

It takes some effort, but you can get the recommendation algo to clean up your feed. My youtube account of 15 years was flooded with political content. Mainly just opinion stuff and lot of AI slop. So I just unsubbed all channels and started clicking the don't recommend this channel or I don't like this content. It took couple of months, but my recommended videos are back to what I liked watching. Mainly dev and hobby stuff. For channels that I do like that are non-political, I just keep bookmarked links that go directly to their channel page.

by nirav72

7/15/2026 at 10:19:40 AM

Hmm it's possible they still sneak something in those movies they try to cram down my throat every 3-4 text posts. But I never even look at those so it's wasted effort.

by nottorp

7/14/2026 at 1:20:57 PM

It’s likely if this is a thing, that early internet users of the 90s experienced their equivalent of having enough.

by j45

7/14/2026 at 1:18:36 PM

It’s not burnout, it’s panic.

The void is coming and everyone knows it.

by brador

7/14/2026 at 3:32:38 PM

Please elaborate.

by NoGravitas

7/14/2026 at 12:13:25 PM

I now realise that incogni and incognet are two different companies.

by inigyou

7/14/2026 at 12:38:54 PM

I've heard people say that if your post on social media isn't making you money, then it isn't worth making. This is very different from early Facebook/Twitter where the majority of posts were mundane things about one's life.

Going on Japanese Twitter was a very different and refreshing experience, because people still post random little life updates. But Westerners rarely do that now.

by smcg