From Followers to Isolation: How Social Media Hijacks Your Brain
I’ll never forget the night I sat in a room full of people laughing at memes… alone. It was my best friend’s engagement party. Instead of clinking glasses, we were all hunched over our phones—posting stories about how “epic” the night was while barely speaking. When I got home, I scrolled through everyone’s photos of the same party, captioned “Squad goals! 💕” and cried into my cold pizza. That’s when I realized: Social media isn’t connecting us—it’s performing us.
After deleting Instagram for a year (and surviving), working as a youth pastor drowning in teens’ loneliness, and interviewing a social psychologist who studies digital isolation, here’s what I’ve learned about why our screens are starving our souls—and how to fight back.
