After a year and a half of online education my university finally opened in September last year. It was the first on-campus semester of my university life. The 18 months spent away from a normal mode of education had its toll on me and I faced a plethora of struggles while adjusting to on-campus education after so long.

There were the usual issues, like waking up early to get ready rather than taking my ZOOM class while still in my bed, and actually having to pay attention in the class as opposed to joining the online meeting and going back to sleep. The thing I struggled with the most was having to limit my phone use. Despite adjusting to other things fairly quickly, I still struggle with this, six months down the road.

My phone was my sole source of sanity during the long months of lockdown (apart from the daily late-night food deliveries). Binging on social media sites became the new normal for me, and my phone became a constant companion for me (so much so that it led to me begging my parents for a new one after my old phone’s battery issues started to limit my use of it). From browsing ‘r/memes’ on Reddit to reading through long threads on Twitter, and from watching funny cat videos on YouTube to mindlessly scrolling through Facebook, there was hardly an instance when my eyes weren’t glued to my phone screen.

I wasn’t the only one who had this problem, it seemed. If the last semester is anything to go by, this is something an overwhelming majority of young people struggle with. The advent of TikTok might have played a major role in that, but sites like Facebook and YouTube certainly didn’t help the matter. During my recent end-of-semester exams, it was much more common to see people watching the latest TikTok than studying. It came to a point where after flunking an exam many of my peers would immediately gravitate towards their phones, seeking comfort in the very sites that had captured their attention the night before and led them to doing poorly in the examination itself.

While games like PUBG pose a problem with addiction, social media use is much more widespread, and even those who mostly use it in moderation are sometimes guilty of overindulging it. The fact that this is so widespread makes it even more problematic, for a multitude of reasons.

Every child that has grown up in the age of smartphones and the internet has had their parents at some point or the other chastise them for spending too much time on their devices, usually followed by a long lecture on the detrimental effects these have on their education. While most addictive activities like video games and even sports usually lead to a drop in grades, with addiction and overuse of social media, the problem is much more serious.

One unfortunate side effect of social media, at least as far as I have observed, is a reduction in our attention span. So ‘dependent’ have we become on the incessant barrage of quick information (thanks to the social media) — from the short and badly worded headlines on Facebook and Twitter to the short videos on YouTube and TikTok — that anything that requires us to spend more than a handful of seconds or to use even an iota of our brain puts us off.

Someone reading this might quite reasonably draw the conclusion that all social media sites are bad and should be expunged if we are to protect our sanity and raise better human beings. As with all things in life, social media too has a wide array of pros and cons. The sad fact is that humans seem to gravitate towards the latter, and they overuse social media in a way that perpetuates their dependency on it. That’s how its algorithm is designed to work.

The writer is pursuing a  bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering at  NUST, Islamabad.  He can be reached at   araheemabaid@gmail.com