Social Media - Why it Sickens the Self and Divides Society

Social media is portrayed as a major identity-shaping force that can “sicken the self” and, by extension, divide society. The core claim is that online life pushes many people away from building a stable inner self and toward managing a public persona for approval. That shift matters because self-concept—what people believe about who they are—affects how they handle life’s challenges, what they value, and how they treat others. When large numbers of individuals adopt fearful, approval-dependent selfhood, society becomes an emergent product of those weakened self-concepts.

The argument traces how identity formation mechanisms changed over time. In earlier Western life, “sincerity” dominated: identity was largely assigned through social roles tied to family and community—class, gender, religion, ethnicity, and profession—and people tried to live those roles properly. Later, increased social mobility and equality of opportunity weakened those inherited role structures, making “authenticity” the prevailing model: individuals discover, realize, or create their own identity, turning selfhood into a personal responsibility.

Social media, however, is said to trigger a regression to a different mechanism called “profilicity,” which resembles sincerity in being other-directed. Instead of family and community judging one’s performance of predetermined roles, a generalized peer audience—hundreds, thousands, or millions—judges and also helps shape the roles people try to play. Profilicity works through selective self-presentation: posting curated images and information, or passively consuming the profiles of admired personalities and using those idealized portrayals as templates for real life. A key consequence is a feedback loop in which digital profiles and in-real-life selves begin to merge, with people adjusting their behavior to match what performs well online.

That approval economy is described as producing hyper-conformity. Success on social platforms is measured by likes, shares, and follows, and the pressure intensifies as algorithms reward certain behaviors and viewpoints. The result is not just conformity to peers, but conformity to algorithmic standards set by powerful tech interests. If someone becomes too unique—or if their values diverge from what the crowd finds acceptable—they risk shunning, shaming, and ostracism. In this framing, social media rewards appearances and popular-culture values more than cultivating a harmonized mind, healthy body, or fulfilling life.

The harms extend beyond personal limitation. Profilicity is also said to harden belief systems and fuel polarization because moral stances become part of a permanent public identity. Once people invest heavily in a cause as a marker of who they are, correcting the underlying narrative can feel like denying the self that the profile represents. The text cites the idea that people may prefer news that confirms feared worst-case scenarios because it validates the identity tied to the cause; if an issue like climate change or civil rights were to be “no longer an issue,” the social validity of the profile would collapse.

Finally, the argument links these dynamics to broader institutional manipulation and surveillance. Algorithmic curation is framed as serving powerful corporate and government interests, and the next step—hinted for a subsequent video—is a “crowd-sourced panopticon,” a dystopian world where people function as both prisoners and guards under pervasive monitoring.