There’s a growing body of research suggesting our ability to sustain attention is shrinking. Social media platforms are in large part the cause: short, fast bursts of stimulation, constant refreshing, and constant reward are rewiring our brains to prioritize whatever is new, loud, or emotionally charged. And we forget everything else. In psychology, this phenomenon is called a “novelty-seeking loop.”
A 2018 study described this in clinical terms: heavy social media use produced symptoms that looked similar to addiction — restlessness, withdrawal, and a constant need for stimulation and validation. The platform doesn’t even need to persuade you of anything, it just needs you to keep scrolling.
Where this becomes particularly dangerous is its effect on our political memory and worldview formation. When a brain is conditioned to seek novelty when consuming media, it stops tolerating anything slow, complex, or boring. Neurologically, novelty-seeking strengthens the reward pathways for fast emotional stimulation, while weakening the pathways involved in sustained analytical thinking.
The result is a political cognition that is impulsive, emotional, and short-circuited — not informed and durable. People are increasingly developing views about politics the same way they do about celebrity drama: scroll, feel, forget. And now that major outlets and civic institutions have been replaced by algorithmic feeds, this mechanism scales. Pew Research Center shows 1 in 5 Americans now regularly get news from TikTok, nearly triple from 2020. 55% of TikTok users and 43% of adults under 30 rely on it for news.
These platforms markedly don’t reward accuracy, context, and critical thinking. They have a financial incentive in feeding our craving for sensationalism, emotion, and virality. In an era in which politics is already so polarized and emotionally charged, these effects are amplified.
Politics is no longer about information; it is about stimulation.
The data informing our views now comes down to which viral TikTok college campus debates between trained professionals and naive college kids give us more dopamine, how annoying the girl who incessantly posts on her Instagram story is, and which headlines evoke the most anger or euphoria.
This is really bad. It’s hurting what the practice of politics is fundamentally about: exploring the ways in which we can make the world better. I tend to dislike the term “politics” because it obscures this important fact. “Politics” is how we solve issues, how we help people, and shape outcomes that dictate the future of humanity.
So when democracy deteriorates into a performative attention market, the real politics gets pushed to the side. Issues that aren’t as sexy but are roughly ~100x more important in creating a better world, like foreign assistance, global welfare, rule of law, and effective governance, are disregarded.
Let me give you just a few examples:
The Associated Press has reported that “starving children” are “screaming for food” as they slowly die due to the U.S’ cuts to foreign aid and crucial humanitarian programs in Myanmar. The World Food Programme now projects 16.7 million people to be food-insecure in 2025, the highest level ever recorded in the country. This is mass starvation unfolding in real time, largely due to our government’s foreign policy. Most Americans don’t even know it’s happening.
Earlier this year, uncertainty and funding freezes disrupted PEPFAR, the single most successful global health program ever created. Surveys of implementing partners showed that 71% of programs had to cancel services, 50% cut staff, and only 14% said they could remain operational for even a month without U.S support. This program has saved 26 million lives, prevented millions of HIV infections, and cut all-cause mortality across entire regions. But we didn’t see this on Instagram, so it evaporated from the public consciousness.
Back in the U.S, a federal court ordered emergency funds for SNAP — the nutrition program that keeps more than 40 million fed. Despite this ruling, our government announced it would not tap into separate Congressional appropriations to sustain full benefits. USDA officials and state agencies warned families might face weeks or months of delays in receiving food assistance. In a world where we cared about the right issues, this would be a political firestorm.
Almost $3 billion in life-saving cancer research was cut in the wide-ranging termination of grants for scientific research. The NIH, the world’s leading medical research agency, is expected to lose 25% of its workforce,
This is what it looks like when civic attention collapses; the consequences are massive, but the public never even hears about the story. I’ve often referred to the current moment as an era of strong desensitization — school shootings, humanitarian crises, and global conflicts are now treated as formalities. Events only have meaning insofar as the media is talking about them. But despite our reluctance to recognize it, and our media to highlight it, issues persist. Poor decisions have consequences that multiply over weeks, months, years, and decades.
Kicking the can down the road has consequences. Rome ignored its severe economic inequality and widespread resentment, which led to populist uprisings, civil wars, and the collapse into dictatorship. After the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles buried Germany with humiliating terms that fostered resentment and radicalization, which paved the way for the rise of the Nazi Party. When society is obsessed with the immediate, it becomes blind to the slow.
But democracies live and die by how they deal with the issues that aren’t as sexy. Debating the intricacies of fiscal policy and environmental regulation might not be fun, but it impacts the lives of millions of people.
I’m not asking you to share my politics — just don’t let the algorithm decide your own. Research the ideas you support. Look at outcomes. Read the news, verify what you read against different sources, and take them into account when developing your beliefs.
At the end of the day, whether right or left alike, we must all do a better job of approaching the world’s issues with the level of critical thinking they demand. Democracy is not a spectator sport — it requires the active effort of the public to stay informed and hold our leaders accountable. We cannot outsource this responsibility to internet algorithms.
