What Did I Miss Today?
If we stop and think about it, we can see that our mothers, fathers, and older relatives are often still in touch even with some of their oldest friends. From the outside, that is certainly something to envy.
So how many friends from your own childhood are still in your life today?
In fact, those of us who grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s were somewhat more fortunate than younger generations, because we lived through enough of the transition to notice what was changing.
We still had street culture. Facebook and video games were part of our lives, but they weren’t our entire lives. Back then, even getting access to the internet was an event in itself. Modems were expensive, getting an internet connection was a whole process, and waiting ten seconds for a website to load seemed perfectly normal.
Yet when we discovered something online, we still wanted to go and tell our friends about it. We wanted to share the excitement with them and experience it together.
There wasn’t really such a thing as being a “streamer” either. I would go to my closest childhood friend’s house, spend the whole day watching him try different games, and we would make plans together.
As time passed, everything became smaller while phones moved closer and closer to the center of our lives. Back when the Nokia 3310 was practically considered a brick, simply owning a mobile phone was a privilege in itself.
I don’t want to stretch the description too far, but I imagine that reading these memories creates a strange sense of comfort in some of you. Nostalgia alone is often enough to produce that feeling.
Even if you didn’t experience these exact things, if you grew up around the same period, you probably remember how deep friendships could be and how much time people were willing to give one another.
In Turkey, when Facebook was the dominant platform, the issue wasn’t nearly as serious as it is today. People mostly followed their friends and the pages they were interested in.
Then Instagram arrived.
Suddenly, people weren’t only seeing their own social circles anymore. They could see what strangers were doing, what they liked, who they were sitting with, whose photos they were liking, and whose posts they were commenting on.
In other words, gossip, comparison, and a culture of visibility moved directly into our phones.
Instagram later removed some of these features, but by then the damage had already been done. There is a Turkish saying that fits this situation particularly well: once people become accustomed to something, breaking that habit can be harder than resisting it in the first place.
With Instagram becoming part of everyday life, the individuals shaped by our culture began to experience a kind of erosion, both on a small and a large scale.
Instead of talking about the things we did, we started displaying them. Instead of consuming content for enjoyment, we started allowing ourselves to be carried along by an endless stream of it.
But simply saying that we “became slaves to it” isn’t enough. This transformation needs to be broken down into several different parts.
FOMO — Fear of Missing Out
When I was working primarily with C#, I also spent time researching social media management and the tools that could be used for it, and I published some of what I learned.
Ironically, even though I had never been someone who was fully immersed in social media, this work became one of the first things that gradually pulled me deeper into it.
Facebook and Instagram became increasingly important to me because suddenly the number of experiences available seemed infinite.
Friends slowly became less important than followers. Maybe you could build a fanbase. Maybe you could get thousands of likes. There were attention-seeking captions filled with obnoxious emojis and carefully designed performances of personality.
People were no longer trying merely to look good. They were increasingly trying to look like people they had never actually been.
Whenever someone posted something, questions began appearing in our minds:
Why didn’t I do that?
What am I missing?
Why am I not going there?
Why am I being left out?
Eventually, what we became addicted to wasn’t necessarily the experience itself.
It was the feeling of not missing anything.
Even jokes, conversations, and shared cultural references began adapting themselves to this new platform-driven social order.
From that point onward, especially if you were someone trying to connect with other people, another fear entered the picture: the fear of being judged because you didn’t know a particular joke, meme, or reference.
Instead of genuinely talking to one another, we began exchanging funny things we had seen online, using them almost as an escape from our tragicomic and, at times, deeply depressing lives.
Attention and Impulsivity
When we look at older, well-educated people, many of us have admired how composed and articulate they seem compared with us.
Their ability to retain what they know and express it without constantly losing their train of thought gives the impression of real intellectual competence.
In Turkey, figures such as İlber Ortaylı and Celal Şengör are examples of this for many people. What makes them striking isn’t simply the amount of information they possess. It is their ability to remain on one subject for a long time without constantly drifting elsewhere, while maintaining control over their impulses.
Now compare that with our everyday lives.
The moment we wake up, or immediately before going to sleep, many of us consume short videos that often last less than ten seconds.
Over time, this habit has fragmented our ability to focus.
Jumping from one subject to another, being unable to stay with something for long, and constantly demanding a new stimulus are no longer exceptions.
They have become ordinary behavior.
Impulsivity is another issue entirely.
People increasingly approach one another through pleasure, validation, and short-term gratification. Their ideas about the future—and the behaviors that follow from those ideas—are shaped accordingly.
This pushes society toward becoming shallower, more impatient, and easier to manipulate.
At the point we have reached today, even the balance between love and sexuality has become distorted.
Content, artificial faces, contextless displays of sexuality, images deliberately designed to capture attention, and a language built to serve all of this have spread into almost every corner of life.
My intention here is not to judge anyone’s personal choices.
But if we are being truthful about the broader system, its direction is obvious: it is competing for your attention and encouraging you to become more impulsive.
Communication Quality and Empathy
As this process gradually turned into habit, it also began weakening some of our most fundamental social abilities.
Communication shifted heavily from face-to-face interaction toward text-based communication.
As a result, facial expressions, tone of voice, hesitation, pauses, and many of the elements that carry emotion disappeared from the interaction.
We became worse at expressing ourselves fully, and worse at reading one another accurately.
When we fail to give the other person the emotional signals they need—and fail to receive those signals from them—empathy inevitably suffers.
At the same time, jokes and dark humor have occupied such a large part of online culture that we have reached a point where some people can turn even the most serious human experiences into disposable entertainment.
As a society, this has gradually eroded both our sensitivity and our capacity for empathy.
Conclusion
There is one final thing I want to say.
If this pattern of consumption has turned into something uncontrollable for you, and you are spending three or four hours of your day doing nothing but scrolling through these applications, you need to start reducing that time in a deliberate and controlled way.
Take control again.
Instead of consuming content unconsciously, try to create new memories.
You can even turn those memories into content later if you want to and share them with other people.
Just don’t replace life itself with content.
What matters is not the experience someone else is having.
What matters is what we are able to feel from the life we are actually living.