$1.4 trillion dollaridoos, hey? That’ll get a few tinnies down the shed. What is Meta actually getting sued so hard for? I get the data collection, but let’s quickly unpack the ‘addictive design’ portion of the action.
Yes Jamie, we know it’s more addictive than crack cocaine, alcohol and tobacco all rolled into one. But I can’t pull out a beer, a cigarette or a syringe on a public train.
Will this mean all users can make a class action? I don’t know. I also don’t know the remedy. What I do know is that USD$1,400,000,000,000.00 is not enough to fix the problem.
The four states suing Meta, California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, aren’t arguing about content. They’re arguing about design. Infinite scroll. Autoplay. An algorithmic feed built so there’s never a natural stopping point. Notifications engineered to pull you back the second you put the phone down. Even if every state wins, even if Meta redesigns every one of those features for under eighteens tomorrow, that fixes exactly nobody who’s already thirty five, forty, fifty, and has spent a decade training their own brain to expect that hit. The lawsuit can regulate the supply. It can’t undo the hard wiring, the addiction we have already consumed.
My own experience is this.
This post is about our collective lack of motivation. As a sales manager, I deal with motivation a lot. There’s a great YouTube video on the science and studies into brain rot, doom scrolling, and short form content of any type, not only Meta. YouTube
In summary, the video draws on a 2025 meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin, a journal of the American Psychological Association, which pulled together 71 individual studies covering 100,000 people. The pattern held up consistently across all of them, heavier short form video use, corellated strongly with weaker attention and impulse control. Also with higher rates of depression, anxiety, stress and loneliness. That’s not one study or my opinion man. That’s 71 studies agreeing with each other.
I’m not a scientist, but here’s how I perceive this.
A force in motion tends to stay in motion, a force at rest tends to stay at rest.
I know when we succeed and complete things, we tend to continue to succeed. When we fail, we tend to continue to fail.
Every time you scroll, you get to a point in the content and your inner dialogue says, “I give up on this, what’s next.” Can you even imagine the damage to the subconscious of your inner monologue telling itself a thousand times a session that it gives up?
That lack of motivation you have, that constant sense of dread, is almost certainly directly tied to that repeated self abuse mechanism of the swipe.
I’m not here to preach at anyone to get off TikTok, mate. I am only expressing my own human experience. The only way to succeed is to stop failing and start succeeding, in any small meaningful way you can.
I went through the hardest, lowest, blackest period in my life recently. The only road out of it was to delete all the short form content off my phone and create boredom. My brain and whole body screamed at me, but I forced myself for one hour a day to sit and look at the wall. Then two, then four. Getting outside amongst people helps, and walking helps. Don’t walk for fitness, that will fail. Walk without headphones and give your brain quiet time. Meditate, paint, write, throw some guerilla seed bombs into vacant lots.
It is only in the quiet that my brain could start to process the massive amount of shit I had poured into it. But the trap here is rumination.
Rumination feels like processing. It is overthinking and predicting negative futures. Highly intelligent people suffer from this immensely. There’s a heap of content out there on defeating rumination and recognising it, but I would say from experience that processing thoughts is a calming, meditative thing. Rumination is a ball of stress. A good trick is don’t try to problem solve while you’re upset or down.
This is why when one of my sales crew is in a downward spiral I get them out of the team, take them for a walk, but stop the calls. Not only are they damaging the brand and the team around them, they are shredding their mental health. Have an impromptu walking meeting, a quick lap around the park. Be a human moment of quiet for them.
None of this means delete every app and go live in a cave, and it doesn’t mean the trial in Oakland is pointless either. Redesigning these platforms for kids matters regardless of what it does for the rest of us. But if you’re waiting on a courtroom to fix how you feel on a Tuesday afternoon, you’ll be waiting a long time. We all know the money will disappear into a war treasury, or get imbezzled by a bank bail out or some other BS. Then a bunch of overworked nurses, doctors and therapists will get left dealing with the outcome.
More thinking like this at www.outsold.com.au/blogs.
