Ryan AyalaHealth, Lifestyle, and Biohacking protocols for Biological Excellence

Social Media Overload Versus the Analog Past #substack #shorts

13 Jun 2025 · 1 min

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1:07

In this YouTube short, Ryan Ayala delivers a rapid monologue warning that constant social‑media consumption is harming mental health, likening it to earlier concerns about pornography’s impact on the brain. He paints a vivid picture of a 2001 bar scene where no one is glued to a phone, emphasizing how life used to be more analog and socially present. Ayala argues that the relentless stream of stimuli from smartphones leads to depression and cognitive decline, and he proposes a return to “analog hours” – scheduled periods without digital devices – to combat the “time‑sucks” and “mind‑sucks” of modern life.

Chapters

So what do we have? We have a bunch of people that are depressed. We have a bunch of people whose brains are literally deteriorating as every minute goes by, right? There was a lot of studies in a lot— like a few years ago, everyone was fixating on the studies that showed how porn damaged your brain. Well, we have to think like the constant consumption of social media isn't really that different. It's all the same thing. It's you getting the most mind-boggling amount of stimuli from this little black box in your phone. This is a huge problem. And I think about how big of a problem it is when I think about what life was like 20 years ago. I was watching a movie last night from 2001, and there are a bunch of people in a bar, not a single person on their phone because phones didn't exist then, right? They're little flip phones. They were boring. Everyone was talking. The people that weren't talking were just sitting there and looking or reading or writing. It was such a different world. It was so much more of an analog world. And I really think it's important for us to get back to that analog lifestyle, right? To make time for analog hours where we abstain from these constant time sucks, and not just time sucks but mind sucks that we're exposed to on a daily basis.