My hypothesis is different. I think that the effects of social media are extremely heterogeneous based on app, population, and dosage: that in some subgroups, some social media apps (when used in high doses) have substantially negative effects on mental health, but in other subgroups, using other social media apps in moderate doses has no negative effect on mental health.

For instance, 13-year-old girls in the US using TikTok or Instagram for 4 hours a day may be very differently impacted than 25-year-old men in Denmark using Twitter/X or WhatsApp for 30 minutes per day.

The current studies may be like trying to answer the generic question: “Do non-prescription drugs have a negative mental health effect?” This question can’t be answered because it combines too many dissimilar things. In particular, the answer hinges on which drugs we’re talking about (cannabis vs. fentanyl), the age of the person doing the drug (teenagers vs. adults), and the quantity of drug use (occasional vs. extreme usage).

If my hypothesis is true, then getting to the bottom of the true impacts of social media on mental health will require carefully designed studies that subdivide by app and by population (ideally after preliminary research is done to figure out what apps and which populations are reasonable to group together – for instance, it may be essential to segment by gender and rough age group and even by culture, but it’s important to get these segmentations right if the research is going to make progress).

Another thing that makes this research so tricky is that social media literally adapts itself to what you pay attention to. So if you tend to click on upsetting things, it will show you more upsetting things, which can create a self-reinforcing cycle, whereas if you click on things that are interesting and pleasant, you’ll get more of those instead. So even at the level of the individual, social media can provide highly varied experiences. It’s instructive to compare your social media feed to a friend’s (on the same app). When I’ve done this, it’s been remarkable to see just how different our experiences on that app are.

Overall, my best guess is that most people’s social media use would be found to have little or no negative causal link to mental health. But I would predict that there is a moderately sized causal negative link to mental health for:

• teenage girls scrolling Instagram a large amount (e.g., checking it >25 times daily)
• teenage boys playing video games (but not with friends), very large amounts (e.g., > 5 hours per day)
• people who are already predisposed to worry a lot about the state of the world, scrolling Twitter a large amount (e.g., > 3 hours daily)
• I also would predict a negative impact on attention or focus for those who use TikTok a lot (>5 hours daily)
• But I would predict little to no average negative mental health effects for apps that a person uses only 20 minutes per day or less, since I think that’s unlikely to be a high enough dose to cause problems for many people

Another hypothesis is that insofar as social media causes negative mental health impacts, it’s because it changes the situation for everyone at once. For instance, if all teenagers in a school are on social media, that can change the way that they socialize (or how much people socialize) and how they interact (e.g., how much bullying or social comparison occurs). By this view, studying what happens to individuals when they use more or less social media misses the important effects. If this is the case, it makes the phenomena even harder to study!

This piece was first written on August 29, 2025, and first appeared on my website on November 2, 2025.

Epictetus, born ~50AD, was a disabled man born into slavery in Phrygia (present-day Turkey). Nothing that he wrote down survives; we know about him only through the words of other scholars. But he was so wise that his ideas reverberate through society today. This article summarizes some parts of his incredible life and the impact that he had on the world:

Epictetus’s Life

Epictetus walked with a limp, a disability he may have had from birth, from when his leg was broken deliberately by his enslaver, or from a later medical condition (stories on this differ). He was passionate about philosophy from a young age. His enslaver, who had previously been a slave himself, let Epictetus study Stoic philosophy. Epictetus obtained his freedom in adulthood and taught philosophy in Rome. But the Roman emperor then banished all philosophers from the city. At that point, Epictetus moved to Epirus, Greece, where he founded a school of philosophy.

Epictetus’s Impact

The reason we know about his ideas is due to his most famous pupil, Arrian, who wrote in the prologue to Discourses of Epictetus: “whatever I heard him say I used to write down, word for word, as best I could, endeavoring to preserve it.” Arrian said Epictetus “induce[ed] his listener to feel just what [he] wanted him to feel.” 

People who cited Epictetus’ ideas in their writing include:

• Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius
• Voltaire, who described him as someone “whom one almost despairs of imitating”
• Author Tom Wolfe (the book, Enchiridion of Epictetus is referenced in “A Man in Full”)
• Novelist James Joyce
• Herodes Atticus who called him “the greatest of the Stoics”

Additionally, Albert Ellis (1913 – 2007) credited Epictetus with providing a foundation for his system of psychotherapy, underlining the prevailing relevance of Epictetus’s observations about the people of ancient Greece. Ellis’ theory (rational emotive behavior therapy, R.E.B.T.) eventually became a major part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the most evidenced-based therapy for treating mental disorders today.

Epictetus’s Ideas

Epictetus was part of the Stoic school of philosophy, which is about letting go of negative emotions like fear and jealousy and being calm – or “stoic” – in the face of suffering. 

Here are some of the most insightful quotes attributed to Epictetus, organized by topic. You’ve probably heard some of these ideas expressed by famous people alive today. Well, Epictetus said these things almost two THOUSAND years before them. Let that sink in for a moment before reading on. (We’ve edited some quotes for clarity – you can find most of the originals on Goodreads.) 

Epictetus on challenges

• “There’s one way to happiness, and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”
• “The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.”

Epictetus on relationships

• “Keep company only with those who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.”
• “Anyone capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed.”
• “If evil be said of you, and it’s true, correct yourself; if it’s a lie, laugh at it.”
• “It is a fact of life that other people, even people who love you, will not necessarily agree with your ideas, understand you, or share your enthusiasms.”
• “If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, ‘He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.'”

Epictetus on self-improvement

• “If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”
• “He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at.”
• “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
• “How long will you wait before you demand the best for yourself?”
• “No person is free who is not a master of themself.”
• “Don’t just say you’ve read books. Show through them you have learned to think better, to be more discriminating and reflective. Books are the training weights of the mind… it’s a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.”

Epictetus on meaning

• “Seek not the good in external things; seek it in yourselves.”
• “Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.”
• “You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.”
• “Who is rich? He who is content.”

Epictetus on wisdom

• “Small-minded people blame others. Average people blame themselves. The wise see all blame as foolishness.”
• “He is a wise person who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those he has.”
• “Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.”

Epictetus’s story is very inspiring, and it is a nice reminder that many of our experiences – and the wisdom that can guide us through these experiences – are shared by people who are geographically, culturally, and temporally distant from us. 

1. Autonomy

Pro: you’re the boss and decide what to do.

Con: you HAVE to always decide what to do. There will be a huge array of options at any given moment, and you’ll never know for sure which to work on. You can seek advice, but ultimately YOU are the one who must decide.

2. Lifestyle

Pro: since you’re the boss, you’ll have flexibility in your hours.

Cons: you’ll inevitably be working a lot of hours. It takes a lot of work to succeed as an entrepreneur. Since there is never an end to how much work can be done, you may have trouble “turning off” at the end of the day or on the weekend.

3. Resilience

Pro: it’s an incredible way to train resilience, persistence, and problem-solving skills.

Con: the world will punch you in the face between 5 and 100 times, and if you ever give up, you lose. This is stressful, and most humans would give up after 5 or 10 face punches.

4. Expected Value

Pro: if you’re well suited to it and work on a good idea, the expected (mean) value in terms of potential impact and monetary reward can be REALLY high. Some companies have truly altered the course of history. And obviously, many of the wealthiest people are entrepreneurs.

Con: the probability of failure is high, and luck is a significant factor. And unless you have substantial savings, you’ll likely be living frugally at first.

5. Learning

Pro: you will learn a tremendous amount. Even if the startup doesn’t work out, this valuable experience will apply to MANY other things. I don’t know of another way to learn so many things so quickly. One of the most important categories of things you’ll learn is “how to get difficult shit done in the real world while charting a path yourself for how to make it happen.”

Con: you will inevitably make many mistakes (ouch), and you have to face up to them (double ouch) in order to learn fast enough. It forces you to acknowledge and improve (or develop workarounds for) your weaknesses. It’s also important to note that if you are really not suited for entrepreneurship, or you just get unlucky right away, you might not learn that much. The great learning from entrepreneurship certainly doesn’t require success, but if you fail too immediately or don’t get anywhere close to success, it will be much less of a learning experience.

6. Meaning

Pro: you can choose to work on an idea that is DEEPLY meaningful to you. Most jobs don’t provide this level of meaning.

Con: if you fail, you will have invested a lot of time in (and then failed at) something deeply meaningful to you.

7. Respect

Pro: many people have a lot of respect for entrepreneurs, and it’s considered cool in plenty of circles.

Con: this respect increasingly kicks in as success increases, and before that, some people won’t even respect it as a career choice. If you fail, that will still garner respect from some people, but most people probably won’t give you much respect for having tried and failed.

8. Relationships

Pro: you will likely meet lots of interesting people and build meaningful relationships with your team members.

Cons: you may have to deal with difficult personalities or navigate complex human dynamics when it comes to employees, investors, customers, and/or co-founders.

9. Responsibility

Pro: it teaches you a deep form of responsibility, which strengthens your character.

Con: you are ultimately, at the end of the day, responsible for everything. You’re the captain, the last line of defense, and the goalie. When someone else at your company screws up, and it ends up having a bad effect on the business, as unfair as it may seem, it’s actually your fault. You hired them, or didn’t put safety measures in place, or didn’t spot the problem early enough, or didn’t give them the training they needed, etc. The captain is responsible for the fate of the ship and every crew member on it.

10. Adaptability

Pro: it hones your creativity and adaptability, can really build self-confidence, and can help you develop a sense of how much you’re capable of (probably more than you think!) as you figure out solutions for complex challenges, develop new ideas, and map out how to make them a reality. It pushes your boundaries in new ways and makes you grow.

Con: it can stretch your creativity and adaptability to the limit. Plans, essential as they are to make, rarely survive their collision with reality. It sometimes pushes your boundaries more than you would like and can place you into situations that you find terrifying (e.g., a high-stakes negotiation to save your company when it is on the brink of failure, or a major technical failure that leaves hundreds of customers furious at you, etc.).

So, why NOT be an entrepreneur? Because it’s a high-risk, chaotic, stressful, responsibility-filled, boundary-pushing, challenging life. And it’s hard work. Not everyone is suited to this path, and it’s irresponsible to pretend that everyone is.

BUT, if you’re well suited for it, it can be one of the most deeply meaningful, high-value, high-impact lives to lead. You’ll meet lots of people, build resilience and adaptability, push your skills to new heights, and learn a STAGGERING amount. For some people, it is absolutely their best life path.

If you think that entrepreneurship may be the right path for you, and you haven’t yet picked what idea to work on, you may be interested in learning more about our work at Spark Wave. We’re a startup studio (venture builder), and we recruit people who are interested in becoming CEOs for our mission-driven software products (no technical background or prior startup experience is required). We aim to reduce some of the worst negatives of entrepreneurship while building products that we believe could add a lot of value to the world. Our goal is to help make a better world through software and entrepreneurship. You can learn more and get in touch with us at: https://www.sparkwave.tech

This piece was first written on September 3, 2020, and first appeared on this site on July 29, 2022.