The currency was your mental health

Welcome to “What happened to social networks?”, a three-part series about social media as the fabric that, ironically, connects all of us today. In this first part we’ll look at where things stand right now; in the second, at what would have to change for social networks to stop hurting us; and in the third and last, I’ll tell you how I’ve tried to turn all of this into a social network meant to be healthier for everyone.

My name is Cayetano Iváñez. I currently run Holafly’s subscription business and, among other things, I’ve led growth at two of the most important social networks to come out of Spain, 21Buttons and Peoople. Today I want to talk to you, from first-hand experience, about how social media has shaped who we are.

Let’s start at the beginning.

Last August, Meta agreed to pay up to 18 billion dollars to settle, without a verdict, a lawsuit brought by a coalition of US states that accused it of designing platforms that were deliberately addictive for children and teenagers¹.

It isn’t an isolated case. In 2025, a former executive testified before the Senate that Facebook could detect when a teenage girl deleted a selfie —a moment of insecurity— in order to serve her beauty ads right then².

In 2017, a leaked internal document showed the company, Facebook, telling advertisers it could identify when its youngest users felt “insecure”, “worthless” or “in need of a confidence boost”³.

Now let’s step away from the legal language. What does this feel like in real life?

• A seventeen-year-old girl deletes a story she isn’t happy with after posting it. That gesture, “delete”, makes her eligible for content that feeds her insecurities, and for ads that sell her the fix: make-up brands, cosmetic clinics.
• A kid who can’t sleep ends up scrolling at three in the morning. He gets picked to receive piles of content reinforcing the idea that something is wrong with him. The fix shows up soon enough: courses that promise to turn him into his best self, clothing brands that idealise what he should be and never will be.

Friends, enough.

We’re all in the same game. Those who weren’t born into it found it just as they were becoming adults. Those who were already adults found the perfect tool to justify their mental lethargy.

I look around me, I look inward, I look far away, and I see the same thing: we live in a state of constant comparison⁴. We aspire to what we see, and what we see is what content creators project about how they want us to see them. It’s Plato’s bloody cave: we stare at shadows cast by people who need us to validate them.

Not to mention AI-generated content. I no longer just project what I wish were real: now you aspire to someone who doesn’t even exist. In Spain we have it at home: Aitana López, an influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers and brand deals, made pixel by pixel by an agency in Barcelona⁵. Not even Plato saw that coming.

More than fifty years ago, an economist wrote it down: when information is abundant, attention is what becomes scarce⁶. We’ve spent years living in the economy of attention and validation, and only now do we see what the currency was: our mental health.

Instagram’s own internal research, leaked in 2021, put it bluntly: “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls”⁷.

Don’t get me wrong: Instagram, as a concept, isn’t bad. Capturing the images of your life and building a sort of album of what you’re living through sounds wonderful to me. I love treating my profile as exactly that: an album for my future self.

But something happens. We’ve been in this dynamic for so long that the brain has started to read digital signals as if they were the real world.

Before you hit “post”, your mind has already rehearsed dozens of scenarios about what will happen next.

Once you post, you go on alert. Likes are processed as social acceptance: the reward circuits of a teenage brain light up for a like the same way they do for other rewards⁸. And silence is processed as exclusion. Social exclusion, by the way, activates the same brain regions as physical pain⁹. It doesn’t “hurt as if” you were rejected: it just hurts.

After the cycle repeats two or three times, you’re inside the slot-machine effect: a variable reward system, the same mechanism casino machines are designed around¹⁰. You post again with the anxiety of someone pulling the lever, hoping for a prize or, at least, lights and colours.

The effect of all this goes beyond how you feel. When an entire generation lives under the same altered behaviour, it stops being an “alteration” and becomes the new normal. It eats me up inside to think that, the day I have children, that will be theirs. Because this isn’t about saying “my kids won’t have social media”; my kids will end up with the same as yours, whether we like it or not.

This is about asking ourselves a different question. And it isn’t rhetorical: there’s evidence the relationship can be different. In an experiment at the University of Pennsylvania, limiting social media use for a few weeks was enough to significantly reduce participants’ loneliness and depressive symptoms¹¹.

Is there an alternative that lets us build a healthier relationship with what we consume and with what we create?