Back to blog listing

No Short Form

Ironically, I tried to keep this short.

Short form content is insidious. In one sense, it’s nothing new, representing the natural evolution of the powerful taking advantage of the common person. Before this it was social media, before that internet marketing, television, processed foods, cigarettes. Notice that as new forms of addiction farming are invented by the wealthy, the old forms remain intact. Short form content is just the next wave, and it falls naturally out of the algorithm-based scrolling phenomenon that has taken over the internet since Facebook’s original changes and Twitter followed suit.

But there’s something different about this one. Like all addicting things, this one takes advantage of some system that evolved for an entirely different purpose, the reward system lurking beneath our neural pathways. Unlike some of the previous attempts at farming the common person as a resource, this taps directly into the brain stem.12 I think what gets me about short form is how incredibly magnetizing it is. I’ve hated social media since maybe 2006, or whenever I first encountered MySpace as a young person. I never found it magnetizing or impossible to avoid. I use YouTube regularly, and every once in a while I find myself naturally clicking on a short that I find genuinely interesting, and then suddenly 20 minutes have gone by and I’ve been watching absolute garbage random content. Watching a 30 second video of cats being dumb that brings you joy is one thing, but watching that kind of content for 4 hours a day?

As a consumer of the web and general enjoyer of neuroscience, I have a casual and natural interest in the neuroscience of short form content. How does it affect the brain while watching? How about over long periods of time with constant exposure? How does it differ from past forms of dopamine farming and consumption addiction? There are plenty of studies showing that it’s an extremely potent form of addiction.34 Of course, there are plenty of studies reframing it in a positive way (don’t look too hard at who funds these).56 But as a father, I have a responsibility to understand the harms or dangers of any popular technology. I’m an avid reader and enjoyer of white papers, which means sometimes these things overlap, and I find myself reading frontier research on how these things affect the brain. It’s scary stuff. I don’t know anyone who hates short form content as much as I do at this point, and yet still I find myself getting stuck in YouTube shorts rabbit holes periodically. I hate it. I can feel my agency being taken away. These platforms are surgically engineered by some of the greatest minds to take advantage of your mind, all for the sake of making money for some giant soulless corporation.

It’s difficult to discuss with normal people. I look around and almost every adult human has their face shoved in a short form content feed for hours and hours a day. The stats on how much time adults spend on these things are absolutely wild. Some people argue that it’s nothing new, that television and radio before it were having the same impacts on people, creating the same addictive behaviors. Of course, there’s a ton of research showing that to be false, proving that short form is aggressively potent and has lasting impacts on the attention span that other forms of media don’t.78 Do not misinterpret this as saying that these other forms of media are good for you. I’m an avid gamer, and yet for years I’ve been telling my gamer friends that I think gaming is genuinely bad for you, for many of the same reasons.9 I’ve seen plenty of people with real potential waste their lives away because they have created this identity of themselves as a gamer, and they cling to that identity at the cost of all else. They never push forward in any other domain because they are too busy playing the next competitive game in the hype cycle. It does make me sad, but I’m not here to shame anyone. I still game as often as I want, and likely far more than any “healthy” person with a balanced life. However, through years of reasoning about what I want to accomplish and what it will take to get there, I’ve been able to naturally start putting less and less time into these kinds of things.

Here’s the question, though. How do you talk to others about reforming something that society has normalized? Gaming is already a challenge to discuss with people, at least socially. And if you have grown up as a gamer, you undoubtedly have known at least one person whose relationship had stress or tension because their spouse hated gaming, or hated how much time someone was putting into what they thought was a fruitless pursuit. Even when someone’s significant other is grilling them about their gaming addiction, people still struggle to see reason and reform. So how do you have that conversation about short form, when BOTH of them are using these platforms every single day? How do you convince a child that the dopamine rush of these platforms is not only not worth it in the moment, but that it will actively impact their future negatively due to cognitive decline?1011 Especially when all of their friends are using it, their teachers are using it, their parents are using it. Even the runners, the athletes, the people that used to shame the rest of us normies for all the unhealthy things we do, are addicted to these platforms.

Maybe I’m just getting old, and it’s as simple as being an old man shaking his fist at the clouds. The science leads me to believe that it’s much more than that. I’m not trying to convince you of anything, and I’m certainly not trying to posture as a scientist. In a way, I’m just recording my thoughts, hoping that it will resonate with someone. I’ve reached a decision point for myself. No short form. I won’t watch something someone sends me, I won’t create short form content, I won’t propagate or send short form content to anyone else. I personally believe it’s bad for the species in a way that nothing else has ever been. I’ve been watching the people around me get slowly pulled into subordination by addiction since I was a child. In a way, it feels like a natural part of the world to me. The normalization of these addiction surfaces makes reform feel impossible.

As a parent, I’ve banished short form content from every surface my child has access to. I’ve read the neuroscience and just decided that it doesn’t make sense to expose her. Societal normalization is not valid reasoning for exposure to one’s self or their loved ones. If everyone and their children were doing heroin, I still would not let my kid do drugs. Many people deny that these platforms are as harmful or addictive as hard drugs. I beg to differ.12 The damage is just harder to see. As for myself, I’m lucky because I already don’t use basically any social media or other sites that incorporate this kind of content. My one point of weakness and exposure is YouTube, which I use regularly for both entertainment and education. That said, I’ve removed it from my phone, and continue to try and make my phone less interesting and distance myself from it.

Across the world, people have many short sayings that encapsulate deep and powerful beliefs. I list these not because they reflect my beliefs (although some of them do), but because they set the stage for the way I want “No Short Form” to be said and held. And in no way am I saying these all have the equivalent level of weight because I’ve listed them. These are also all currently popular.

  • Stop Killing Games
  • Free Palestine
  • No Kings
  • Abolish ICE (aka f**k ICE)
  • Tax The Rich
  • Right to Repair

No Short Form.

Footnotes

  1. Su, C., Zhou, H., Gong, L., Teng, B., Geng, F., & Hu, Y. (2021). “Viewing personalized video clips recommended by TikTok activates default mode network and ventral tegmental area.” NeuroImage, 237, 118136. doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.118136. fMRI found that personalized, algorithmically recommended clips drove stronger activation of the ventral tegmental area (a core dopamine reward region) and the default mode network than generic clips. Companion connectivity paper: Su et al. (2021), Human Brain Mapping, doi.org/10.1002/hbm.25616. ↩

  2. Gao, Y., et al. (2025). “Neuroanatomical and functional substrates of the short video addiction and its association with brain transcriptomic and cellular architecture.” NeuroImage, 307, 121029. doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2025.121029. Severity of short-video addiction tracked with changes in reward-related regions (orbitofrontal cortex, cerebellum). See also Zhang et al. (2025), Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2025.1542271. Worth being precise: these are neural correlates, not direct measurements of dopamine release, and they are mostly cross-sectional. ↩

  3. Nguyen, L., et al. (2025). “Feeds, feelings, and focus: A systematic review and meta-analysis examining the cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use.” Psychological Bulletin, 151(9), 1125-1146. doi.org/10.1037/bul0000498. Across 71 studies and roughly 98,000 people, heavier short-form video use correlated with poorer cognition, with the strongest associations for attention and inhibitory control. The data are correlational, so they show association, not proven causation. ↩

  4. Wang, Y., Markett, S., Zhao, Z., & Montag, C. (2025/2026). “On TikTok use disorder tendencies, fear of missing out and everyday cognitive failure.” Addictive Behaviors Reports. doi.org/10.1016/j.abrep.2026.100675. For the broader construct, see Li et al. (2025), “Research Insights on ‘Problematic Use of Short Video,’” Addiction Biology, doi.org/10.1111/adb.70082. ↩

  5. The honest counterweight. Orben, A., & Przybylski, A. K. (2019). “The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use.” Nature Human Behaviour, 3, 173-182. doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0506-1. Across roughly 355,000 adolescents, digital-technology use explained at most about 0.4% of the variance in well-being, comparable to whether a teenager wears glasses. See also Odgers & Jensen (2020), Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13190, and Coyne et al. (2020), Computers in Human Behavior, doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.106160, which found no within-person link between social media time and depression over eight years. ↩

  6. On who funds the research. A 2022 Lancet Psychiatry analysis documented how heavily addiction research can depend on industry-linked money and the conflicts that creates: doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(21)00356-4. See also an Addiction editorial calling for independence from interested funders, doi.org/10.1111/add.16729, and reporting on tech-industry funding of policy institutes (New Statesman, 2021). In fairness, the case can be overstated: Wardle (2019), Journal of Gambling Studies, doi.org/10.1007/s10899-019-09875-8, found industry-funded studies were not clearly more likely to report favorable results, though disclosure was poor. The defensible claim is a structural conflict of interest, not that findings were bought. ↩

  7. Support, then the caveat. The Nguyen et al. (2025) meta-analysis above found attention and inhibitory control were the cognitive domains most strongly associated with short-form use, and Chiencharoenthanakij et al. (2025), Brain and Behavior, doi.org/10.1002/brb3.70656, linked short-form video to inattentive symptoms in children aged 6 to 12. But there is no clean experiment showing short form is worse than television specifically. Fast-paced TV alone immediately impairs young children’s executive function (Lillard & Peterson, 2011, Pediatrics, doi.org/10.1542/peds.2010-1919), and TV-to-attention links were documented decades ago (Christakis et al., 2004, Pediatrics, doi.org/10.1542/peds.113.4.708), so the mechanism predates short form rather than being unique to it. ↩

  8. The strongest version of the opposing view, stated fairly. Orben, A. (2020). “The Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(5), 1143-1157. doi.org/10.1177/1745691620919372. It argues that novels, radio, television, and video games each triggered a near-identical moral panic, and that “this time is different” has a poor historical track record. ↩

  9. Both directions, because the evidence genuinely splits. Harm side: Ostinelli et al. (2021), Journal of Affective Disorders, doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2021.02.014, found roughly one in three people with internet gaming disorder also showed depression. Neutral or beneficial side, using objective play-time telemetry rather than self-report: Johannes, Vuorre, & Przybylski (2021), Royal Society Open Science, doi.org/10.1098/rsos.202049, and Vuorre et al. (2022), doi.org/10.1098/rsos.220411, found play time was not a meaningful predictor of well-being; a natural-experiment study in Japan even found gaming causally improved well-being (Egami et al., 2024, Nature Human Behaviour, doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01948-y). Colder Carras et al. (2020), PLOS ONE, doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240032, argues the harm-side reviews are methodologically weak. ↩

  10. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory, Social Media and Youth Mental Health, concluded there is not yet enough evidence that social media is “sufficiently safe” for children and adolescents (hhs.gov). The American Psychological Association issued a parallel 2023 health advisory (apa.org). On developmental outcomes, see Eirich et al. (2022), JAMA Psychiatry, doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2022.0155, and Nagata et al. (2025), JAMA Network Open, doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.11704. The APA’s own framing, in fairness, is that social media is “not inherently beneficial or harmful,” with effects depending on content and context. ↩

  11. “Brain rot” was Oxford University Press’s Word of the Year for 2024, defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state… as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” Reported usage rose 230% from 2023 to 2024. corp.oup.com. This is a cultural marker, not scientific evidence. ↩

  12. Whether “behavioral addictions” to media are real addictions is genuinely contested. DSM-5 lists only Gambling Disorder as a behavioral addiction and places Internet Gaming Disorder in its research appendix as a condition for further study (Petry, Zajac, & Ginley, 2018, Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, doi.org/10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-032816-045120). When the WHO added “Gaming Disorder” to ICD-11, 26 scholars publicly objected that the evidence base was too weak (Aarseth et al., 2017, Journal of Behavioral Addictions, doi.org/10.1556/2006.5.2016.088; van Rooij et al., 2018, doi.org/10.1556/2006.7.2018.19). So the comparison to hard drugs is contested rather than settled, even as the reward-system findings above keep it from being absurd. ↩

Back to blog listing