The Opportunity Cost of Social Media Use

It’s probably worse than you think.

Kate Ward
9 min readOct 4, 2018
“selective focus photography of three person looking on phone on train station” by rawpixel on Unsplash

I deleted Instagram off my phone a few weeks ago. I do this from time to time and I always feel better when I do, which makes me wonder:

Why do I keep re-downloading it?

Logically, if I’m happier, more focused, and just a better human without it, which I believe I am, then WTF is this addict-like behavior about?

It’s like an alcoholic that thinks beer is the problem, not whiskey. I say, Instagram is the problem, but oh, YouTube, that’s cool.

I’ll just use that one.

The Marginal Benefit Analysis

I was an Economics major in college. And after I graduated, I spent a year studying the ins-and-outs of a field called Behavioral Economics — which essentially fuses our understanding of psychology with economics. It is, in many senses, the true study of decision making and human behavior in a modern world.

One of the key ideas presented in Microeconomics 101 is the idea of making decisions “on the margin” which essentially just means — making this decision, right now, based on this set of circumstances.

Does this decision provide a benefit right now?

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Kate Ward

Thinking deeply about how to make myself and the world a little better. & writing about creators mostly | email: kate@onedayent.com