It always starts with one innocent click. A cat video, a recipe reel, a pretty girl on a beach, a lad lifting weights, a gamer shouting into a headset. You smile, you scroll, you move on. What you don’t realise is that in that moment, you’ve put a marble in your social media jar. And the platforms love nothing more than to keep handing you more marbles until you’re buried in them, rolling around like a toddler in a ball pit you never asked for.
The reason is simple. Every click, every like, every pause over a post tells the algorithms, “Yes please, more of this.” They’re not doing it out of kindness. Each view, each follow, each second of your attention is a microtransaction in their giant casino. They’re selling your eyes to advertisers, to promoters, to anyone willing to pay for you to linger a little longer. That’s why when you stop to watch a cute kitty video, your feed suddenly becomes a cat café on steroids. And if you hover over the other kind of pussy, the two-legged sort posing in a micro bikini, then brace yourself, because you’ve just opened the floodgates – and many of those are run by sweaty blokes…
Yes, here’s the darker bit. A significant chunk of the accounts you’re following aren’t run by genuine people at all. They’re scammers, bots, and professional illusionists who you wouldn’t trust in your living room, but somehow it feels acceptable to let them into your phone. Behind those glossy selfies and seductive captions are people who are bored at best and predatory at worst. Some want your money, some want your data, some just want to keep you distracted enough to forget you’ve been had.
And yet, people keep adding. Men in particular have a fondness for padding their follow lists with gamers, Instasluts, and women whose main talent is taking selfies. It gives the illusion of intimacy without the effort of real connection. A dopamine snack. A little jolt of “maybe she’ll notice me/if I add her, it feels like a friend/I can jack off to her later” even though the only thing she’s noticing is how many subscriptions she can squeeze out of her audience; you all get the same PM “Join my OnlyFans, I’ll make it worth your while and it’s only £3/month”.
The problem is that with every marble you collect, your feed becomes less about your actual friends and more about strangers you’ll never meet. Algorithms don’t care about balance, they care about engagement. So if you follow more than aproxim 300 accounts, you’re never going to see what matters. Your best mate’s holiday photos? Buried. Your sister’s graduation? Lost in a sea of recycled memes and semi naked influencers holding the strings of their bikini up while they do that dance… You’ll be scrolling forever, yet never satisfied, like someone stuffing crisps into their mouth while still hungry for a proper meal.
And it has consequences for your head. Constantly grazing on shallow, curated content makes real life feel dull. You start comparing your day to the highlight reels of people you don’t know. You crave the next hit, the next laugh, the next cleavage/bum cheeks shot, the next thirty-second life hack. But it’s hollow. It erodes your attention span, chips away at your confidence, and leaves you less connected to the people who actually care about you.
The harsh truth is that these platforms are not free playgrounds. They’re marketplaces. The accounts that rise to the top are the ones that pay. When you pause over a clip, that creator makes a mental note to feed you more, and the platform makes a profit out of it. And the scammers? They’re delighted you stopped. They’ve just bought themselves a little more of your brainspace.
So ask yourself, how many marbles are you collecting, and what do they really add up to? If your feed is full of strangers pouting, preening, and pretending, what does that say about how you’re spending your time? If you wouldn’t let someone into your home, why let them colonise your phone?
Social media has turned into a vast marble museum, but not all marbles are worth collecting. Some are chipped, fake, or stolen. Some are glass dressed up as diamonds. And the more you gather, the less you can see the few genuine gems hidden underneath.
The platforms want you drowning in marbles because every roll, every clink, every shimmer means money for them. But for you, it means mental clutter, wasted energy, and a warped view of reality. The moment you start noticing the game, you’re already ahead. Because the only way to win is to stop hoarding and start choosing. Fewer marbles, better marbles, real marbles.
Otherwise you’ll keep scrolling in circles, surrounded by illusions, and wondering why the people you actually love have gone quiet. They haven’t. You just buried them under a pile of junk you thought was shiny and valuable.
