Social media affirmation.

People pursue social media affirmation the way religious devotees follow the edicts of prophets, priests, or their own hallucinated visions.

People pursue social media affirmation to their own deep hurt, to the point where they’re inflicting damage and even death upon one another, to the point of becoming murderers, to the point of incarceration.

Social media affirmation is orders of magnitude more prevalent and more immediately rewarding than the awe and mystery of the sublime. The cost-to-benefit ratio of social media affirmation is much higher than that of the sublime, which often requires periods of solitude and disengagement that social media junkies find intolerable.