Let's say for the sake of argument that I was being hyperbolic with my "punching yourself in the face" statement. Let's say you are addicted to social media, and you use it for 5 hours a day. Let's say I take away your phone. For a week. You will probably feel gradually diminishing impulses to look at your phone, which will eventually subside almost entirely within a handful of days. You will not experience withdrawals. You will not lose sleep. You will (probably) not try to scam somebody else out of their phone. If I hand you your phone back after a week, there's a good chance you might just delete the social media apps off the phone yourself, having realized how much time you were wasting.
In other words, if the social media companies are doing every trick in the book, it's not really amounting to much. If you were spending 5 hours a day on Facebook, it probably had a lot more to do with the general shape of your life and opportunities for actualization and socialization, than it had to do with intermittent reinforcement schedules.
And fundamentally what I'm saying is correct: it is mundane daily suffering that creates the void filled by social media and other distractive addictions, giving them a foothold in your life. This is orthogonal to any claims about whether social media is "actually" "addictive".
