What Universities, Signal Groups, and Social Media Have in Common
There is a particular cognitive state that is difficult to name but easy to recognize once you pay attention to it. It is not a distraction, and it is not exactly stress.
It resembles overthinking, and it can feel neurotic, but it is not simply a personality trait or a mental weakness. It is a reaction. A response to something structural. It appears most clearly in digital spaces — in Signal groups, on social media feeds, inside endless threads of opinions and advice — but it is not limited to them. It can emerge in lecture halls, in professional environments, in conferences, in newsletters, in any space where information flows toward you before you have a reason to reach for it.
And what kind of state is it?
It is a kind of internal constriction — a subtle tightening that appears when you expose yourself to streams of information that you did not actively seek.
The Signal Problem
I used to be part of multiple Signal groups. Bitcoin discussions, digital privacy circles, topics on biohacking and nutrition, campervan communities, or huge general chats that served as ego trips for businessmen, where every topic was discussed a little. On paper, these (or at least most of them) are aligned with my interests. I genuinely care about these topics.
But something just doesn’t feel right here.
The truth is that once I become interested in something, I can devote myself to it completely. When I’m trying to solve a problem, I can spend hours and hours researching the topic online. I can read stacks of papers, browse GitHubs, watch YouTube videos, download and listen to podcasts, read books, test things, and try them out in practice. And all because something caught my interest.
And how do I feel during this process? I feel amazing and motivated. I feel great and full of energy. I feel natural and alive. And most importantly, I feel completely different than when I open the group chats.
I don’t think the problem will be my lack of interest or low motivation.
As soon as I open the Signal group, it’s a completely different process. I feel that something is wrong. That I’m not keeping up. That I have to try something. Learn something. Improve something. Move forward in something. Devote myself to something. Belong somewhere. And that “I’m not good enough.”
I have tried many times to hack Signal groups. To mute them, put them in an archive, create a separate account for personal communication and a separate account that I only use for groups. However, nothing worked. Even though I reduced the groups to a bare minimum, there always came a time when I had to open them. Or at least the urge that convinced me to do so.
A similar compulsion to what you might feel when obsessively checking the social media of someone you are emotionally invested in. There is an urge to look and a simultaneous resistance. You anticipate that something important might be there. You also anticipate that what you see might destabilize you. That ambivalence is not intellectual; it is physiological. Signal groups trigger something similar. When I open them, I am not simply encountering information. I am entering a field of comparison.
Someone has discovered a new marketing strategy. Someone optimized sleep with a different supplement protocol. Someone automated something. Someone is ahead on some metric. None of this is presented as competition, but the social dimension is implicit.
We know that human cognition does not process peer information neutrally. In 1954, social psychologist Leon Festinger introduced Social Comparison Theory — a framework that remains deeply relevant today. His central idea was straightforward: when there is no clear, measurable benchmark for “how well we are doing”, we evaluate ourselves by comparing ourselves to others.
An objective benchmark is simple. Did the code compile? Did you lift 100 kilograms or not? Did the wave break cleanly and did you stay on it? Did the experiment produce the expected result? In these environments, feedback comes from the task itself. The standard exists independently of other people’s performance.
But in environments where no such benchmark exists, the mind looks sideways. Who is further ahead? Who seems more competent? Who appears more disciplined, more optimized, more informed? The comparison is automatic. It does not require intention or insecurity. It is simply how the brain orients itself when there is no stable metric available. That’s simply how we operate. (Festinger, L. (1954). A Theory of Social Comparison Processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872675400700202)
Digital groups and social feeds rarely provide objective standards. There is no shared task, no defined endpoint, no agreed definition of “enough.” Instead, there is a continuous stream of updates across different domains — productivity, health, finance, philosophy, entrepreneurship. Without a task-based anchor, the brain defaults to positional evaluation.
And this evaluation simply does not feel free. Each exposure triggers small recalculations. Where do I stand? Should I be doing this? Am I behind? That ongoing recalibration consumes attention.
In addition to triggering comparison, these environments rarely produce deep learning. Cognitive Load Theory suggests that working memory has limited capacity, and when it is saturated with loosely connected inputs (what the theory calls “extraneous load”), transfer into long-term memory weakens. You process fragments, but they do not consolidate into structured understanding.
So the effect is double-edged – the environment increases comparison while decreasing integration. It makes you recalibrate your position more often, but it does not necessarily make you more competent, more productive, or more intelligent.
Harmfulness far beyond the boundaries of the digital world
But this mechanism does not belong only to Signal groups. Signal simply exposes it clearly because it concentrates comparison into a single, compressed stream. The deeper pattern is broader and more structural.
In environments where you are anchored to a concrete task, evaluation comes from the task itself. The benchmark exists independently of other people. But when information reaches you before you are oriented toward a specific problem, there is no such anchor. There is no defined standard. No endpoint.
You could think of it this way: there are environments built around solicited information, and environments saturated with unsolicited information.
Solicited information is information you move toward. It answers a question that already exists in you. It enters a structure that is partially formed. It has somewhere to land. Even if it is complex or challenging, it feels coherent because it attaches to a task, a curiosity, or a problem you are already working on. And working with solicited information is exactly the process I was talking about when I said how “motivated and great” I feel.
Unsolicited information, however, works differently. It reaches you before you have decided you need it. It arrives without context. It presents possibilities, improvements, alternatives, warnings, opportunities — but without a stable frame to evaluate them. In the absence of a task-based benchmark, the only available reference point becomes other people.
That is the environment that feels strange and slightly destabilizing. Not because it is malicious or false. But because it lacks the grounding that makes evaluation straightforward. Instead of asking, “Does this work?” you quietly begin asking, “Where do I stand?”
Perhaps my metaphor with unsolicited and solicited information is only the another way to describe the same mechanism Festinger pointed to decades ago – when clear standards are missing, comparison fills the gap. And digital environments, by design, are full of input but thin on shared benchmarks.
It is not surprising that such spaces produce a subtle cognitive tension. They ask the mind to orient itself without giving it anything solid to orient around.
Social media is perhaps the most efficient environment for unsolicited information. It compresses unrelated domains into a single feed and delivers them without asking whether you are oriented toward any of them.
You can encounter geopolitics, fitness advice, financial speculation, personal milestones, philosophical threads, and outrage cycles within minutes. Each item demands orientation. Each item asks for evaluation. And because there is no shared task tying them together, your attention is repeatedly forced to reset.
Signal groups operate on the same logic, but with even higher social density. You are not just exposed to information; you are exposed to peers. The absence of objective benchmarks becomes more intense (at least for me) because the only stable reference left is other people’s progress.
Schools as primitive social networks
And then there is the educational system.
I personally spent two years at a university, and honestly, I was shocked by how well people tolerate that environment. To me, it felt overwhelming in a very specific way. Not intellectually difficult — structurally unnatural.
A lecturer walks onto the stage. No one in the room asked for that specific topic at that specific moment. The lecture begins and continues. Information flows in one direction. You are expected to absorb it whether or not a question exists inside you. The same pattern repeats in kindergartens, elementary schools, and high schools. Someone steps forward and starts speaking. The audience did not initiate the inquiry. The direction of flow is predetermined.
This is normalized to the point where it no longer looks strange. But structurally, it is the same inversion we see in digital environments. Information arrives before curiosity. Exposure precedes intention.
For me, the tension accumulated until it became unbearable. That’s exactly why I left university, even though I was a good student and passed without any problems.
What makes this even more ironic is that entire books are written about how social media damages developing brains because children are forced into comparison. And yes, they are. But comparison is not a problem only for children. It does not suddenly disappear when you turn sixteen or eighteen. It operates in adults just as reliably.
And first and foremost — social media is not the only environment that produces this effect. Signal groups do. Endless newsletters do. And schools do.
We criticize young kids for scrolling, yet we force them into classrooms structured around the same direction of flow — information delivered on schedule, comparison embedded in the system, benchmarks often abstract and detached from lived tasks.
Passing an exam may look like an objective benchmark, but it is often a proxy metric rather than a measure of integration. It captures short-term performance under standardized conditions, not necessarily internalized understanding or intrinsic motivation. A student can satisfy the metric — even manipulate it — without reorganizing their cognitive structures in any durable way. It’s similar to when you write an extremely intellectual message in a Signal group on a topic you don’t understand at all, so you just have AI generate it and pretend you’re an expert. Will you move up in the hierarchy? Maybe. Does it make you feel good? Definitely not, unless you’re a psychopath.
Educational systems are, in this sense, structurally rotten. They operate on the assumption that if information is delivered clearly and repeatedly enough, comprehension will follow. But decades of cognitive and motivational research suggest otherwise. Exposure without personal relevance often produces short-term memorization at best, not durable integration.
Research on intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, particularly within Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985; 2000), consistently shows that when learning is externally imposed, engagement decreases and retention suffers unless the learner internalizes the value of the task. In other words, external pressure can produce compliance, but it does not reliably produce depth. Students may perform well on standardized assessments, yet fail to consolidate knowledge into flexible, transferable understanding. The system rewards performance under constraint, not necessarily cognitive restructuring.
And so we are back to the same problem – such unsolicited information structures are only comparative, we feel tense and unnatural, and again – for almost no value in return. We will certainly not become significantly wiser or more intelligent because of them.
What to do now?
The same “unsolicited information structures” however appears in corporate training modules, productivity newsletters, self-help feeds, online courses that promise transformation without demanding immersion, and sadly even in certain podcasts designed to deliver distilled “insights” in rapid succession.
To say that this feels “unnatural” is not to romanticize some pre-digital past, or to complain about schools. It is simply to acknowledge that human cognition stabilizes around intention. Attention works best when it is directed by a question, a task, or a problem. When it is continuously redirected by external streams, you shift from building to reacting.
Unsolicited information subtly trains this reactive mode. It encourages scanning over dwelling, updating over integrating, comparison over construction. The issue is not that information exists. The issue is that integration is rarely required. Integration is slow, selective, and effortful. It demands staying with something long enough for it to take shape internally. And the systems optimized for constant exposure rarely leave room for that.
Yes, there are many environments where unsolicited information is unavoidable — news cycles, marketing ecosystems, algorithmic feeds…
The solution is probably not to leave everything behind, but to be aware of it. Realize that you have a choice. Not everything has to concern you, you don’t have to be part of everything.
If information arrives and you have no project that requires it, it should probably wait. If a group exists but you have no defined reason to engage at that moment, it should probably remain closed. If school is holding you back from what you really want to do, maybe you should leave. Maybe YouTube should be your teacher.
Feeling bad, unnatural, ashamed, inferior, and drained of energy is not a sign of fragility. It’s a sign that you have enough fakes and you have a sense for something real.
When information arrives before a question forms inside you, it rarely deepens anything. It interrupts. It scatters. And when comparison becomes constant background noise, you slowly begin measuring yourself against fragments instead of against your own trajectory.
Scrolling, staying in dozens of groups, constantly checking what others are doing — none of that is inherently wrong. But it may not be neutral either. It may be keeping you in a state of mild cognitive agitation where you consume much more than you actually build.
Sometimes the most intelligent move is not to optimize your feed or mute another group. It is to close the stream entirely and return to a single task. To let your questions mature without interference. To work without continuous exposure.
Not because information is bad. But because depth does not grow in noise.