When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed. The same psychological phenomena happens to gambling addicts, alcoholics, or users of heroin. It has fewer physiological downsides and side-effects as those things; the only material loss you have is the loss of time.
But far more remarkable than that it's simply a waste of time, and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The destruction of the self. That echoes through a person's life, to their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is those echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass sociological scale.
By the way. "There" has a lot of upsides too. People can be creative, productive, expressive while they are "there" too. Creating, being funny, being social, etc. That's why this is so hard.
ps: now that I think about it, it started around the ajax era.. as soon as a webpage could change parts in the blink of an eye your perception of the web is altered IMO.
When I am home I really struggle to put things into practice because the easiest thing to do when I wake up is to look at my phone before I sit at my computer.
I do a lot of meaningful work on the computer, but I’m uneasy about how frictionless it is to just be on the computer and never act in the real world.