Catherine Prasifka on Cutting Seven Hours of Social Media a Week

Catherine Prasifka, the novelist whose fiction and essays have tracked social media’s grip on attention for years, has now applied that critique to her own daily use. Her recent column carries the headline “How I reclaimed seven hours a week by limiting my social media use.” The figure lands as a small, concrete answer to a structural question she has put to readers since her debut novel None Of This Is Serious appeared with Canongate.

In a longer essay for The Gloss around the publication of that first novel, she set out the personal stake plainly. “I’ve used social media for my entire adult life, and most of my teenage years,” she wrote. “I’m fascinated by social media, and I guess you could call me an expert in it.” Crucially, in that same essay she conceded she does not understand the effect it has had on her life, a gap her new column appears to close.

A Decade Inside the Feed

Prasifka grew up inside the feed. She scrolled through the same apps she now writes against. Her own description is unhurried. “I’ve used social media for my entire adult life, and most of my teenage years,” she wrote, adding: “I’m fascinated by social media, and I guess you could call me an expert in it.” Her debut novel None Of This Is Serious, published by Canongate, treats online life as a pressure cooker for young women, and her second novel This Is How You Remember It returns to the same territory. The two novels frame the recent column: a writer who has lived the question is now answering it for herself.

The seven hours she reclaimed did not arrive as a single decision but as the cumulative weight of her own argument. In her Gloss essay she wrote that the apps trade in attention, and that “ingrained into the culture of all apps is addiction.” A column that names seven hours a week is what that insight looks like when applied to one writer’s calendar.

• Social media for her entire adult life and most teenage years.
• The currency traded is attention.
• Seven hours reclaimed in a single week.
• Apps exist to spur users on to the next post.

The Argument She Has Stated Plainly

Prasifka’s case against social media rests on business model. “We don’t pay for social media apps,” she wrote in her essay on posting authentically online. “They primarily make money through advertising.” From that premise she draws a harder conclusion: “Ingrained into the culture of all apps is addiction. They want me to enter some fugue state as I scroll, to be unable to truly let them go. And there will never be an incentive for them to change.” The system is described as adversarial without requiring the reader to take sides.

Her second target is who the design is built to exploit. “They thrive off identifying insecurities and exploiting them,” she wrote. “No one is a greater victim of this than young women.” The point is structural, not moral, and the attention economy is the framing she keeps returning to.

Platforms do not need bad faith to produce harm. They need engagement, and engagement is harvested from insecurity. Young women, in her account, are at once the pariahs of social media and the cogs that keep it turning, because any post by a young woman can be read as too prudish, too sexy, too intelligent, or not thought-out enough. Each reading generates its own counter-wave, and the waves compound. The transaction is documented in her essay, and is what her seven-hour week now disrupts.

Why Even the User Cannot Stop

Prasifka is honest about her own compulsion. “I always feel a sense of confusion when I’m finished with an app and close it,” she wrote. She also concedes, with unusual precision, what the moment of closing actually feels like.

For a moment, I feel sated. Then, my fingers move of their own accord to reopen the exact thing I’d just decided I didn’t want to look at anymore.

That sentence is from her essay for The Gloss. It was written around the publication of her debut novel None Of This Is Serious, published by Canongate.

She frames the pull as a system problem, not a willpower problem. Apps, she wrote, “thrive off identifying insecurities and exploiting them.” The longer the scroll, the less of it survives. “There is a kind of passivity, a state of constant entertainment, in the endless scroll of social media,” she wrote. “That dog TikTok? I can’t remember a single thing about it.” Her summary is plain: “Social media does not allow us to properly engage or analyse anything. It exists merely to spur us on to the next post.” The fugue state she names is the consequence she wants readers to recognise.

There is no exit door in her account. “Even if you were to take your phone and chuck it into a lake, you wouldn’t be free,” she wrote. The cultural saturation is the point: large parts of public life run through these platforms regardless of whether any one person uses them. Cutting seven hours a week is therefore a personal act, and she is clear about that.

That distinction is the difference between a column and a manifesto. Prasifka’s column is a column.

From Column to Practice

The move from essay to action was published in her recent column, titled “How I reclaimed seven hours a week by limiting my social media use.” She has been writing about social media as a novelist since None Of This Is Serious appeared with Canongate, and as a columnist. In an interview about her second novel This Is How You Remember It, the same themes reappear: the way online life shapes identity and intimacy for young people. The column reads as the natural endpoint of that body of work.

Her writing asks the same question in several forms. Each is a question she has put to readers across essays and columns. They are not rhetorical, and they do not share a template.

• Is what I see on social media real?
• How do these apps ensure you are emotionally invested?
• What is it about social media that has its hooks in me?
• Is it possible for anything I post online to be authentic?

The Limits of Her Own Argument

Prasifka does not pretend the platforms are worthless. “Maybe I know it’s not real, but there are aspects of social media I like,” she wrote in her essay for The Gloss. She gave specific examples: laughing at a TikTok about a dog, sharing it into a WhatsApp group, strengthening bonds with people, getting genuine enjoyment from it. That concession is what keeps her critique from being absolute.

Her recent column applies the same balance to a single week. In her podcast on the social media era, she discussed the consequences of living online and in the real world at the same time, and the costs of that split. Cutting seven hours is a response to the cost.

She is also clear that no individual choice ends the problem. “There is no escaping social media,” she wrote. “Large swathes of our lives exist on it.” Her column describes a limit on use.

What a Seven-Hour Week Reclaims

The column lands on a small imperative, written for one reader at a time. “We need to decide how much power we are willing to give social media,” Prasifka wrote, and “we need to start asking the right questions.” Her own action is the seven hours; her own list is the questions. Whether other readers keep the same tally is theirs to decide. The case she is making in her column is the same case she has been making in fiction, with one number now attached.

Her Instagram account remains active, and her posts about social media are public. What she has changed is the cost. The seven hours are hours, not a verdict, and she has been careful not to dress them up as one. That restraint is itself part of the argument she has been making since None Of This Is Serious.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Catherine Prasifka?

The novelist Catherine Prasifka writes fiction and opinion pieces about social media and the lives of young people. Her debut novel None Of This Is Serious was published by Canongate. Her second novel is This Is How You Remember It. She has written a regular opinion column about the topic.

What has she argued about social media?

Her long-running position is that platforms are designed to harvest attention because users do not pay for them, and that the business model incentivises addiction. She has written that “ingrained into the culture of all apps is addiction,” and that the apps “thrive off identifying insecurities and exploiting them.”

How much time did she reclaim by limiting her use?

Her recent column carries the figure in its title: “How I reclaimed seven hours a week by limiting my social media use.” She has not publicly broken down which apps she cut.

What does she say is the answer for readers?

Her stated imperative is for readers to decide how much power they are willing to give social media, and to “start asking the right questions.” She has framed this as a question each user must answer for themselves rather than a recommendation to quit.

Does she think people should quit social media entirely?

No. She has written that “there is no escaping social media” and that “large swathes of our lives exist on it.” Her column describes a limit on use.