A clip from Before Sunrise. A woman joking that she won’t date men with flat heads because their lack of tummy time as babies betrays parental neglect that any female partner will be tasked with unpicking. Another woman gathering dahlias from her garden. A man discussing how Trump’s erratic night-time posting is a sign of the “sundowning” behaviours of patients with advanced dementia. Bob Mortimer being Bob Mortimer. An American cooking spaghetti in the same pan as a creamy sauce, enraging Italians. Ryan Gosling laughing at his face on a tea towel. Nina Simone playing the piano. A beautiful honey cake.

“I built this algorithm brick by brick”, as social media users say – a wry nod to our own complicity in the selection of content furnished to us by platforms such as Instagram or TikTok. Perhaps it’s because Thomas the Tank Engine loomed large in my childhood, but whenever I see that comment I think about Henry, bricked up in the tunnel he obstinately refuses to leave (“we shall leave you here for always, and always, and always”, says the Fat Controller).

All of which is to say that I feel entombed by my algorithm. It’s full of lovely stuff but it’s making me unhappy, and I’m not alone. A study released last week in the Journal of Psychology linked excessive consumption of short-form video to higher levels of anxiety and loneliness, and lower life satisfaction.

I’m not sure when it started to take over my life, exactly – definitely in the past year or so. We are now watching more short-form video than streaming or TV, but as someone whose primary form had always been the reading of novels, along with cinema and television, I was a relatively late adopter, a vestigial devotee of long-form storytelling. Then suddenly, hours of the day were being hoovered up by the infinite scroll – a highly addictive development in web design that keeps you gobbling up more and more content in the search for … what, exactly? The final boss of wild garlic recipes? The ultimate cat?

A few things made me realise that I was wasting my life in the tunnel. I started to notice how drawn I felt to my phone, even when my gorgeous, happy child or my husband were in the same room, seeking interaction. I realised that the 25-year long written conversation that I’d been having with a friend from school who now lives in Australia, a conversation that first began on MSN Messenger when we were 12 and has continued over text and email before migrating on to WhatsApp, had basically stopped. Hundreds and thousands of words written and read, covering every significant life event, now dwindled to videos and memes. I observed that a lifelong reading habit of at least a book a week had been cut in half.

It doesn’t surprise me that 2026 Ofcom data points to social media use becoming increasingly passive, as users switch from communication to consumption. Nor that more than a third of British adults have given up reading for pleasure. I recently listened to a podcast interview with James Marriott, whose upcoming book The New Dark Ages looks at our “post-literate” culture and the potential impact the decline of literacy and its attendant analytical and reflective thinking skills, could have on global democracy. That interview has basically turned me into a short-form video content truther who fears we are all doomed, because, as Marriott says, to look around on a bus or a train is to now see people not reading, but consuming short-form video, much of it “fragmented”, “inane” and “superficial”. Even the stuff that’s good, or uplifting, or creative, is served in easily digestible bite-size chunks, and tends to be personality-led at the expense of depth or intelligence.

During my foray into short-form video addiction, I could actually feel myself becoming stupider. My brain simply wasn’t getting the workout it used to, a workout that came from sustained engagement with the written word forcing me to deploy critical thinking and analysis. I was lonelier, too, as relationships with people I loved became mediated by a screen and therefore impoverished. My engagement with the public domain became less present and observant – dangerous for a novelist attuned to human relations. My appreciation of art, whether in the form of listening to an album or standing in front of a painting, felt intruded upon by the rude presence of the smartphone in my pocket and its promise of consumption over contemplation.

Marriott will be called a luddite and a romantic, but he is right to be so alarmist about the potentially far-reaching consequences of short-form video content consumption for democracy. The impact goes beyond politics, though, into almost every aspect of our existence. During the period when I was watching short-form video every day, everything that matters to me in my life felt negatively affected, in a way that now strikes me as terrifying.

I haven’t quite taken the step of buying a dumbphone, but I am no longer watching short-form video daily. The reason I was late in cottoning on to the monumental shift that has taken place in our media consumption is also my saving grace: I still had a foot in the old world, that great privilege of which my generation are the last beneficiaries. It’s a privilege I have decided not to squander. I have known a life without short-form video content, quite recently in fact, and remembering how much I preferred that life was enough to allow me to glimpse daylight beyond the brickwork, and hopefully break free.

• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist. Her novel Female, Nude is out now