It’s not strictly social media. It’s boredom. We’re basically using these things to groom ourselves to have attention problems.
And in the end it’s not that they can’t, but they actually have absolutely no reason to want to. There’s no immediate or probably even no intermediate consequence to sitting down on TikTok for 2 hours. You get your serotonin boost and nothing bad happened.
Of course you could have spent the time constructively, learn a new skill, cleaned the bathroom, but those are the exact opposite of getting that serotonin boost.