There’s a moment – somewhere between your 27th doomscroll of the day and your 43rd mentally exhausting comment thread – that you pause, stare into the cold blue glow of your phone, and think: What am I doing with my life?
That was me. Or rather, that was the ghost of me that used to haunt Twitter and Facebook with a mix of caffeine-fuelled takes and existential dread. I didn’t use social media. I lived in it. It shaped my moods, consumed my time, rewired my brain, and slowly replaced meaningful thought with dopamine hits from meaningless notifications.
But one day, I left. Not in a grand, dramatic flounce with a 37-tweet exit thread. Just… quietly. I logged off and didn’t come back. And honestly? I haven’t felt this human in years.
The Digital Hunger Games
Twitter and Facebook are often described as platforms for connection. Which is true, in the same way that Thunderdome is a venue for community engagement. Yes, people gather there – but mostly to fight, scream, posture, and try to survive in an ecosystem designed to amplify the loudest, angriest, and most polarising voices.
On Twitter, every thought becomes a potential landmine. Nuance dies a fast death in 280 characters. There is no such thing as “agree to disagree.” There is only “ratio,” “blocked,” and “you’re a monster.”
Facebook is no better – just a slower, more passive-aggressive variety of the same sickness. There, the venom is often laced with Minion memes and passive posts like “Some people need to learn loyalty 👀.” The newsfeed became a wasteland of conspiracy theories, humblebrags, and half-baked opinions from that guy you haven’t spoken to since high school but now somehow knows exactly how virology works.
The Great Escape
The decision to leave wasn’t impulsive. It was survival. I noticed my attention span was eroding. I couldn’t read long-form anything anymore. I was constantly anxious, always feeling like I was supposed to be outraged about something, even if I couldn’t remember what it was by dinner.
So, I deleted the apps. First Facebook. Then Twitter. I deactivated the accounts, deleted the bookmarks, and finally, for good measure, installed a site blocker in case of muscle-memory relapses.
The results? Immediate and astonishing.
I was bored for a few days, yes. My thumb twitched. My brain, trained to chase stimulus, panicked in the silence. But after the withdrawal symptoms faded, a strange thing happened: I got better. Truly better.
I could think again. I started reading books. I had thoughts that weren’t shaped by trending hashtags or viral takes. I remembered what it was like to sit in silence and not feel like I was missing something. My mood stabilized. My sleep improved. My attention span came crawling back like a neglected houseplant after some water and sun.
And perhaps most surprising of all – I didn’t miss it. I didn’t miss the anger. I didn’t miss the performative outrage. I didn’t miss the weird dopamine rush from getting retweeted by someone with a blue check mark and a God complex.
Social Media: The Doom Engine
Now, let’s zoom out.
There’s something deeply broken about platforms whose business models require division, distraction, and addiction to function. Social media doesn’t exist to connect us – it exists to keep us there. Angry people stay longer. Scared people click more. Outrage is profitable. Nuance isn’t.
The algorithm doesn’t care if your family stops speaking to you over vaccine misinformation. It doesn’t care if teens spiral into depression from curated beauty filters and status anxiety. It doesn’t care if democracy collapses under the weight of bot-fuelled disinformation. It cares about “engagement,” which is just a sanitised way of saying: more time spent scrolling through the chaos.
And we keep giving it to them.
We’ve created the largest psychological experiment in human history and gave it to a handful of tech executives who optimise for nothing, but growth and shareholder returns. Our emotional well-being, our attention spans, our sense of shared reality – all of it, collateral damage.
We’ve wired an entire generation to treat validation like a scoreboard and discourse like blood sport. And we did it in exchange for the ability to share dog memes and argue about pineapple on pizza.
What Now?
I’m not here to preach from some digital monastery. I still use the internet. I have group chats, I email, I read online news. But I no longer live in the scroll.
The decision to leave Twitter and Facebook didn’t make me better than anyone. But it did make me better than the version of myself who lived inside them. The one constantly agitated, always seeking the next hit of digital stimulation. That version of me was loud, reactive, and tired.
This version? Quieter. Clearer. Less angry. And far more at peace.
Social media won’t disappear overnight. But if enough of us walk away – or at least rethink our relationship with it – we might slow the erosion of our collective sanity. Maybe we’ll even get to a point where the human mind is once again treated as something worth protecting, not just harvesting.
Until then, I’ll be over here. Reading. Breathing. Thinking. And not once missing the algorithm’s toxic embrace.
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