Quite how insidiously some social media had altered my brain wasn’t apparent until I kicked the habit.
There is nothing worse than the sanctimony of the reformed – smoker, drinker, slob, social media user. So I’m going to avoid the didactic sermon on the ills of social media, which you already know.
In terms of my own former use, this is about the platforms once known as Facebook and Twitter, and only as I unhealthily experienced them. This is not a criticism of those who still do.
More than five years ago I stopped posting on Facebook. I deleted the app from my phone. But I still checked in – lurked – occasionally. I also used it to find people I needed for work reasons. Whenever I did, the emotional muscle-memory of the things I disliked most about it quickly re-ignited my loathing.
The thing that perhaps I hated most was the capacity – no, the encouragement! – the platform gave people to confect and cultivate parallel, false lives. The perfect marriages. The beautiful, oh-so thoughtfully, eclectically curated homes with ocean- or bucolic bush-outlooks. The perfectly adjusted children and their prodigious A+ results, and their expertise with anything – ball, bat, violin – they took to hand. The holidays, replete with glimpses of the pointy-end cabin and club lounge.
You could live your very best life on Facebook. Just as long as it wasn’t complete – or was, at best, the tip of a more complex reality, as human existence tends to be.
The humblebragging drove me insane.
Honoured to be mentioned …
Truly humbled that …
The anomalous truth behind this was that, IRL, I liked these people (the ones I knew personally, anyway) and they knew and I knew – we all knew! – that this lifestyle PR of theirs was a veneer. A chimera that refracted and reshaped reality.
I never posted much of note. Occasionally an article I’d written. Mostly though it was whimsical stuff about my dogs and city.
I understand the value of the communities this platform and others facilitate and the democratic voice they give people regardless of economic and social status. But ultimately I found it more angst-inducing than beneficial.
But I stuck with Twitter. Compulsively. Obsessively. On my computers, and see-sawing on and off my phone in an attempt to manage its distracting, attention-shredding impact on me. I found I checked it compulsively even though, in terms of what I tend to write, it was not (with exceptions over the years) all that beneficial. That checking became part of the rhythm of my writing. This was unhelpful, unproductive and, yes, unhealthy.
I was never very good at the short and pithy. So I was never actually very good at Twitter. But it still felt somehow necessary, fundamental, irreplaceable. Addictions are. I became ever more compelled (and concerned about and disturbed) by those whose sometimes over-sharing, piece-by-piece narratives – often about mental and physical health and personal calamity and just everyday life drama and mundanity – seemed to cry for help or real-life support and understanding. I reached out often (off-line) to some I knew personally.
The Elon Musk takeover gave me pause. Yes, there were the bloke’s contorted political values and perspectives on speech freedom. But this was when I began to notice that, for all sorts of reasons, some people who I knew (face-to-face), who were friends (in that we had spent actual time together and liked – in the traditional sense – one another) and with whom I shared interests and pursuits and empathy because, well, we’d looked into each other’s eyes in a way you can’t quite on some apps, were leaving.
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A mate who’d ditched it early this year said “Think about how it changes your brain.” He gave me a three-point checklist on the personal neural/emotional/psychological impact of the app.
Did I experience a dopamine hit – a slightly inexplicable rush that quickly turned to emptiness – when I checked on likes? Tick.
Did I check the app on my phone or computer compulsively – every five or 10 minutes – whether I’d posted or not? Tick.
Did I start to think about posting an article I was about to engage with before I’d started reading or writing it? Tick.
“Go cold turkey,” my mate, much better at Twitter and with many more followers than me, said. “You won’t know yourself.”
I did. I didn’t.
The first few weeks were as hard as quitting ciggies.
Soon I noticed the benefits. My concentration was far more acute. I literally had more time to do the things that were important without preoccupation with online performance.
I wrote and read far more effectively.
I stopped seeing interesting articles always as potentially postable content and, therefore, ceased thinking of how to pithily send them to the Twitter/X-verse, even while still reading them.
When one of my own articles was published, I no longer had to fret over how I might post it – and how the platform might respond.
Each to their own. But this is, personally, a liberation. And as this goes into the world, I’ve no preoccupation about conjuring a catchy line to post it with.
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Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
