That’s what my dad said it should be called once—anti-social media. Is that ever true. Partly because I’ve just kind of had enough of it all, and partly because Twitter’s killing of Substack link-sharing has made the platform much less useful to me, I’ve been spending a lot less time on Twitter. I post my stuff, I read my replies, and that’s about it.
I don’t know if it’s addictive or not, but I can say I feel no sense of withdrawal. No nervous boredom, no temptation to just scroll. Rather, I feel like some better and more alive version of myself is accessible to me again; like social media is a kind of mental pollution, a smog that does the mental equivalent of burning your eyes and making it hard to breathe. You don’t feel it, per se, but your body, or your brain, knows it.