That time I unexpectedly stopped ruining my own life

A preliminary report on my semi-involuntary social media detox

I have always been an internet addict, ever since I got internet access for the first time in the mid-’90s. I’ve had my own website since I was a teenager, and I got in right at the initial moment of the blogging trend. Yet something about social media repelled me. People kept bugging me to get onto Facebook during my late grad school years, but the very last thing I wanted to do was connect with distant cousins and friends from high school. Thus when Twitter came out, I signed up almost as a joke—maybe people would stop bothering me about Facebook if I just skipped ahead to the next thing.

It proved to be a fateful decision, one that had an embarrasingly huge impact on my life. As it turned out, I was good at Twitter—quick on my feet, able to draw on obscure references at will, and above all, mean. The same traits that made my blogging such an ambivalent impact on my career—the sarcasm, the sharp elbows, the snap judgments and harsh critiques—were condensed and intensified in the milieu of microblogging. My follower count grew inexorably, without apparent algorithmic meddling or any “big name” patron. As in the blogging world, as (I liked to think) in my career, I was a self-made man, who had earned a steadily growing audience outside traditional channels. Presumably big things would come my way eventually.

I didn’t realize that my reach was expanding in what was still essentially a bubble. The audience for my unique rhetorical style—the people who could read my often inscrutable tone, who got the references, who knew what my “deal” was and responded accordingly—was, in retrospect, surprisingly large. But it was not indefinitely large. Inevitably, I came into contact with a much more hostile audience, who didn’t get the joke, who didn’t care how smart or clever I was, who just wanted to make me suffer. As it turned out, I was being monitored by the burgeoning right-wing hit squads targetting academics, and on a couple occasions when I got out over my skis—responding off the cuff to a news story I hadn’t bothered to fully understand, or making an ironic joke to someone who was in no mood—they pounced and more or less did the equivalent of beating the shit out of me in online terms. This is when I realized that there were some seriously scary people online, people you could never persuade or win over because their whole purpose in life is to vent their rage at others.

I wound up on the Professor Watch List and after the second incident—at which point I was mentioned by name on the air by Rush Limbaugh—briefly retired from Twitter. (Ironically, this was the time that I finally joined Facebook, which I have succeeded in making a tool solely for academic networking.) And the strange thing is—I was deeply depressed. I didn’t realize how much I had integrated Twitter, with its rapid-fire responses and uniquely concentrated self-referential humor, into my life. In retrospect, I realize that I was an early “online dopamine” addict, that I had figured out how to set up my computer so that it always gave me something back. A friend of mine was a social media coordinator for a major corporation and once shared that she viewed a post that got X number of engagments as a big success. I was shocked—that was the number of engagements I regarded as a baseline for literally everything I posted, even comments deep in a thread.

As some anonymous blog commenter said at the time, I was always bound for disaster. I was, despite it all, an academic. I believed in reason and argument and evidence. Despite my apparent success, I was not made for the harsh world that was emerging on social media. And yet I went back. At first I started an anonymous account, for the sake of safety, but piddling around with 300 followers was boring. Within a few weeks I rebooted in my own name and a few weeks after that I had almost entirely regained the followers I lost when I deleted my original account.

The next big moment of disillusion came when Musk bought Twitter. At that point, I felt I could no longer be part of it. I tried various alternatives and finally settled on Bluesky, which I hated. It was all the worst parts of left-liberal Twitter without any of the good parts. Humor in particular proved impossible, in part because expecting people to understand context and tone was impossible. Blueksy denizens are very defensive about mainstream media critiques of the service as an ideological bubble, but it 100% is one. And despite the fact that I am surely within one standard deviation of the average position on all important political issues on the site, I was made to feel consistently unwelcome.

But I was an addict, so I stayed—until I started hearing tell of people losing their jobs because of what they had said about a guy who turns out to have been the founder of the Professor Watch List. It felt like a sign. I had to get out before I destroyed my career and my life for the sake of shooting off my mouth in public with every half-formed fucking thought that crosses my cerebral cortex. I briefly tried Substack Notes as a further degree of Twitter methadone, but the algorithm is so bad that the site is basically non-functional for me. More substantively, the conversations on Substack Notes are very different from those on Bluesky, which were more or less in continuity with what was going on in the left-liberal segment of Twitter at the time I left. And as a total outsider to those discourses, I immediately saw that they were Incredibly Stupid. Even when the topics were objectively important, the positions staked out were reductive and any attempt to enter the conversation was rebuffed as somehow rude.

And so ended my addiction to short-form social media. I did not make this decision for any virtuous reason. Had the tragic events I allude to above not occurred, I would surely be hating myself and everyone around me on Bluesky even now. But it amazes me how quickly I was able to break the chain of addiciton. Once my phone stopped giving me something new and enticing every time I looked at it, I stopped looking at it so much. The depth of the effects have astounded and even shamed me.

Months ago, I got subscription to the print Financial Times to try to get myself off the computer in the mornings, but I always felt myself being pulled back as I was reading. Now that I don’t have the promise of ever-refreshing responses on social media, I read the paper much more thoroughly and patiently—indeed, I read everything more thoroughly and patiently. It used to be that whenever I didn’t have time to really “get into” proper reading, I would default to my phone. Now I am much more likely to just pick up a book for a few minutes. If I get tired of the book I’m reading on the train, I usually break out the novel on my Kindle for a while. There have even been cases where the impulse to look at my phone does not arise for my entire commute. On the rare occasions where I feel too tired to concentrate and find myself scrolling on Substack Notes, I catch myself after a few minutes and simply stare out the window until I feel recharged enough to return to real reading.

Getting rid of short-form social media has also greatly enhanced my experience of TV. I have wasted a lot of time watching great stuff in “two-screen” mode, constantly breaking my attention to look at my phone. In more recent weeks, I find that I watch the highest-quality programs without feeling any particular impulse to check in online. And even with less-engaging shows, I usually wait till a commercial or do something else distracting (like washing a pan that has been soaking since dinner, or doing my old-man stretches). I’m enjoying everything I watch more because of it, and it’s functioning more as My Esteemed Partner and I intend our TV time to do—as a shared social time for us, where we can comment to each other as we watch. It feels stupid to me now that I missed so many moments she was riffing on because I’d rather pay attention to a stranger on my phone.

The biggest surprise, though, is that my mood feels so much steadier and more upbeat. I attribute this to the fact that I’m not actively seeking out anger and frustration every few minutes. My Esteemed Partner confirms this benefit, saying that she enjoys the fact that my mood no longer unpredictably shifts because of something that happened online. My record on this has not been absolutely perfect—sometimes the responses to my posts on here can trigger that kind of insta-anger—but I’m more aware of it now that it’s something strange and exceptional rather than a semi-constant state of irritation. I am more able to step back and ask for clarification from an interlocutor, rather than reading every response (as one is habituated to do on social media) as a kind of attack.

I don’t think it’s just the lack of conflict that’s enhancing my mood, though. I’m also not exposing myself to the most stupid and extreme possible views all the time—the kind of bizarre positioining that social media encourages. When I hear from people who are still in the trenches of social media, it sounds like news from a foreign land. One friend who is still on X, for instance, wondered aloud about the emergent Covid discourse, and I blessedly had no idea what he was talking about. When I get wind of the latest round of “takes” on the latest outrage from the Trump administration—the kind of thing I would previously have felt obligated to participate in to “keep my name out there”—it all sounds so foolish and pointless. Why did we ever think that analyzing world events in daily micro-doses was going to produce any kind of insight? Why did we feel obligated to issue a “statement” on every news story, much less demand that everyone else do the same, lest they “tell on themselves”? Why did we ever do any of this, much less view it as a form of activism? (I think here of the poor addict who said on Facebook that I was “privileged” in my choice not to doomscroll, which is actually necessary for more disadvantaged populations under Trump.)

I realize, of course, that my sudden clarity of outlook, as a decade-plus addict to short-form social media, is akin to McNulty’s moralism about drinking during the season of The Wire when he embraced sobriety. And like McNulty, I may well relapse—but for now, I’m not worried about it. It feels like the spell is broken. After a certain point of quitting Musk’s Twitter, I felt that I would be ashamed to return, no matter how much I hated Bluesky. Now I feel similarly about the whole scene. I won’t claim that it was all bad. I met a lot of cool people, got a lot of cool opportunities, and participated firsthand in something that was very culturally important. But at this late date, whatever good I got out of it has long since been destroyed and the only thing keeping me attached to it was inertia and addiction.

I don’t claim any righteousness here—my detox was involuntary and arguably even cowardly in a sense. But I did in fact detox and now my life is better in ways I never would have expected.