I quit Facebook and Twitter cold turkey – and I barely know myself | Paul Daley

Quite how insidiously some social media had altered my brain wasn’t apparent until I kicked the habit.

The thing that perhaps I hated most was the capacity no, the encouragement! the platform gave people to confect and cultivate parallel, false lives.

This is not a criticism of those who still use social media, and only as I unhealthily experienced them.

I stopped seeing interesting articles always as potentially postable content.

I stopped 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.

This is, personally, a liberation.