Breaking the Doom Loop

A little essay about not being on Twitter (again), plus more stuff! [LINK DROP]

Hello! And happy September. It’s been a while since I’ve done a Link Drop with all the interesting things I’m reading/seeing/etc. So I figured why not now!!!

First, a little diary entry of sorts:

I have, for the last two weeks or so, successfully stayed nearly completely off Twitter. And for the last several months I have used it way less than I was using it. 

Whenever I go through extended bouts of abstinence from it, I immediately feel much more sane. And whenever I relapse, I immediately and completely forget how much better I feel when I’m not on it. 

This, of course, is by design. Similar to any actual drug, social media provides you with constant, small hits of dopamine so that scrolling becomes what your brain is primarily concerned with, which in turn encourages the rest of the world and its complexities to fall by the wayside. 

Not only is this bad for my brain in a very basic, chemical sense, I also think it’s bad for my ability to be thoughtful and experience the full emotional spectrum the world has to offer. 

My use of social media truly does remind me of periods of my life in which I’ve been addicted to drugs. Drugs have a way of completely reorienting your life—it’s not just that you use them, it’s that using them becomes the guiding organizational force of your days and weeks and months and years. You obsess over how to get them. You change friendships based on who is more or less accepting of, or willing to participate in, your drug use. Things that were once important become less so because they do not contribute to the process of acquiring or using drugs.