A little over a month ago, I accidentally quit social media.

Not completely, I should be clear. I’m still posting on Bluesky periodically. But only periodically, and I’m pretty much not checking my feed at all. And I’ve been largely inactive on every other platform for a while now—I still have a Tumblr and a Facebook account knocking around somewhere, but my Twitter and my Instagram are long gone, and I haven’t posted anywhere else for ages. It was just Bluesky. And now with the odd exception it is Bluesky no longer.

I’m still collecting my thoughts regarding what this development actually means. Not only collecting, in fact, but tracking; the simple fact is that I don’t know yet all of what it means, I don’t think all the data have come in, and I want to be cautious about making pronouncements. The cautiousness is a significant part of it.

Here’s some of what led to this.

The last couple of years have been extremely weird and extremely uneven for me. Totally aside from, y’know, The Horrors, I got basically cast into the professional wilderness and I remain there today; my agent stopped being an agent—for good and positive reasons, it was the right move for him in my estimation—and I haven’t yet managed to land another one. My relationship with what appeared as if it might be my primary publisher for the foreseeable future ended up… Let’s say it has not ended up not panning out like I hoped or thought it would. I don’t know that there’s anyone or anything to blame for that aside from the vagaries of the industry itself, but sometimes—probably way too often—that’s just how these things go.

Those events have left me in a state of profound uncertainty regarding what kind of writer I want to be going forward—what kind of writer I even can be. That I want to be one isn’t in any serious doubt; I honestly don’t believe I could stop even if I tried. It’s a thing I do and have nearly always done, and if I didn’t do it in one way I would merely have to do it some other way.

So I’ve been trying to work that out. It’s been… a process. Not all good, not all bad, not yet resolved. It’s Complicated (I’ll likely have a lot more to say about that in the near future).

Some other things have happened. We somewhat abruptly bought a house and moved to Baltimore. One of our cats died—we were very sad but it’s fine, she was 18, she was ill and ready to go—and we adopted a new one, who we love dearly but who has ended up being a much larger source of stress than we were expecting (note to fellow cat folks: BEWARE OF TOYS THAT CONTAIN STRINGS THAT CAN BE EATEN).

And a fair amount of it has been less concrete and more of a diffuse, gradual happening. I’m in my forties now. I’ve been feeling increasingly unmoored, increasingly isolated. Time has been growing slippery, and I think I’ve been spending more and more of it dissociating from my own body and mind in ways that I don’t remotely care for. Everything seems to be happening at a remove of several feet, the sensory input muted, my responses correspondingly so. Even 2020 and 2021 did not feel like this—although my experience of the first couple of years of COVID was somewhat distinct from many other people’s for a whole host of other reasons, which are related to what I’m trying to describe here but which I don’t want to get into just now. The Horrors absolutely have to be playing a role in all of this, they couldn’t not, but I don’t think this is all attributable to them.

I’m spending way too much of the time tired and sad and unfocused and much closer to anhedonia than I’d ever want to be. Something in the machinery has been wrong. I don’t think I should be feeling like this.

Then, in early September, I was listening to an interview with Cal Newport. Cal is a computer scientist at Georgetown, and he approaches the field in what I’d consider a decidedly social sciencey way; he’s done a great deal of writing on the nature of what we call work, the dynamics of productivity, and how we can thrive as human beings in the midst of it. How we can do certain kinds of labor in a manner that contributes to our thriving. Owing significantly to that body of work, he takes a very dim view of social media; he doesn’t advise that someone quit it completely, he isn’t so unrealistic or puritan as to call for that, but he does strongly suggest that one find strategies for restricting one’s use of it.

Specifically, he advises that people get it off their phones, if they can. Make it harder to use. Make it harder for that use to be reflexive and habitual.

So, somewhat on a whim, I decided to try that. I deleted the Bluesky app from my phone. I kept it on my iPad, which is my primary work device—I do all my writing on it—but I changed the settings so that every time I wanted to use it, I would have to retrieve my password from Bitwarden and manually log in. It’s not remotely impossible, but it’s just a little bit inconvenient.

I figured I’d end up using the app less as a result of that. What happened is that I essentially stopped using it at all.

It took me a while to really notice this. Once I did, a stark conclusion presented itself:

For this whole entire time, I must not have really been wanting to use Bluesky. If I did want to, a minor inconvenience wouldn’t result in such a total cessation of use. If I did want to, I’d be seriously missing it now.

It did result in cessation. And for the most part, I’m not missing it.

As I said, I’m not confident yet about what this means for me. I do know that it’s interesting.

I should admit that there are some major downsides here. Bluesky was the primary way in which I kept up with many if not most of the people I consider close friends, and I had a ton of regular pleasant little interactions with people I consider friendly acquaintances. It’s where I find out about important stuff that might well escape my attention otherwise. For all the dumb shit cluttering up my skyline—even as carefully curated as I’ve tried to make it—there’s also an abundance of thoughtful people saying smart and worthwhile and even beautiful things, often to each other.

But I keep coming back to that realization—that I wasn’t using social media because I really wanted to. It had to have been mostly if not entirely habitual.

And then I start thinking about how much of my life feels that way, right now and for far too long. How often I’ve found myself doing things I don’t want to do even though I don’t actually have to do them, literally burning my one wild and precious life on them for no reason. How many mornings I’ve found myself lying in bed way past when I should have and wanted to be up and moving, scrolling on my fucking phone, often Bluesky but just as often other shit, and knowing that I was going to be upset with myself later for having wasted such a large chunk of the morning, and doing it anyway.

If you, like me, have a specific flavor of neurodivergence that heavily features executive dysfunction, you’ll know piercingly well that dealing with it is almost never simply a matter of willpower or self-discipline. It’s not something you can reason your way past. It’s not merely a skill issue. It’s not something you can shake just by doing Brain better.

Still, though.

What does scrolling feel like, at least most of the time? Well, to me, it feels dissociative. It feels numbing. It feels habitual, not in the casual sense but in the sense of deep grooves being carved into your brain. It feels tonally deranged. It feels fast in a way that never allows time for anything to sink in. It doesn’t naturally afford space and time to process new information; if you manage to claw those things together, you’re doing it against the affordances of the platforms. You’re doing it in spite of them, not because of them.

I feel like I know more all the time, I’m constantly pummeled by information, and I’m simultaneously forgetting how to think about anything. So much of that information is terrible, and it feels like my only choices are immersion or total disengagement. That’s an illusion, and I know it, but knowing that doesn’t put much of a dent in its power.

Get out in meatspace, meet people, organize. Sure, absolutely, but I’ve felt like I don’t even know how to think about doing that. It’s overwhelming. Everything is overwhelming. I am a single giant perennially overstimulated nerve, unable to connect with any other nerves or usefully process the input that’s deadened me, because it won’t stop fucking coming.

Until a significant amount of it suddenly… stopped. Now I find myself sitting in the middle of a very strange silence, wondering whether silence is even what it truly is. When your eardrums are blown out, silence becomes difficult to distinguish from quiet.

So I’ve been trying to listen.

I used to write a lot of essays. It was a thing I did for myself, for my own blog, sometimes for money, and regularly for a digital sociology group I hooked up with in grad school. I’m proud of some of that work, and less so when it comes to other parts of it. When you’re writing to that kind of a schedule, self-enforced and otherwise, they aren’t all going to be winners. But I do miss it. I miss being able to think in the way you need to in order to do that kind of writing. In my opinion, microblogging as a form has certain strengths, but I realized a while ago that as I got more active on Twitter (then), I was experiencing increased difficulty in thinking through longer sustained flows. Instead, my nonfiction thinking—writing, writing is thinking—felt stuck in that pattern of short staccato bursts, the rhythm of a thread. I won’t say that it’s impossible to work deeply through an idea in that form, but I will say that I think it may be more or less impossible for me.

In even a medium-length nonfiction piece, you have to be able to sit with an idea. You have to be able to maintain the attention span necessary to unpack it in a way that sustains at least some degree of coherence. You can’t post through it. You can’t scroll.

I don’t take quite as dim a view of social media as Cal Newport. But I’m at a point now where I do increasingly question its utility, at least in the form it’s taken in 2026. I question what it’s been designed to do to us, by people who do not have our best interests at heart. Who does it serve if we’re exhausted and upset and dissociating all the time? Who does it serve if we start to confuse information accumulation with cognition? Does knowing more about everything all the time help us think more deeply, or does it only make it more difficult?

Is it good for us to feel like we need to always have a Take about whatever bullshit is currently the communal focus? Is it good for us to base our primary mode of online interaction on a set of platforms that encourage us to respond hard and fast and purely on a gut level? Do you, like me, find that it makes you maddeningly paranoid? Do you post defensively? Do you worry about saying something offhand that blows up in your face, even as you’re being encouraged by the design of the platform to toss out thoughts and feelings before you’ve fully considered them, because you have to post right now while everyone is talking about this one thing before in a few hours they’ve all inevitably moved on to something else so what does it actually matter anyway, except you can’t shake the feeling that it does matter, it matters tremendously, even if you can’t quite pin down why?

What the fuck are we doing here? Like, what the actual fuck do we think we’re all doing here?

I keep pondering along these lines, and then I do come back to the fact that I can’t speak for anyone else, and everyone’s relationship with technology is going to be unique to them. But I can’t help mulling over the possibility that if this was all really going to make us happier and smarter and more deeply connected to each other and more human, it would have done that by now.

I’m not so foolish as to think that pulling back from social media specifically and a digital presence more generally will fix everything in my life, or even anything. The Horrors persist. My brain problems persist. Professionally, if I’m going to come out of the wilderness, the time and manner of my emergence is mostly not under my control. But in the meantime I want to try to know less, say less, and think more. I want to try to carve away the things that I don’t want or have to do and yet do anyway.

I would like to make writing here more regularly a part of that. I’ve wanted that for a while, and have made several attempts that haven’t panned out, so this could just be another iteration of that pattern. But hey, here we are. What exactly I’d write about, I haven’t yet figured out. Writing, probably, and creativity. Maybe media I’m especially digging. Maybe gardening. Who goddamn knows. Maybe it’ll actually turn out to be sort of the same impulses that governed my posting on Bluesky, just longer and slower and less tense and more considered.

Am I writing for anyone? I mean… Maybe? Kind of? Look, I’ve spent the last year writing a 300k+ word piece of fanfiction in a fandom that consists of basically just me. I’ve more than proved that I’m sufficiently unhinged to vomit out an ocean of words for myself alone. That can be enough for now.

Anyway, I’m no longer sure that the product of the writing matters all that much. I think I might be way more interested in the process. I think the process might be the thing that ultimately means the most to me. I’d like to say more about that too at some point.

So what’s Bo Burnham doing up there at the top? Well, Inside is probably one of my favorite films—not comedy specials, I mean films period. In the past month or so, I’ve been drawn back to it and it’s been rattling around in my brain. I think he’s working through a lot of what I’m talking about here, a lot of what I’m thinking and feeling. Yet another thing I’d like to put a pin in, for some other time.

That’s a fair number of pins, and this is already rambling and disorganized, so I’m calling it here for now. But I want there to be more. I just need to do some meditating on what and how.

I want to know less, say less, and think more. That’s where I’m at. We’ll go from there.