Not Really A Fan 

of social media (but I check it every day)

Social media ruined the internet and I can't stop participating in its ongoing collapse.

I remember when it felt like connection. When posting meant sharing something you made or thought, and the people who responded were actually responding to you. That version is gone. Now it's performance anxiety dressed up as community.

Every platform has become the same place wearing different masks. Twitter is rage cosplaying as discourse. Instagram is envy filtered through aspiration. LinkedIn is desperation in business casual. TikTok is algorithmic hypnosis. Threads is Twitter's sad younger sibling. They all promise connection and deliver comparison.

I know this. I know the studies about mental health and attention spans and radicalization pipelines. I know I'm the product, not the customer. I know the infinite scroll is designed to exploit dopamine loops the same way slot machines exploit probability. I know all of it, and I still check.

Because opting out feels worse.

Not being on social media means missing the conversation. Not the good conversation—that barely exists anymore—but the ambient hum of what everyone is pretending to care about this week. It means losing access to weak ties that occasionally matter. It means professional invisibility in industries that conflate online presence with credibility.

So I stay, but with resentment. I mute more than I follow. I lurk more than I post. I've trained myself to scroll with detachment, like I'm studying an anthropological curiosity instead of participating in it. It almost works.

What bothers me most isn't what social media is—it's what it replaced. We used to have blogs, forums, weird niche websites run by obsessives. The internet was messier but it was ours. Social media centralized everything, monetized attention, and turned communication into content.

And I helped. Every post, every like, every share—I fed the machine I claim to hate.

The healthiest thing would be to delete it all. Go cold turkey. Reclaim my attention and my sanity. But I won't. Because I've already tried, and the FOMO was worse than the doom scrolling. At least when I'm scrolling, I know what I'm missing.

So I'll keep checking. Keep hate-reading. Keep pretending this is connection while knowing it's consumption. I'll complain about the algorithm while benefiting when it works in my favor. I'll fantasize about logging off forever while refreshing one more time.

I'm just Not Really A Fan.

NRAF