I’ve gone back in forth on my relationship with social media. I went cold turkey off all of it a few years back only to have that experiment fail spectacularly. That led me to my most recent period of social media addiction, where I made accounts with countless platforms and allowed several hours per day to be sucked into their feeds. Well, that time wasting part of my daily routine is coming to an end.

I wasn’t a consistent poster or tweeter. But I was an aggregator. I needed to get through my Twitter and Instagram timelines, had to remain caught up. I guess Fear of Missing Out is a real thing. I wasn’t engaged with any of it though. I just needed to scroll. To get to the end.

But the reality is that I gained very little from my time spent on social media. I didn’t follow an overt amount of people or seek out anyone who would enrage me. I didn’t ever experience trolls. Maybe I was doing social media wrong.

My social media removal hasn’t been finalized as of yet. None of my accounts have been deleted. So far I have just removed the Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram apps from my phone. I haven’t checked any of those platforms for two weeks.

But in place of those big three, another platform started to creep in – Reddit. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to be as dopamine driven as the others, so I haven’t build up any kind of addiction to it. Probably will delete that app soon as well.

Once I get through a couple more weeks of abstinence, I will start to sort out complete account deletion. Ridding myself of all those passwords and usernames will feel like joining an internet nudist colony. And it might not end there. I might even set up my own email server to get completely out from under Microsoft and Google’s fat thumb.