About a year ago, I quit Twitter. Cold turkey. I was pretty addicted to it, but didn't realize for a long time. When I went to an island with no reception or wifi for a week, it finally dawned on me. It probably helped that I did a lot of meditation on said island, and so there was lots of introspection happening.

Once I had quit though, I barely missed it. I think everyone realizes at some point that Twitter is basically a giant anxiety machine, and so taking a break from it was a relief. Twitter has a way of encouraging extremist rhetoric, even for opinions that are totally reasonable or even banal. I don't really use Facebook but I've heard people say the same thing happens there too. It wears you down.

Boredom is really profoundly uncomfortable. But when I resist the urge to quell the boredom by going on social media or watching TV, I almost always manage to come up with something more interesting to do. I suspect that being occasionally bored is actually quite necessary.

So anyway, I'm back on Twitter these days, a little bit. I've turned off retweets for basically everyone and done some pruning to my follow list, which I hope makes it more manageable for me. I don't think there's any big lesson here, not even that social media is Bad; it just is what it is.