DITCHING SOCIAL MEDIA

Last Friday I deleted the last remaining vestiges of social media from my phone. Goodbye Reddit and Instagram! Other apps such as X have long been absent, and I never was a user of Facebook.

Good riddance, time-wasting stress-inducing garbage! Now I can become one of those smug types who think they are better than everyone because they aren’t following the herd. I’m going to be patronising, proselytising and elitist like a teetotaller or a born-again Christian.

All joking aside, the addictive nature and detrimental effects of social media cannot be overstated. I was fooling myself into thinking that the kind of stuff I looked at on Instagram and Reddit wasn’t the usual mindless drivel the masses dose themselves with. Oh no, I was scrolling through way more intellectual high-brow fare, wasn’t I? Like a delusional alcoholic, this was the kind of nonsense I told myself.

Reddit in particular, can be an insidiously evil place to enter. I’m not talking about general toxicity here or the polarising adversarial nature of a lot of online interaction.

I only got into Reddit a year or so ago, first to get some answers to questions I had about the two games I play, Crusader Kings 3 and Rimworld. While these two Reddit communities are generally very friendly in nature with plenty of people happy to help out new players, I couldn’t help noticing a few trends.

First, people would post long responses to my queries which included vast amounts of jargon and irrelevant information - it was as if they hadn’t actually read all of my post, and just had this need to spew out text to establish and justify themselves.

I then began to notice that these forums were dominated by players whose game experiences were so different to mine that they might as well have been playing a different game entirely. A lot of bragging, a lot of casually mentioning of impossible achievements. A lot of people desperate for attention and to be part of the inner circle.

As well as the gaming areas, I also started following the subreddits for classic literature and Japan.

The former, a never-ending stream of people posting a photo of their copies of The Brothers Karamazov, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Wuthering Heights asking ‘which should I read next?’ Again and again and again…the same books, the same questions, day after day. Absolutely stultifying in its narrow-mindedness and lack of imagination.

Or, posts to the effect that the writer has read 600 books this year, but couched in such terms as to try to hide the blatant bragging and lying.

As for the Japan subreddit - well, a nice mixture of tedious questions from tourists and inflammatory posts from residents - all of it completely irrelevant to me.

And yet, like a fool, I continued to read this stuff, and even occasionally posting, getting more and more wound up and irritated but also feeling the same urge to broadcast my own arrogant opinions.

Instagram was pretty much the same thing, but with way more unpleasantness in the comments. Any excuse to divert the conversation to a bit of none-too-subtle racism, eh lads? Not that I ever actually posted anything there, I was just a passive absorber.

It got to the point when my daily ritual would be to scroll through Reddit and Instagram first thing in the morning, then during my commute and any downtime during the day, and then again in the evening before bed. Endlessly, mindlessly scrolling and becoming more and more irritated, my head full of impotent rage and a desire to express my opinions against ‘those idiots’ online.

So why didn’t I ditch this crap earlier, if it was obviously making me feel on edge and stressed out and also becoming increasingly addictive?

It’s the same reason I got sucked into playing endless online blitz chess games a few years ago - I have two hours of commuting per day and that time needs to be filled with something to blot out the boredom and unpleasantness.

The solution is fairly simple : I can easily fill my commuting time by writing for this blog. I get to express my opinions in long form without the results being subsumed in a mass of posts on some subreddit, and I’m not really bothered if anyone reads it or not - I can just safely and freely vent in my own online space.

I have to wonder, though, if I’m not just one of those people with addictive personalities. I do notice a slightly worrying tendency for me to consult ChatGPT a lot recently…is that going to be my new unhealthy obsession?