Something Has Happened To My Brain

I left social media and now I don't know what I'm supposed to think.

Part of my job as a reporter is to think about how I think. There is—ideally—a gap between me and my thoughts, a place where I can examine why I think what I think, where the information or opinion came from, and what I might be missing. I picture this gap as a kind of no man’s land, a buffer zone between me and my ideas. This week, while working on a piece that you will receive later this month, I found myself wandering around in it a little longer than usual.

Photo by The Chaffins on Unsplash

One reason for the wandering is that I am no longer on social media. For the first time in decades, I am exploring a controversial topic without any awareness of the positions on that topic that are held by niche opinion-shapers of various political stripes. I’ve read widely on the subject itself, but I’ve read nothing that allows me to easily categorize what I’ve read. Do the people in my particular algorithmic bubble think that the article I just read is “essential reading” or “harmful propaganda?” Is it being quoted approvingly or mocked? Or am I the only person who is engaging with it at all?

In the absence of that knowledge, I am suddenly aware that I have relied on it to orient me far more than I wanted to admit. Maybe that online chatter didn’t shape my thinking, but it certainly shaped my feelings about my thinking. If mine wasn’t the prevailing take, I had to find some way to think about the difference. Was my disagreement evidence of a personal flaw? A bias? Or perhaps everyone else was biased and/or flawed?

Thinking about the world when you’re not on social media is a bit like navigating without GPS. You’ll probably arrive at the same place, and you might even travel there using the same route. But turning off GPS and using a map, the stars, or your own sense of direction engages parts of your brain that GPS lets atrophy. And if you decide to wander around without any map at all, you might end up somewhere unexpected.

Now that I’m not on social media, I can see more clearly the way an established opinion settles over the public discourse, determining that certain ideas or people should be dismissed out of hand while others should be embraced wholeheartedly. This established opinion is not, I should be clear, the same as fact-checking. This is more like faction-checking. Social media’s job is to tell you “People on our team do like this and don’t like that.”

There are, of course, writers, pundits, and public intellectuals whose work I greet with intense skepticism. Some of those are conservative, some are centrist, and some are leftist. They are people whose thinking or reporting is consistently shoddy, lazy, knee-jerk, self-aggrandizing, or offensive. That’s not what I’m talking about here.

I’m talking about the way that social media hands out opinions like party favors, letting you skip the troublesome work of thinking things through yourself. Consider the book you already know is bad or problematic without having actually read it. The phrase you know you should always or never use. The contrarian take you trot out at parties that lambasts some popular album/TV show/movie/video game, or, alternatively, lambasts the dumb hot take that the Other Team has about that particular piece of pop culture, which you only know about because there was a screen shot of it in your feed. I remember seeing a post on Twitter in which someone confessed to having loved the portrayal of their own ethnicity in a certain book until they became aware, via a Twitter critique, that the book was “problematic.” I mean, who are you going to trust, your own reading experience, or the aggregate of opinions on Twitter?

I say this as someone who was, until recently, very online. So online that I can still recall Twitter controversies (like that one) from 2012. I was on Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky. I knew what was what, or at least what people on my team thought was what. Sometimes I didn’t agree, but my disagreement was mixed with a sense of dislocation and frustration; I was out of alignment with my peers and that felt like a schism, even if the locus of disagreement was fairly small. After logging out, I needed to rant, privately, about why the prevailing view was wrong and to debate whether it was worth saying so publicly and then deal with the resulting backlash. (Mostly I decided it wasn’t.)

I didn’t intend to leave social media entirely; it just sort of happened. I’ve written about my decision to leave Facebook, Instagram, and X in response to the anti-democratic actions of their owners. I took a break from TikTok because it was too addicting, and, once the habit was broken, I had no desire to return. I was an early adopter of Bluesky and felt aggrieved about the charges waged among the chattering classes that the platform was a left-wing echo chamber (charges I only knew about because I saw them screen-shotted on Bluesky). I didn’t mind being part of an echo chamber—I was horrified and infuriated by Trump and his minions and it felt good to be surrounded by people who felt the same. Until it didn’t. Too much rage-baiting. Too many hot takes. Too many identical opinions. It was boring and depressing and paralyzing and so I deleted the app from my phone.

In the months since my departure from social media, a remarkable thing has happened to my brain. It has regained the ability to read through entire books, articles, and essays without feeling like anyone is looking over my shoulder judging my reaction to them. I still read a lot of news, from a lot of different sources. I still read newsletters that offer curated links and specialized explainers and yes, plenty of opinions. But my reactions to all of this input is entirely my own. It’s just me and the text. Whatever I think or feel about the thing I’ve read, the experience is mine, unmediated by the question of whether I’m in or out of alignment with the prevailing view.

Increasingly, I am alone with my own thoughts. Perhaps, if I was on social media, I’d know whether those thoughts are original or not, and whether they are heterodox or heretical or mainstream. At some point, I may decide that I need to know those things again and will rejoin the online discussion. But for the moment, I’m enjoying my privacy. It’s a different experience to argue with a piece of text in your own head, or to write down the quotes that feel interesting in an actual notebook, rather than posting them online. I’m enjoying seeking out alternative takes on pieces that I read that seem questionable or incomplete or all-too-appealing and then mulling over those opposing views without being told whose side I’m supposed to be on.

In this new mental quiet, I am increasingly aware of the extent to which the conversational gulf between people on the left and those in the middle is fueled by social media and its adjacent opinion-delivery vehicles (podcasts, news-feeds, newsletters). This is not an original thought, to be sure, but as I emerge from the fog of received opinions, I can see with fresh eyes how rarefied the online discourse is. The settled questions of my particular niche haven’t even penetrated the conversation elsewhere, and obviously the same is true across the political spectrum.

And yes, there are reasons for this polarization that go far beyond social media and algorithmic bubbles: Fox News, media monopolies, disinformation, the decline of local newspapers, geographic distribution, income inequality, and the high cost of college all have a sizeable role to play.

But this is a newsletter about accountability, so let’s own the piece that’s ours: we are too insular. We are too eager to be told what to think and too worried about not thinking the right things. We want to be in alignment with our communities and so we also suppress the urge to question things everyone else seems certain about.

There are many wonderful things happening online, including on social media. I’m not discounting that. All the same, I invite you to take a break, long enough to let your brain stretch out and settle into new habits. Two weeks. A month. See what happens when you spend more time in the uncharted buffer zone between you and your opinions.

Let me know what you discover.

With a sigh,

Dashka