I Deleted Social Media Because I

I recently decided to stop using X.com.
Not because I hate Elon Musk but because I started to hate my own brain and opinions.

I’m now five weeks into my X hiatus, but it only took a couple of weeks for me to realise that I wanted to stop using social media entirely.

As I’ve been emerging from burnout, I’ve been paying closer attention to my habits and how I feel as I move through my days. One habit leaves me feeling undeniably worse every single time: scrolling social media.

I’d open X and immediately start comparing myself to other AI builders, product managers, and entrepreneurs, trying to keep up with the tools, innovations, and clever quips they were putting into the feed. I noticed the same feeling on LinkedIn. A while ago I’d already stopped using Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok, and I’ve never really been into Reddit or Twitch.

A single phrase kept repeating in my head:

If you change your input, you change your output.

Lately, I’ve felt creatively bankrupt. And not just that, I’d reach the end of the day feeling worth less. Like I hadn’t produced anything at all. I’d just fucking scrolled.

In its simplest form, what I’m trying to escape by quitting social media is the feeling that I am not good enough just by being me.

What I want back is confidence in my own thinking. Confidence in my own opinions. The ability to creatively link together different inputs in a way that makes my output more diverse, more interesting, and more mine.

I’ve said for years that interesting people smash together unexpected things. They’re curious people. But if I’m just a social media slut, endlessly scrolling and regurgitating other people’s insights, how could I possibly produce anything interesting? Social media feels like faux-curiosity to me; I think I’m interested in something unique or curious about something never seen before but the post I just liked already 125k likes.

I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want to produce content that’s “on trend.” I don’t want to think like everyone else thinks. I don’t want to believe what everyone else believes just because Huberman, Rogan, Pohler, Godin, Sinek, Brown, or, heaven help us, a Kardashian said it once on a podcast or a show.

Fuck that.

My thoughts started to feel recycled, and that scared me more than I expected. I felt like a softer, weaker version of all the voices I’d been following, whether on LinkedIn, X, podcasts, or popular content more broadly.

When it comes to social media, I don’t think most people are intellectually honest enough with themselves to admit they’re distilling a worse version of somebody else’s better idea. It’s too easy to repost something you didn’t read, reshare a take you didn’t examine, or drop a ❤️ on a photo just to feel involved.

Without realising it, I lost my confidence and originality. Motivation too. I’m inspired by finding interesting ideas, smashing them together, and placing them into new and unexpected contexts. But if all I’m doing is consuming everyone else’s versions of everything, then I’m just distilling their opinions. And I’m tired of doing that.

If nothing changes, I’ll become even less confident, even less likely to produce anything original, and even more frustrated that I’m a worse version of people I see online. I’m trying to be the best version of myself, and social media, in all its iterations, is turning me into an average version of everybody else.

Social media is the average opinion of the worst possible group of people we could collect in a room together.

Inspiration is deeply personal and my creativity is inseparable from motivation. Staying “informed” to the degree most of us do today is wildly unnecessary and dampens my inspiration. We consume an ungodly amount of news, insights, and opinions from people in places we don’t understand, will never visit, don’t respect, and don’t actually care about.

Ask yourself this: if you stopped following the latest outrage or scandal right now, would your life be materially worse? What are you really missing?

After five weeks with no social media consumption, aside from occasionally posting on LinkedIn for work, I’ve realised I don’t need to keep up with anybody or anything I don’t consciously choose. It felt like I did. But I don’t.

I need to be content with myself, the things I’m doing, the way I spend my time, and the actions I take. Taking control of my input has helped me take control of my thoughts and opinions.

I’m not saying everyone suffers the way I do when I consume social media. But I am saying it’s a slow, largely unrecognised descent into the average. And if I want to stand out, I can’t consume social media as my primary source of information and insight and then expect to produce original thoughts or meaningful work.

This decision is for me. I don’t give a shit if you read this and join me. But I do believe you should analyse your relationship with the information you consume, who’s producing it, why they’re producing it, why you think it matters, and whether you actually believe it or whether the algorithm is just forcing it into your face so often you give up and believe it.

Social media rots your brain, whether you like to admit it or not. I thought I had control over my habits until I stopped X, my gateway social media drug, and I realised how much of my thinking was consumed by other people’s mental rubbish. The more time I spend consuming social media, the less time I spend forming my own opinion of the world.

I hope by now you’re jolted into realising that you get to choose what you consume. You have agency over your algorithm, whether you believe it or not. Your algorithm is simply the accumulation of what you’ve engaged with over time. You say you don’t like it. You say someone else is manipulating you. Maybe they are. But it still responds to you, to your actions and what you allow into your mind.

So you get to choose.
You get to control it.

And the question I want you to sit with is simple:

Is your life actually better because you doom-scroll it away on X, LinkedIn, Twitch, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook or any of the myriad slopfests out there?
Or are you stalking other people’s lives and hoping for a better one instead of going out and building it?

This is my line in the sand.
I’m done. I’m doing something different.
And I’ll see where the chips fall.