I have deleted TikTok, Twitter and Tweetbot— yes, I had two different apps just for Twitter– from my phone. My plan is to leave them gone for a week; my hope is that I can make it through my coffee tomorrow morning. My phone rather helpfully asked me if I wanted to cancel my $5.99 yearly subscription to Tweetbot, which I actually declined; it re-ups next week, which kind of entertains me.

I’m trying to cut down on the amount of free-floating dread and hate I have in my life, you see. Twitter is a prime contributor to this, although TikTok definitely has its moments, and although I feel like both services are useful to me in certain ways– Twitter, in particular, is the source of most of my news nowadays– I just need a detox for a while. I need free-floating existential dread to have less of a death-grip on my brain and every time I open Twitter up I am reminded how fucking awful everything is.

Note that I’m not even going cold turkey on the service– I literally have it open on my second monitor as I’m typing this, the second monitor that I have on my desk more or less specifically for Twitter. I’m just keeping it off my phone, to cut down on those moments where I realize I’ve lost an hour to mindless scrolling. I mean, hell, I’ve stopped typing this post three or four times because something shiny scrolled by, so maybe I’ll ditch that too. But baby steps, right? Right.