I recently had to summon extraordinary willpower—like that of a man sawing off his own leg to escape a bear trap—to simply delete my Instagram app.

Being a very visual person, I found Instagram to be the most enjoyable of the social media platforms, as Facebook is rife with bipartisan political nonsense and irrelevant paid content, and I spent more time on YouTube reading people’s comments than I did actually watching the videos they were appended to.

I eventually noticed that one or two swipes through my Instagram feed was all it took to cross the event horizon and get sucked into this digital black hole. A few images or videos related to things I’m actually interested in, like travel and arts, soon gave way to a quagmire of inane, algorithmically proffered content.

As my kids would say, I had some high key brain rot, bruh.

I fully understand the need for a person to put their mind into screensaver mode for a little while at the end of the day, but the slope is too slippery for me when it comes to social media. That’s something I’ve had to own.

Like the recovering alcoholic, I must swear off even the smallest of indulgences.

Perhaps it all has to do with the way I’m wired, tending to have an intense and consuming focus on the thing that is placed in front of me, but I simply cannot use social media in moderation; I’ll easily lose a half hour here or a half hour there to senseless doomscrolling. I’ll come away feeling physically ill, irritated, and often times depressed.

There’s quite a lot of peer-reviewed research papers published on how bad social media is for your mental health, so I don’t need to bang that drum any louder.

A lot of weird things have been happening within me since I turned 40 last month (it’s like a second puberty, but instead of a burgeoning vitality, things are going in the opposite direction). One of the most significant changes has been this profound and immediate sense of the passage of time, something that I’ve had trouble articulating to anyone but has been bumming me out pretty bad.

It seems like only a few months ago my kids were knee-high and drawing all over the walls in crayon, yet that chapter of my life was closer to 10 years ago.

There have been myriad pursuits, creative projects, career moves, people, and worries that I thought were deserving of untold sums of my time, so many of which turned out to be fruitless and now haunt me like unwavering wraiths.

Yet this temporal sensitivity (or whatever the hell you might call it) could in fact be a blessing, a razor by which to excise superfluous time wasters, like social media.

Time is absolutely the currency of life, and when you’ve exhausted your bank account, well, that’s all, folks.

Be mindful of how you spend your time, is the best lesson I can glean in the wake of my on-off relationship with social media. I for one won’t be laying any more tithings of my life at the feet of slop content jockeys.

That said, thanks for spending a few precious minutes of your own life to read the opinion of this humble indie creator!