What If We Just Stopped?

There's only one way to go from here. I went offline. It wasn't so much a choice at first. I spent much of the summer on the road, which meant that getting online was nearly always a struggle, and so when I didn't have to, I stayed off. And when I did get on—I was working my remote job doing book research—doing work was the focus. I didn't fall prey to the usual distractions of endless scrolling on Instagram and Bluesky, because when weighed against the effort to get and stay online, it didn't seem worth it. Once I was in a place with a more reliable connection, I reconnected, but not to social sites. I tracked the news enough, but not obsessively. I kept in touch with friends, mostly via text and WhatsApp. But when it came to social, I'd venture in and turn back around, Grandpa Simpsons style. Because logging in after a while away, it was painfully clear just how broken it all was. All the things that made social media so vital a decade or two ago have fallen apart, replaced by…