Coincidentally, I was telling to some friends that I deleted all my social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit) years ago and is one of the best deci

Coincidentally, I was telling to some friends that I deleted all my social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit) years ago and is one of the best decisions I've ever made. Reason being mainly, that in a more or less subconscious way, social media (and internet in general might too) alters your perception of many things and create by default very bad habits. The most relevant for me are: 1. Intensification of tribalism. 2. Manipulates you making you to believe that certain things are a widely accepted trend or consensus. 3. Create, on the big scale, the habit of consuming short content, demolishing your attention span. 4. Makes you to dehumanize very easily people as what you get is a virtual representation of a human, and IMO, makes easy to become arrogant and discard opinions and depreciate the value of others. 5. Gives you a false expectation of reality (like traditional marketing but worse IMO) Of course one could still be using social media and fight oneself against those things but I think: 1. There is a multi billion conglomerate of companies investing for making you to fall in some of the aforementioned points among others not mentioned. 2. There is no point. I consider that the value of social media is, in big part, just an enchantment we've fallen in. It has way less value than we think. So, what I try to do these days is to force myself to consume content that requires certain cognitive effort I consider beneficial. Personally: books, play videogames, watch movies, play instrument, learn new languages, write code, do sports, focus in real people around me and learn from them etc. Always trying to analyze and think on what I am doing and focusing as much as possible. No, I haven't become some kind of ascetic but I think that overall it has helped, a lot, with developing more empathy, humbleness, less anxious and stable in my ideas and my perception of the world surrounding me. PS: Yes, I still use Hacker news that some might consider social media, but I do because the content, whether are comments or articles linked, has good quality and the mindset of the community is quite rational and common sense prevails most of the time.