I took a break from 𝕏. Here’s what happened.

I’ve been an active user of 𝕏 (formerly Twitter) since 2014. In those 12 years I’ve made more than 31,000 posts. That’s about 230 posts/month, or more than seven posts per day, although since I never post on Sundays, it really works out to around nine per day. Not as crazy as some power users, but that’s still a lot of time spent on the social media platform—and that doesn’t even count the endless hours scrolling through my feed reading other people’s posts. 

Last month I decided to take a break from 𝕏—no posting, no scrolling, no access at all to the platform. I was amazed at what happened next.

Yes, I know there’s a whole genre of internet content on the dangers of social media and the positive impact of quitting these platforms. I’ve seen these warnings for years and I’ve always thought they contained a good deal of wisdom, but for a number of reasons none of them led me to seriously consider quitting social media, even for a short period of time.

First, I had systems in place to control my social media usage. I only use 𝕏 on my work desktop computer (not on any mobile devices), and only during work hours (admittedly, sometimes I slip on that second part). In other words, I don’t carry social media with me everywhere I go; I treat it more like a job task.

Second, I’ve long felt that being on 𝕏 was necessary for my work at Crisis. Our mission here is to provide commentary about the crises in the Church and in the world and to help our audience navigate those crises—and my personal 𝕏 account was one of the best ways to further that mission. (Personal social media accounts are much more effective than company accounts for this purpose.) So a hiatus from 𝕏, even temporarily, didn’t seem like an option.

Finally, while I was always receptive to the arguments about the dangers of social media, I never felt that they completely applied to me. I’m not a teenager; I wasn’t doomscrolling 16 hours/day; and I wasn’t getting into petty, uncharitable arguments with other people online (usually). So I didn’t think it was a big deal to keep posting and scrolling, day in and day out.

So what changed my mind? A number of factors, but the biggest influence was a book I began reading around the beginning of Advent: The Power of Silence by Cardinal Robert Sarah. I’ve been aware of this book since it was released in 2017, and many friends recommended it to me. One of my daughters praised it, as did my wife. Maybe they were all trying to tell me something. But for some reason I never picked it up until a couple months ago. What an eye-opener.

Here is Cardinal Sarah’s argument in a nutshell: Shut up. Seriously, just shut up.

As a professional talking head, that’s not exactly advice I wanted to hear. It’s literally my job to write and talk about things, so how exactly am I supposed to shut up, Your Eminence? 

But the more I read and prayed, the more I realized that even someone whose job is to write and talk needs to be way more silent than today’s norm. Our Lord lived in silence for the first 30 years of his life, and even during his three years of public ministry he spent many hours in prayer and silence. I’d estimate less than 3% of his entire life consisted of preaching or performing public miracles. That’s a lot less public-facing work than most of us professional talkers, and that silence didn’t keep him from accomplishing his very public mission.

While there’s nothing wrong with commenting publicly on the latest news in the Church and the world, Cardinal Sarah made me realize I don’t need to comment on every news story, nor am I required to give my opinion on every subject. At times it may be best to remain silent, and silence is something that 𝕏, by its very nature, works against. 

Yet it wasn’t only Cardinal Sarah’s book that led me to take a break. I’d grown increasingly frustrated with my time on 𝕏, finding so much of the content there to be repetitive, reactionary, and mostly rotten. Yes, some good people post helpful content at times, and solid discussions can and do happen on the platform. But more often than not, the cost of spending time on the site was far more than the benefits. So The Power of Silence came at a fortuitous (even providential) time for me. Reading it helped crystalize my frustrations and take action.

The results have been far more consequential than I expected. 

First, I have significantly more time in my day. Way, way more. Although I strictly controlled the times of day I used 𝕏 in the past, I was still spending more time scrolling than I cared to admit. In fact, if you asked me before my break how much I used 𝕏, I probably would have underestimated it by at least 30%, perhaps more. Once those hours were freed up, it became clear how much a time-suck 𝕏 had been. Taking an 𝕏 hiatus allowed me to clear my email inbox, produce higher quality content, and look more deeply at what is going on in the world today.

Having stepped away, I also realized how much 𝕏 amplifies controversies that are ultimately inane and pointless. Longtime users of the platform know what I mean. An issue arises and is hotly debated for a few days, and it seems like everyone in the world is talking about it, and it’s the most important topic in the world. But when you actually interact with people in real life, you find that they have no inkling of the supposed controversy, nor do they care. The tempest in a teapot syndrome dominates 𝕏, and it can pull you into an unrealistic world consuming your thoughts in the mundane and the meaningless.

Taking a sabbatical from 𝕏 also improved my ability to do “deep work.” The internet has evolved into a giant distraction machine, pushing mostly meaningless content from every direction all the time. Look at this video! Can you believe what that politician said? Buy my book! It’s difficult to calm the mind and think deeply about anything. The safeguards I had in place to set aside time for deep work (like writing a book) had not prevented my mind from wandering back to the latest controversy I’d read about on 𝕏 the day before. As my 𝕏 break grew longer, I found my ability to focus improved dramatically.

But the biggest change I noticed during my hiatus was being more at peace. My thoughts settled down, and I didn’t feel the need to constantly be in the know, to perpetually post comments, to incessantly be engaged with every random person on the internet. When I did interact with someone—either in real life or online—I was more immersed in that interaction, instead of seeing it as just a momentary blip in a constant stream of engagements. 

These consequences are significant. Readers and writers (and editors!) of online content can easily fall into the bad habits of our attention economy: producing or consuming content that’s maximized to grab our attention amidst the ocean of internet distractions, but that is ultimately shallow. We’re flooded with junk-food content. But for more than 40 years, Crisis Magazine has striven instead to produce substantial commentaries, with more lasting value. As a result of my 𝕏 break, my mind reset, leaving me more committed to fulfilling this mission.

While I’ve found my break extremely beneficial, I don’t want to pretend it came without cost. As the Editor-in-Chief of Crisis Magazine, I do need to keep abreast of the latest news, and 𝕏 was my primary news source. So I’ve had to find new ways to follow the news (without being caught up in the Tyranny of the Now). 𝕏 is also an excellent promotion tool, which I used to promote Crisis and my own books; less promotion might mean fewer readers. I also should disclose that I was monetized on 𝕏, so I’ve lost that income stream (it was about $300/month). However, it’s clear that the benefits during my break far outweighed these costs.

I never planned for my break to be permanent, and I recently returned to 𝕏, but in a greatly reduced form that I hope will maintain its benefits while minimizing its costs. I’ve enabled a browser extension that puts 𝕏 into what it calls “Zen Writer Mode.” Basically, all I see on the screen is the prompt to post something. I see no other content at all—it’s just a white screen. So I can post, but I can’t scroll the timeline. I’ll see how this experiment goes—whether having 𝕏 back in a browser tab, even in its restricted form, is too great a temptation. Now that I recognize clearly the significant costs of constant 𝕏 usage, I hope I won’t let it suck me back in.

Critiques of social media are typically ignored by those who are on social media; i.e., the people who need to hear it the most. That might be the case with this article as well. But I would encourage you, if you find yourself too drawn into 𝕏 battles, too consumed with the Tyranny of the Now, to consider taking a real and meaningful break from the platform for a while. It could lead to benefits you never expected and help you see the world in a deeper way.