OUT ON A LIMB: Social media is nothing like heroin.

I used to call myself a Twitter addict. It’s the first thing I check each morning and the last thing I look at at night. Yet during a family vacation in August I deleted Twitter from my phone for a week and didn’t check it even once. I didn’t vomit or convulse, as drug addicts tend to do when getting clean. I didn’t stop using because I had hit rock bottom. I wanted to be ‘in the moment’, as the kids say, and Twitter is a time-suck.

What I missed most was consuming a lot of news in a very quick manner — not the takes or the arguments, or the likes and retweets which offer that sweet dopamine hit. I was reading newspapers but I still felt out of touch. My addiction turned out to be an entirely correctable habit. If Twitter was having a negative effect on my life, I could have decided never to return to the app. Or I could return to the app in smaller doses. It’s not heroin, after all.

It’s Karol Markowicz, so read the whole thing.