I’ve been on Twitter (now called “X”) since I was 10. Since that time, it has served largely as a stream of consciousness of almost every passing thought I have had since then: good or bad. I’ve been concerned about how heavily I use social media, and Twitter in particular, and its impact on my mental health for some time. I haven’t done anything about it, I suppose because I’ve trained Twitter into my daily life from a very young age. Something needs to change.

Twitter, in particular, has proven a particularly big distraction for me. Per Apple’s Screen Time app, my average usage is over 10 hours a week: and that’s just on my phone. This week it will end up at over 20 hours. For much of the week during the semester, I’m normally using Twitter on my laptop suggesting this number could be even greater. This is clearly not sustainable and it is time that would be better spent doing other things. I use other social networks considerably less with the only app getting anywhere close being TikTok, at a much healthier 6 hours a week.

Effective Tuesday 12am AEDT, I will be setting my account to private and deleting the app off my phone. I’m sink-holing “twitter.com” in my hosts files on my computers. I will only post on there when I have something that deserves share: a new blog post, a new article in a publication, a new live-tweeting thread for Woroni, or a life announcement. The link to my Twitter profile on my homepage will be directed to this post (If you got here from there, you can click through to my Twitter here though – obviously – you won’t see anything)

I will still be reachable by other means (perhaps including other “Posting” apps like Bluesky or Threads, but I’ll try to avoid these to avoid falling into the same trap I have here).

I look forward to having a much healthier relationship with social media in future.