The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

There's something about the social media influencer industrial complex that short circuits women's brains worse, as far as I can tell. Most of my friends quit social media years to a decade ago but our wives are all on it. Men seem to get sucked into Youtube wormholes instead.

I think the only way out is cold turkey. The number of conversations my wife starts with telling me about some distant acquaintances recent vacation (as seen thru IG) is distressing.

My "social" internet use is more hobby based - forum/reddit hobby focussed content.

It is anecdotal but eg. me and my brother and some of my male friends "burned out" on silly meme feeds on sites like Memebase and what not before there was any very addictive feeds. Maybe fewer women was full of it by the time Instagram came?

When my girlfriend told me on our first date that she doesn't use social media, I nearly proposed on the spot.

And even she does some doom-scrolling though news sites. She claims to know it's mostly nonsense, and then says she has to do it to know what's going on. I try not to point out the contradiction too much, because she does limit it pretty well.

There may be an apparent contradiction but I think she's right. You want to know the gist of whats being reported so that you know directionally what is going on / what other people may be talking about.

That is - you don't need to read 18 different articles about how Pete the drunk defense secretary (and probable assaulter/abuser) likes to text on his personal phone about war plans (including to non-govt officials), but when you see the article pop up in enough of the less biased news places you browse, you get the idea that it's true & bad.

Generally I find business news like FT/Bloomberg/CNBC and (if you ignore the opinion section) WSJ are best for the less-biased news sourcing.

I also browse a bit of known-biased news on each side to understand what each side is going to talk about (and makes it clearer what each side may be BSing about). This is helpful so I don't get jumped by some of my more left/right wing nut social circle when discussing a topic with a known-false partisan argument (as 99% of people just repeat what they see in their-sides news).