I won’t lie: deleting the Twitter account that I’d had since 2009, because of Elon Musk’s behavior and the clear ideological direction that he’s steering the platform, has been like coming down off of some strange drug, hence the title of this post, and why I’ve been posting so much to my blog these past days.
I feel like there’s some parallel between that particular flavor of social media, and the type of person that it was turning me into, and being addicted to a very expensive and intellectually and emotionally stupefying drug, but the cost was in my time and my attention span, as well as my mental coherence.
Moreover, as with what I’ve read of people who join 12-step programs to help them deal with the challenge of being sober from a drug, I have to come to terms with putting together bits and pieces of my life that I’d been letting slip and slide, all because I was performing for a live audience instead of living in the real world.
If you have a social media account that you’ve become addicted to, there’s never been a better time to exchange email addresses and other contact info and then delete your account. Especially Twitter. It’s not good for your soul. I mean it. At least I can be grateful that I was in my early 30’s when I created the account and not a teenager or 20-something. That would’ve really messed me up, I’m sure.
Update: I’ve never taken ayahuasca or any other strong hallucinogenic drugs before, but “coming down off of Twitter” is like some weird unending loop of Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Imagining Elon Musk falling into the black hole of his own making is a sort of poetic justice, but he’s bringing so many people down into that abyss along with himself. He wants to be a comedian, and he’s giving himself brain-worms of the worst kind. At least Trump’s on his own site.
It doesn’t help that I’ve come to believe in the “universe is made out of consciousness and spacetime is a collective side-effect” theory, as proposed by cognitive psychologists like Donald Hoffman and many others, especially as we’ve come to know more about life outside of our bodies from near-death experiences and the like. So I’m really getting into the concept of “remote viewing” the future, and that is a strange experience in its own right. Now I have much more free space in my mind, after banishing the “stage” of Twitter.
Update 2: It’s nice to live in a world of 21st-century pharmaceuticals (preferably legally prescribed). The surgeon general is only just now warning about the dangers of social media, but at least now we know what most of the pills do. It’s important to have a good relationship with one’s psychiatrist if one has ADHD or problems of that nature. They know about pills, but not necessarily psychology, and certainly not for something as new as today’s social media.
Did I mention that the conspiracy theorists who believe fluoride is poison also believe SSRIs are poison? They would say that they know the plot. SSRIs are apparently not useful for kids or adolescents, but any port in a storm for adults, right? The higher dosages seem frightening to me. Nobody needs an affect that flat. As long as you can deal with reality and aren’t oversharing about your kids.
I mention the scariness of high SSRI doses because of a YouTube video I watched with an anesthesiologist talking about a patient who was still twitching around on a standard dose of general anesthetic because their serotonin system was so jacked up on an SSRI plus an SNRI antidepressant. That seems a bit… suboptimal. There are serotonin receptors all over the body, with the potential for unpleasant side effects.
That doc is pitching ketamine and other hallucinogens for depression. That’s become a popular form of short-term anti-depression therapy, and it’s within his wheelhouse as an anesthesiologist. We sort-of know what most of the pills do, at least some of the time (if not why they work, sometimes). 😄
For me, the real winner in the pharmacopeia has been bupropion aka Wellbutrin, (300 mg extended-release). There are almost no side effects, you can take it for an extended period of time, it helps with ADHD inattentiveness, and it makes you immune to getting addicted or re-addicted to nicotine. It’s a drug that doesn’t get advertised because the patents have expired. What’s funny is that nobody seems to know why Wellbutrin works yet.
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