The Surprising Parallels Between Quitting Social Media and Stopping Drinking

Listening to Cal Newport on The Making Sense podcast, I heard Newport liken his fans’ reaction to Sam Harris leaving Twitter/X to how friends respond when people stop drinking.

The pair discussed how people perceived Harris as suffering from some mental health disorder because he left, and this can also happen when someone stops drinking alcohol.

You’ve stopped drinking; ergo, you must have a problem with alcohol.

You’ve stopped using social media; therefore, you must have a problem that’s exacerbated by being on social media.

If you want to live a SELF-led life, then playing in the sandbox of the 8Cs and 5Ps of SELF is par for the course. One of those Ps is Perspective, so let’s look at this issue differently.

What if you were an outlier? You see things others don’t see because you experience more of your life in SELF than most. Because of this, you can see that drinking alcohol or spending time on Twitter/X is actually -EV, and not by a smidgen, but by a lot, and you can foresee that leaving both will end up being a massive net positive for you.

How would things change if you could switch perspectives like this and act according to the new appraisals?

Lee