There's only one way to go from here.

I went offline.

It wasn't so much a choice at first. I spent much of the summer on the road, which meant that getting online was nearly always a struggle, and so when I didn't have to, I stayed off. And when I did get on—I was working my remote job doing book research—doing work was the focus. I didn't fall prey to the usual distractions of endless scrolling on Instagram and Bluesky, because when weighed against the effort to get and stay online, it didn't seem worth it.

Once I was in a place with a more reliable connection, I reconnected, but not to social sites. I tracked the news enough, but not obsessively. I kept in touch with friends, mostly via text and WhatsApp. But when it came to social, I'd venture in and turn back around, Grandpa Simpsons style.

Because logging in after a while away, it was painfully clear just how broken it all was. All the things that made social media so vital a decade or two ago have fallen apart, replaced by algorithms, engagement hacks, and endless, bottomless, screaming.

We're in a cycle of constant outrage (which is not to downplay how actually outrageous the time we're living in is), pushed by the insatiable need for engagement that has been stoked by algorithms and the misaligned incentive structures that have emerged in the last few years that need people to stay mad bro to keep the dollars flowing.

As my pal Akilah Hughes wrote the other week, "I realized something recently, and so did you. So did everyone. Posting is not fun anymore. It's formulaic. It's butter yellow text on an image with whatever the week's buzz word is. There's zero faith that anything any of us makes is actually reaching our audience, and certainly not the intended audience."

Akilah's right. I don't know anyone who's getting anything out of the social sites they frequent anymore. People who used to love seeing what their friends are up to just complain about how they're not seeing them. People who use social to hype their work now mostly talk about how much extra work it's become. And people who've used the sites to build followings are watching their engagement plummet, undone by an algorithm that grows ever more fickle.

I used to tell myself that I had to stay engaged because social was where news broke, but I'm not sure what news I've seen break on social in ages. It's all just people reacting to news that's already broken. Or, worse, making shit up in the hopes of getting likes.

Mostly, it seems, we yell. We yell about the world, we yell about the other social sites, we yell about news stories we didn't read, we yell about whatever sucker was unlucky enough to be that day's main character, and we yell, mostly, at each other. We yell because we are mad at all of this. And we yell because we're all trapped in a machine that was built, in part, to keep us yelling.

I'm not sure what keeps me there, what keeps any of us there, beyond inertia. We're in the Looney Tunes stage of the end of social, where we've glided well past the edge of the cliff and it's slowing dawning on us that the only way left is down. Fast.

What if we just stopped?

What if we stopped plugging our selves into the machines, stopped performing (wittingly and unwittingly) for the algorithm, stopped letting bots bait us, stopped all of it and figured out new ways—our ways—to do things again.

Because there has to be a better way of connecting and sharing and existing together, a way that isn't locked into the exploitative doom loops and psychic death of what we currently have. A way that's built around humans again, not around algorithms. A way that values connection instead of confrontation.

Maybe that means building things that are smaller and closer and less visible to everyone. Sure, this has been something I've been saying for a long time, but that doesn't make it untrue. Now more than ever—as social falls apart and AI companies compete to replace us—it's important to start figuring out what makes us actually human, what makes our hearts beat and our blood pump and how we can connect with each other in ways that feel real and fill us up instead of drain us completely.