Chris Pugh

Somewhere on the road in Lacaster, Calif.

The Scroll Never Ends.

I thought I quit social media when Elon Musk bought Twitter. That was the breaking point. I watched as the site turned into a billionaire’s plaything, a landfill of reactionary nonsense, and I walked away. Deleted the app. Shut the door. Felt pretty good about it, too.

Except—well, not really.

Because here’s the thing: social media isn’t just Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. It’s a habit. A reflex. An itch that keeps finding new ways to get scratched.

For a while, I convinced myself that I wasn’t really on social media anymore. No timeline, no algorithm, no doomscrolling. But then I found myself on Substack Notes, that little side feed of posts, updates, and casual commentary from writers I actually respect. It’s smarter, the people are nicer, and the writing is better. But at the end of the day, it’s just another spigot of endless content.

I caught myself scrolling, scrolling, scrolling—just one more!—and suddenly, I had that old familiar thought: What the hell am I doing?

This is the part nobody wants to say out loud: quitting social media isn’t as simple as deleting an account. It’s a rewiring process. And the wires run deep.

I still feel the pull. That restless urge to check something. Doesn’t even matter what. Email, news, an obscure forum about vintage cameras—just give me the sweet, sweet dopamine hit of something new. The internet has conditioned me to believe that boredom is a personal failing, that if I’m not consuming something, I must be missing out.

I hate that.

I told myself I was quitting social media to be more present, more engaged, more thoughtful. But truthfully, I just replaced one form of scrolling with another. It turns out that leaving Twitter didn’t suddenly transform me into a monk of pure intellectual discipline. It just made me search for the same distractions in slightly different places.

I still skim articles without really reading them. I still refresh Substack Notes for no good reason. I still look for something—anything—that feels like a tiny break from reality.

And for what? None of it sticks. None of it matters. It’s all just more noise.

The platforms don’t matter. The addiction does.

I don’t know what the solution is, or if there even is one. Maybe this is just how our brains work now—frantic, fragmented, always craving the next hit of something new. Maybe the only way to truly quit social media is to unplug entirely, go live in the woods, read books by candlelight, and pretend the world ended.

I won’t do that. I like indoor plumbing too much.

But I do know this: every time I catch myself mindlessly scrolling, I try to snap out of it. Close the tab. Put the phone down. Walk away. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

I quit Twitter. That was a start. But, now you can find me on Bluesky.

Fuck my life.