Note before reading: I am exposing my less-than-polished self on purpose. I want you to feel the rawness of the drive, so you understand what’s happening. I also request grace in service of the point.
Something happened to me yesterday.
I opened Nextdoor for the first time in years; my original intention simply to figure out how to unsubscribe. But then, I started reading.
Someone was defending themselves after making a hard decision that a group of people labeled cruel. She wrote that she’d cried all night. She edited the original post to ask for mercy and understanding after an evening of piling on.
I felt an urge growing.
I wanted to dig in and read every cruel remark. My gut said: defend her. At the same time a smaller part questioned—what if she was wrong? What if she was backpedaling after being called out? Reading would tell me.
I stopped myself.
Next post: “Entrepreneurship is hard. Being poor is hard. Choose your hard.”
I felt an urge growing.
I wanted to comment that entrepreneurship requires means for self-investment that poverty doesn’t always allow. That the statement, however inspirational it meant to be, lands as shaming. Did they realize that? Were they trying to motivate? Were they chest-thumping? How do we help people “choose their hard” while lowering barriers instead of adding shame?
I stopped myself.
Next: teen protestors allegedly vandalized a local Kroger. Someone commented that the teacher who released them should be charged with the crime.
I felt the urge building—now layered on top of the others.
What was being called vandalism? Why are we assuming teachers have more control than teens, the store, the parents? Have they ever parented a teenager? Has authoritarianism ever truly worked with one? And someone in the thread arguing that teens shouldn’t have a voice—that protest is simply truancy and crime—I so deeply disagree. They have every right to a voice about their future.
The urge grew bigger.
I stopped myself.
Three minutes into a social media platform and something inside me felt ready to explode. A veritable pressure cooker, with the lid being my decision to stop myself, over and over, from useless engagement.
And that’s when it hit me.
This is what the last several months had felt like—far too often—before I deleted social media from my phone for good.
Why did I allow this into my life?
Years ago, my urge to comment on these random posts was intermittent—maybe a few times a year. But recently? I truly believe it started as noble motivation. I swore I would never let a social justice issue go unaddressed during a time when human decency seemed to be lagging.
But just because I wanted to speak up in real life does not mean the same impulse belongs in social media.
I began to recognize that I was adding to the din—the noise. Even when I brought time, thoughtfulness, and sophistication to my responses, I was still participating in a system intentionally built to provoke engagement.
And I had to ask:
Is any good actually coming from this?
Does the world need my opinion here?
And even further—can both of those be true at once?
I’m not wrong about caring deeply about humanity—I am a therapist after all–but am I right about how I’m attempting to practice my value?
The fact is, the structure of social media—no matter how skillfully I try to engage—fosters trench-digging. There is no nervous system co-regulation. There is no human-to-human softening. The only engagement on something where people disagree: argument and counter-argument. And the instinct to be right hardens everyone involved.
Not only was I exhausting myself, I was also strengthening the artificial lines, and my nervous system was going Threat Level Midnight with an intensifying drive to engage.
Those last few months—when I was teaching myself not to respond to everything—required a ridiculous level of self-control. I was still feeling the fight-or-flight surge (sometimes even more intensely because I wasn’t “acting on my own behalf”).
I was **choosing** stress, which seems so ludicrous as I write about it now, but my body sure felt it again yesterday!
And the deeper question underneath all of it was this:
When does engagement become self-harm?
When does the moral high ground become a nervous system hijack?
And what would it mean to practice justice in ways that don’t destroy the body carrying it?
I know this: my nervous system is not a sacrificial offering to the algorithm.
And opting out—at least in some spaces—has felt less like apathy and more like stewardship of my energy, my attention, and my ability to create actual impact.
Maybe it’s building slower, steadier spaces where we can actually hear each other, human to human.
Maybe the most countercultural thing I can do right now is choose where my voice belongs—and where it doesn’t.
If this resonates, I’d love to hear what you’re noticing in yourself.
Be well!
Renee