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The Observationist
I stopped participating in social media in 2025. No dramatic announcement, no farewell post. I just stopped talking, stopped reacting, and stopped feeding the machine.
Now, every so often, I take a peek. And every time, it feels like I've been in a coma for thirty years and woke up in a room where everyone is shouting a language I almost recognize.
What the Coma Feels Like
When you're inside the feed every day, you adapt to it gradually. The outrage gets a little louder, the certainty a little harder, the reasoning a little thinner, and because you're moving with it, you don't notice the drift.
When you step out and look back, you see the whole drift at once. That's the coma effect. It isn't that people suddenly changed overnight. It's that I'm no longer being changed along with them, so the distance shows.
And what I see is a lot of people who seem confused and misled. Not stupid. Confused. There's a difference. Intelligent people can be led into very strange places when their identity is attached to the destination.
Politics Before Logic
The pattern that stands out most is the order of operations. In a healthy mind, you look at the evidence, reason through it, and arrive at a position. On the feed, it's usually reversed. The position comes first, based on the team, and the reasoning shows up afterward as a legal defense.
When a conclusion is chosen before the thinking starts, the thinking is just decoration.
You can watch it happen in real time. Two people see the exact same event and each one instantly knows which side it proves right. Nobody asks what they don't know yet. Nobody says "I'm not sure." Uncertainty has become a kind of social weakness, so everyone performs confidence they haven't earned.
My Field Notes From the Feed
- Identity is doing the arguing. People defend positions as though they were defending themselves, because on the feed, they are.
- Opposition by default. If the "other side" said it, it must be wrong. The claim never gets evaluated on its own merits.
- The confirmation loop. The algorithm shows people what they already believe, they react, and the reaction teaches the algorithm to show them more of it.
- Emotion as evidence. If it makes me angry, it must be true. If it makes me feel good, it must be right.
- Everyone is a broadcaster. Very few are listening. Most replies are just the next speech waiting for its turn.
Why I Call It Observing
I don't scroll the feed to join the conversation anymore. I scroll it the way a sailor looks at the sky. I'm reading conditions.
The collective has a mood, and social media is where it leaks out in public. Fear, anger, hope, exhaustion, tribal pride, they all show up as patterns in what people repost, what they attack, and what they're suddenly all talking about. When you stop adding your own noise, the signal gets much clearer. I'm not trying to win anything or correct anyone. I'm just noting what energy the external environment is in right now.
That's the role I've settled into. I'm not a participant, a debater, or a guru. I'm an observationist.
A Fair Warning to Myself
I want to be honest here, because observing from the sidelines can quietly turn into feeling superior, and that's its own trap. I have my own conditioning. I spent years inside belief systems I thought were truth before I examined them and stepped away. If I could be that sure and that wrong, so can anyone, including me.
So the practice isn't "I see clearly and they don't." The practice is to keep checking my own reactions while I watch everyone else's. If the feed makes me smug, that's data too.
How to Become an Observationist
You don't have to delete anything or make a big declaration. Try this:
Stop reacting first. Go a few weeks without liking, commenting, or sharing. Notice how often you feel the pull to respond, and what exactly is pulling.
Then watch the pattern, not the content. Ignore who's right for a moment. Look at how people are arguing, what emotion is driving it, and what everyone seems afraid of losing.
Finally, let them be. People are allowed to hold the beliefs they hold. You don't have to fix the room to understand it.
Books That Sharpened My Observation
These are the kinds of books I'd point someone to if they want to understand what's happening in minds and in feeds, and how to get some distance from it.
- The Righteous Mind by Jonathan HaidtWhy good people end up divided by politics and religion, and why reasoning so often follows intuition instead of leading it.
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel KahnemanA map of the mental shortcuts and biases that quietly run most of our opinions.
- Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil PostmanWritten long before social media, and still one of the sharpest looks at how media shapes the way a culture thinks.
- Digital Minimalism by Cal NewportA practical guide to stepping back from attention-harvesting platforms without disappearing from life.
- Meditations by Marcus AureliusTwo thousand years old, and still the best manual I know for watching your own mind without being ruled by it.
- A simple notebook for field notesI log what I notice offline. Writing it by hand slows the reaction down and makes patterns easier to see.
The View From Here
I don't miss the engagement. I don't miss the arguments I never won, or the strangers whose opinion of me I somehow cared about. What I have in exchange is quiet, and in the quiet I can see things I couldn't see while I was inside.
The world isn't going to slow down so I can feel comfortable with it. But I can decide how I stand in relation to it. I choose to watch, think, and stay clear.
So here's my question for you: if you stopped reacting for thirty days, what would you notice?