Is Social Media rotting our brains, or are we just using the wrong social media?

For years, I have wanted to quit social media.

I convince myself I need it because it has become the place where I document important life events such as travel and birthdays, etc. Yet, there is one aspect of it I find, frankly, challenging and perhaps slightly psychologically perverse.

It is the feeling that I have a large swath of relationships which, in reality, I don't have. Maybe I knew them in high school, college, in my twenties as I adventured through the Seattle nightlife. But I probably barely knew them then and I really don't know them now. But in my head, because of social media, they somehow became "important." They are "people I know" when I am in conversation with real-life humans I talk with out there in the "real world."

But anytime I say, "I know this guy" and then tell a story about something I saw on Instagram, I feel gross. I don't "know" that guy. He's a guy I drank with at a bar that doesn't exist anymore and I probably don't know his last name.

Sociologists call these "parasocial" relationships. The prevailing narrative in the social sciences is that these parasocial relationships are problematic because they make us feel connected to celebrities who not only do not care about us but are exploiting the feelings of intimacy we have with them. But I can't help but wonder if the parasocial relationships we have with people we don't know might be worse.

All this is to say, I found a new social media app I like. PLOT TWIST

Am I crazy? Very possibly.

*MORPHEUS VOICE* "THE MATRIX HAS YOU" But here is the thing -- the app is very book nerds. It is called "Fable" and I feel like it might be *holds face in hands out of embarrassment* making me a BETTER person? I am reading more and reading more widely and I don't feel that same kind of impulse to collect friends and only show the best version of my life "for the gram."

It is just making me read more and that is fun.

It feels like a new possibility and I am not just a shill for the app here. It is actually not necessarily about the app itself. Instead, I find myself thinking--hoping--that the internet splinters into more and more stratified corners where people can interact "socially" online via whatever their passion is without the simmering parasocial psychopathy that slowly grows from Facebook, X, and Instagram.

This feels, dare I say, different.