Over the past week I’ve significantly limited my media consumption and have completely refrained from using social media, with the exception of posting this daily blog. I’ve written before about my seesaw relationship with the news cycle, and I’ve just gotten to the point where I need a break.

I got sucked in. I had been spending more than 10-15 minutes a day on Winno, Twitter, and the John Hopkins newsletter. I found myself checking them throughout the day, before bed… and it started to become overwhelming. I developed an unconscious addiction, a frantic, incessant desire to consume.

Enough. I’m taking a break. And you know what? It got me thinking… what is social media for? Why do we use it? Sure, there’s the age-old argument that Facebook “helps people keep in touch.” There’s the rationale that Twitter “empowers every person to engage in civil discourse,” that these platforms “enable every voice to be heard.” People much better educated than me have written articles about the dangers of social media, so I don’t want to rant about its consequences.

But I reached an epiphany recently: the vast majority of people use social media to reverberate like-minded thinking within their own echo chambers. Regardless whether this is a conscious choice by the user or not, the fact remains these gargantuan tech companies employ teams of engineers and invest millions of dollars to keep people on their platforms. Because after all, more time spent on Facebook or Twitter or Youtube means more ad revenue for the respective companies. Our attention gives them money. My personal Facebook feed was no different; it was always populated with posts advocating viewpoints similar to my own.

It’s been said that too much of anything, even a good thing, can be bad for you. We don’t even know if social media is ‘good’ for us (and much of the research suggests it’s unhealthy). Maybe it’s beneficial, for our collective sanity, to take a break every once in a while. It might do us some good. You are what you think about. When our days are filled with consuming other’s thoughts, where does that leave us?