The corridors are dark and open. It’s reminiscent of a utility closet, but instead of “closet” it is the entire vessel. The occupants’ bodies have mechanical pieces through the flesh. There are thousands of them. The voices are mechanical, and in unison. And they are threatening to engulf anyone who is not part of them already.

I am describing the Borg from the Star Trek universe. They are a collective of humanoids who were forced into the collective and involuntarily outfitted with cybernetic components in a pursuit of perfection. All of their minds were channeled into one consciousness. Their purported goal is perfection through the assimilation of everyone they encounter. In the series, the Borg are the avenues to explore ideas of forced conformity, resisting unrelenting power, and the tension between individuality and belonging. Indeed, one of the first things experienced by liberated drones was crushing loneliness.

For most of humanity’s existence, interacting required another person near us. Messages were carried by people. Then we increased the scale that information could travel by creating the printing press, telegrams, telephone, and the internet. When I was born, the idea that we could have a device in our pocket to connect us to most of humanity was Star Trek material. In my lifetime, what used to need paper and a Post Office employee now uses electricity and radio signals. A key part of parenting now is discerning how to regulate our children’s connection to the information of the world. When do we permit access to cell phones and the internet?

Last week I impulsively made the decision to delete all of the social media apps on my phone except Discord and LinkedIn. I kept the former because I experience it more like a group text and the latter because I need it for work sometimes. LinkedIn, for me, is otherwise as magnetic as a piece of wood. The accounts are still live, but they are not places I’m not going to for the time being.

I was admittedly influenced into this, in the way that every cool sober person I met eventually helped me understand that I, too, could live that way. A new acquaintance at a party was describing to my best friend and I how he left Facebook 9 months ago. In a beautiful dining room I’d otherwise never before stepped foot in, his eyes absolutely lit up as he described a calmer way of being, better relationships, and a clearer head. He wasn’t trying to convince us to follow in his path; he was expressing joy.

I am forever a sparking wire looking for the grounding connection of other people; anything to make being alive to feel less lonely. Social media seemed to do it. For a time, it was a lot of fun. I met so many (real!) people who I became close to. However, it’s less been the presence of other people and more the onslaught of information as force-fed by algorithms. Increased exposure lead to diminishing returns. Social media was feeling like a cross between drug addiction and being part of the Borg.

The first thing I noticed is how similar this felt to the time I quit drinking. I was a feeling a bit twitchy. Social media turned out to be, for me, a numbing habit. I had this instinctive sense that once I got used to abstaining from it, I was going to be better off. Reports of a clearer head and better attention were not exaggerations.

Like a drone severed from the Borg, I also acutely and immediately felt the disconnection. There’s the obvious: less ads, less panic, and fewer bad ideas from strangers. There was the subtler: the neighborhood watch groups, the Fire Department groups, and the missing pet groups. I don’t see the photos of the deer that’s eating my garden also devouring my neighbor’s. The presence of a lot of people outright disappeared from my awareness. In quiet moments, I am learning to keep my own company.

Social media disconnection does not create a life of solitude. There are still people all around me. They are the ones I live with, the people in my physical presence, or the ones I’ve texted or called. I have sent some letters and postcards. There is something very nice about how the only people who find me are largely doing it on purpose.

Our technological advances seem to be in the direction of tighter and faster communication. It seems our instincts are to pull each other closer. Yet. We are not made with wires. We are made with flesh. There’s limits to our processing. The Borg were a horror show, not a how-to. Despite the pull and speed of technology’s permeation into our life, resistance may not be futile after all.

In full honesty, the metaphor of addiction may not be a good one here. I suspect it may be more like recovering from an eating disorder, where the problem is still a facet of the world one cannot completely avoid. Social media is like the communication equivalent of refined sugar: we weren’t wired to have access to this intensity. The step forward thus becomes figuring out how to better regulate. The world’s technology is changing so quickly, I think it is fair to give all of us grace in how we work with it. The first time you do something new, you will probably screw it up. Society’s hyper-connection and machine-facilitated information saturation is new to us all. Steady as we go.