Today, I am trying to go 24 hours without checking social media. At 12 noon, I logged out of twitter. At 12:05, I logged out of Facebook. We'll see if I can make it all the way through Friday without checking to see what people are saying about the state of the world.

This is something that I've actually been meaning to attempt for a while. Last year, I noticed that not only was I spending hours on social media and, as a result, not accomplishing much beyond liking a few dozen tweets. Even more importantly, the constant barrage of negativity that one finds on twitter was starting to effect the way that I looked at the world. I was becoming a negative person and I found myself reacting to everyone as if they were a potential twitter troll. The constant barrage of anger, negativity, and outrage was starting to take a toll on my own sense of well-being. It was making me anxious and jumpy and pessimistic.

Fortunately, in my case, I was realized what was happening to me and, on January 1st, I resolved to be a more positive person. I resolved to let go of unnecessary anger and disagreement. It may sound simple to say, "I resolve not to obsess over someone not agreeing with me about a movie or the latest political trend," but it's a lot more difficult than it sounds. So far, this year, I've been doing a pretty good job at keeping myself focused on the good things in life. That doesn't mean ignoring the bad things, of course. To be willfully blind is just as bad as being willfully negative. But I refuse to buy into this idea, which is very popular on twitter, that things have never been worse than they are today and that anyone who feels differently is my enemy. I refuse indulge in the narcissistic doom and gloom that has come to dominate social media. I refuse to be bullied by the latest trending topics of twitter and it's made all the difference in the way I currently view life.

Here's the thing: twitter is not the world. Too often, we assume that just because a few hundred people are being hateful on twitter, that means the entire world is hateful. And when something happens -- like yesterday's school shooting in Florida -- twitter does not provide information. Nor does it provide comfort. Instead, it just provides anger and hatred. If you solely went by what you read on twitter, you would believe that the world is perpetually on the verge of ending. You would believe that there is no hope for people to come together in the spirit of shared humanity, as opposed to shared ideology. Twitter can be a wonderful resource and I love it. But if you don't occasionally take a day off from it, it'll drive you crazy.

It's very easy to say, "I'm staying off twitter for 24 hours." It's a lot harder to actually do it. Even as I sit here typing this, my natural instinct is to go check twitter. Realistically, how much is the world going to change in 24 hours? Not much. How much is going to happen on twitter in 24 hours? Nothing. When I check in on Friday, it'll be the same as when I checked in at 11:30 this morning. And I won't have changed either. 24 hours is not a long time. But I will have taken a break from the twitter echo chamber and, hopefully, it'll be easier for me to do so again in the future.

So, no twitter for me today. No Facebook either. Today is all about me.

We'll just see if I can pull it off.