Possibly the worst invention of the last 25 years. How else can we describe social media?

What was meant to brighten up our lives has made us anxious and at times depressed. So, lets switch the whole thing off and reclaim a simpler more satisfying life.

Who’s going to miss it? Maybe some creepy marketing execs who can no longer stalk your every purchase or bombard you with rubbish you don’t need, but the planet will be the better for it. Kids getting cyber bullied, anyone who follows Liverpool FC or Wayne Rooney will all have richer lives. No Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson, or Alec Salmond egging on their Spads to make it look like they have something worth saying. No Mark Drakeford either since he’ll have cut internet speeds to 20bps. Troll armies will be seen only in Warhammer and the unemployment rate in Chelyabinsk will soar.

We will still have the internet to do sensible things like financial transactions, online press, and data searches. But we can do away with narcissists looking likes and pumping out tosh to get them. People will have to start talking to each other more and engaging with those they have avoided – teenagers will discover the joy of having parents. We get all that screen time back to go out and discover the world around us – to cook, to meet, to raise the birth rate. Pixels are the contraceptives of our age.

And who really cares if Zuckerberg or Musk are a couple of billion out of pocket? They should be off doing something useful instead of pretend cage fighting. How about they plant some huge forests or move their geek farms to Gaza or just pay their taxes in the US instead of Ireland?

So, let’s switch them off – Tik Tok, WhatsApp, X or whatever else is in the pipeline. Let’s do it before old curmudgeons like me all die off since we are probably the last generation to remember life without Facebook. Our teetotal, chaste, conformist offspring won’t have the nerve to do it unless we do it for them. Let’s take the red pill and enjoy life outside the Matrix.

Alanbrooke