It’s unedifying for a modern human to have to admit to having a reptilian brain but, alas, there comes a time when one must. That time is now.

I have had my suspicions about the state of my brain for some years because it no longer works the way it used to. Much like a noughties internet connection, it’s glitchy and sluggish and its flailing machinations continuously hamper its promise. You’d never know by looking at me because I seem normal, calm even, but inside my head, my brain is a Rubik’s Cube perpetually trying to arrange itself into some kind of order.

My inclination is to blame social media. I am, after all, an elder Millennial, born between two major global events: Argentina invading the Falklands and Expo ’88. My people have witnessed the advent of many a social network. We were there, underdeveloped frontal cortexes in tow, when the likes of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram first launched.

Back then we were sold on the novel promise of connection, open dialogue and renewed friendships with several people we hated in high school. We were not to know, all those years ago, that one day the owner of Twitter would challenge the owner of Facebook to a literal dick-measuring contest as both billionaires reckoned with the prospect of their respective sites being overrun by actual Nazis.

If you had asked me then whether these platforms might, in the not too distant future, addict millions of people, thieve our attention, allow nefarious actors to meddle in elections, erode the mental health of teenagers, fragment our shared reality, sell our personal information to brands and corporations for a tidy profit, radicalise young men into extremist thinking, polarise societies and help facilitate a literal genocide in Myanmar, I would have said, please leave this cyber-cafe, I’m trying to update my relationship status to “it’s complicated”.

I’ve often heard the devolution of social media likened to the fable of the boiling frog: if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water it leaps out but if you place it into a pot of lukewarm water and slowly turn up the heat it will not realise it’s boiling to death. This metaphor comes close enough to describing what it has felt like to be an active user of these platforms for almost two decades, with one major caveat. Yes, we are the frog in the slowly boiling pot of water, but the difference is we know we’re boiling to death … yet we’re still here.

This, I’m sure you’ll agree, won’t do.

As such, some months ago, I began easing myself off social media starting with Twitter, a platform that had begun to feel like the final hours of a house party where the only people left are a drunk couple pashing and some weird guy urinating in the azaleas. Oh, and the drunk couple are Nazis.

But more than this, I deactivated my account with a strong sense of moral superiority that I, Jan Fran, elder of the Millennials, was simply refusing to be boiled to death. Reason, rationality, clarity, self-restraint, discipline and calm had won out. Yay me.