Why I Removed the Substack App From My Phone (And Why You Should Too)

Also known as: one easy trick to increase the depth of your thinking.

I've had my fill of social media at this point. Enough is enough. We've really hit the point of diminishing returns now.

Does anyone remember that Facebook used to be just another website? Mark Zuckerberg used to be just one arrogant millennial college dropout with a social media website. (He didn’t invent the concept, he just figured out how to monetize it more effectively than anyone else.)

And it used to be just one of many websites that we bloggers used to share our articles and try to drum up “traffic” and find new readers for them. And there were other sites that often provided many more readers at first!

Oh, God, I feel like such an old man here, talking about the "ancient internet," a veritable Eden compared to the radioactive sewage spewing across our pockets at every hour of the day in this strange year of our Lord, 2025.

I removed the Facebook app from my phone perhaps a decade ago. I stopped tweeting in February 2023, not long after Elon Musk made the mistake of buying it. And then I pivoted to Substack Notes instead, justifying the time and attention I spent on Notes as "working:" I figured that more short notes sounding off on whatever, or sharing a book excerpt or a photo of “Twin Peaks” would result in more readers.

And I will not deny that it’s helped: Notes is effective at drawing in new readers.

But does the time put into it justify the new readers acquired?

At this point, for me, personally, I've decided that it doesn't.

I'm still going to post on Notes and do short little things there, but now it's only going to be from my laptop, during my usual workday run of business. Writing a Substack note is just going to be akin to writing a work email or editing an article. It's not going to be something to do while lying in bed, while trying to focus on our “Twin Peaks” binge, or while I should be focusing on reading The Autobiography of Mark Twain or Alan Moore's Jerusalem, my two primary literary preoccupations at the moment.

That's what this is really about.

Over the last few months, I've been rediscovering what it means to be a writer. I've returned to fiction, and I've started pushing myself to write out deeper essays regularly, rather than just when something strikes me. I've pushed myself to try and make it a more ingrained habit than it had been previously.

And as I've tried to both write more deeply and read more deeply, too, there's always that phone tempting me. Now, without social media and an infinite scroll of "content" right at my fingertips, I feel less of a need to pick up the phone. There are emails and texts; if I want to hop on and see CNN or ask a ChatGPT question, then I can, but no longer is there the mystery of what might await behind that little red notification on the app, or what I might find to amuse myself instead of focusing on what I'm actually doing with greater depth.

There seem to be multiple factors here informing this decision. And these threads may be familiar to our regular readers:

1. As I wrote about yesterday, I've run out of gas with trying to humor anonymous writers or take anything they say seriously. Now, in the age of AI, we can assume that such “writers” are actually using ChatGPT rather than writing themselves, because there is no consequence for being caught doing so.

2. Communication is just so inherently unsatisfying and incomplete. Attempting to have some meaningful discussion with someone about weighty topics, like the nature of God or the authoritarian reality of the current administration, is impossible. I give up. It just can't be done. For every one person I connect with through social media and have a meaningful exchange with, there are 19 failed attempts so frustrating as to not make the one good conversation worth the effort.

3. There really are not that many great writers on Substack. I am currently subscribed to nearly 1000 Substacks. I did that over the years to try and read widely, to explore perspectives apart from mine, to learn new things. And again, the ratio of wheat to chaff is about 5%, perhaps 10-15% if I'm generous. But I suppose I really shouldn't be so kind and should just be honest. In my work as an editor, considering book submissions at Liberty Island from 2015-2021 and now here at GOTD from 2021-2025, the ratio of submissions that are so good that I would seriously consider recommending them for publication is in about that same range.

So now, when I flip through the Substack app, it's largely posts that don't grab my attention enough to click on them, and Notes from anonymous people spouting off the telltale signs of AI writing: "It's not this, it's that! It's not this, it's that!" And could you please litter your article with more emojis and bullet points? Because human writers totally write articles like that.

Going back to when I was first making a career "generating traffic" through sharing blog articles on Facebook, we as authors and freelance writers have felt this perpetual tug between writing more deep, substantive material that we can sell in books or articles, vs spending more time "marketing ourselves" and "promoting our work on social media."

I would submit that for most of us, this balance has long been out of whack. We've put in too much time doing promotions that have not paid off in terms of time spent, and not enough time in simply creating more sellable material.

So I'm going to correct this in my own writing routine with a simple tweak: just removing the Substack app from my phone. It's that easy.

Yes, we as authors still need to engage with social media platforms to varying degrees; this isn't a black/white, all/nothing point here. But at this point, let's understand it as a task akin to checking emails and paying bills. We put in a little bit here and there when it's appropriate and necessary, but otherwise, we choose to pull back to focus our attention on deeper matters.

Finally, one last point here, too, about the removal of social media apps: We are living in a country that is building concentration camps in the Florida swamps and selling merchandise that openly jokes about people inside being eaten by alligators. Yet what is the discourse today on these precious, all-important social-media websites? Some Republican supermodel with 34D breasts in a controversial jeans commercial—a commercial that was, by the way, intentionally designed to emotionally manipulate people into talking about it. And they are.

It is not healthy for us to constantly be reminded that our commander-in-chief is a sexual predator who is now using the federal government to cover up his deep involvement with the 21st century's most notorious child sex trafficker.

Every time you pull up your phone and see "Epstein, Epstein, Epstein" over and over again, what it's really saying is “CHILD RAPE CHILD RAPE SUICIDE SUICIDE!” That's what's hitting your mind and soul each time you scroll past yet another meme or "hot take" or whatever bit of media is endlessly rehashing the popular narrative of the day.

I've had enough. I've had enough of people I don't know talking about things that I don't care about, or that I simply cannot hear any more about. So it's time to shut off the sewer pipe, and I invite others to join me.

Remove Substack and any other social media apps from your phone and limit your use of them to intentional time at a laptop, in which it is understood as just a normal part of the daily working writer's routine.

And then, what can you do with all that extra energy and focus you have all of a sudden?

This Autobiography of Mark Twain has more than 700 pages, and it's still just the first of three volumes of similar size. The Alan Moore novel I've been working through is more than 1,200 pages, and each one is like a stroll through the park where you're taking your time wandering through to absorb all the beauty.

That's what I'm needing at this point. That's what I think so much of us are needing as we confront a toxic media-technology complex and the fascist political party which rode it into power. We need to think deeply—to reach back further into great history and transformative literature.

And that means telling social media to shut the fuck up and get back into the browser, where it belongs.

It’s just another website.

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