Imagine waking up in a world where most of your friends, family, and colleagues reflexively check feeds before breakfast, where notification prompts feel like natural bodily sensations, and where silence from your phone can seem like absence. Now imagine deliberately opting out. That’s the reality for a surprising subset of people — people who choose not to use Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X, and other social networks that many of us treat as extensions of ourselves. What does it take to make that choice, and what does it tell us about the psyche of those who make it?