Wetherspoons stole my thunder last week when the pub chain suddenly announced it was deleting its entire presence from social media.

What people didn’t know was that I’d decided to do it first. At the beginning of the week, exasperated for the umpteenth time by the negative and argumentative nature of social media, I decided I was throwing the towel in. I’d had enough.

I wasn’t going to make a big announcement - people endlessly make a song and dance about quitting, often subsequently covered by media outlets, before tip-toeing back in a few weeks or so later as if they’re sneaking home after staying out an hour late and hoping the parents won’t notice.

No, I’ll just go quiet, I thought. No explanation, nothing. Twitter can speculate all by itself, I’ll just leave it all unexplained and that’ll be my cyber gravestone: “Angela Haggerty. Mysteriously disappeared.”

That was until a couple of days passed and nobody had noticed my departure. I could have been dead and not a single person twigged. So back I trundled, quietly glad that I hadn’t stamped my feet and made a big announcement about it before slamming the digital door behind me.

And then, lo and behold, a couple of days later Wetherspoons turned up and grabbed all the headlines. If stealing people’s thoughts was actionable I’d have had them hauled into court quicker than they could press delete.

It turns out that the pub chain has opted to pull the plug on its head office online channels and its 900 pubs across the country will quit theirs, too (‘online channels’ just means ‘Twitter account’ or ‘Facebook page’ to us mere mortals). It just isn’t worth it anymore, says Wetherspoons, citing the abuse of MPs as one example of everything it finds unacceptable about social media.

Now, the cynical among you might speculate that this is all just some clever PR dressing up a cost-cutting exercise (hang your heads in shame), but let’s give Wetherspoons the benefit of doubt and believe that this action was borne out of genuine concern and disgust at the downward spiral of social media.

In fairness, Wetherspoons isn’t the only business to take action recently. After details of the Cambridge Analytica data-grabbing scandal emerged, billionaire tech innovator and founder of Tesla and Space X, Elon Musk, had the two companies' Facebook pages taken down from the site in protest.

Fears about invasions of privacy didn’t stop with businesses; I’ve never seen so much chat from my Facebook friends and Twitter followers about quitting. Indeed, a few people told me they’d already ditched it within the last year or so, having become sick of the inevitable obsessive behaviour that often accompanies social media use. Having social media apps on our smartphones breeds a compulsive use – how often do you find yourself staring at Facebook on your screen while barely remembering any conscious decision to open the app? It becomes routine, thoughtless, subconscious.

For most of us, however, we’re somewhere in between at the moment. If you’re anything like me, you’re feeling beyond sick of it right now. I’m worried about all the information I’ve blindly handed over to Facebook over the years and scolding myself for having been so stupid; I’m tired of the constant sense of battle over on Twitter and the seemingly endless stream of insults and abuse that people never seem to get bored of dishing out; I’m concerned that it’s sapping my attention span and having a negative effect on my own sense of self-worth – does constant vigilance over other people’s lives inevitably tap into our deep-seated insecurities and torture us over our own weaknesses?

These are all reasons enough to quit, you’d think, but the addictive nature of it all keeps pulling me back. When something funny happens on a Glasgow bus, I know there’s a bunch of my followers on Twitter who would crack up over it, and I really want to tell them. On Facebook a number of years ago, I made contact with a long-lost cousin in Canada who I’d always wondered about since I was a child. As a result, she came over to Scotland with her partner and children to celebrate Christmas and New Year with the family she had never been able to find. Facebook is the easiest way for us to stay in touch, and for me to keep contact with relatives in other parts of the world. I worry that I’d lose more than I’d gain by quitting.

So, unlike Wetherspoons and Tesla, I’m stuck in digital limbo. Unfortunately, leaving social media wouldn’t have the added benefit of saving me a fortune, and if everyone else is still there then I fear quitting would put me at an ultimate disadvantage.

So, you beat me, Wetherspoons, but I warn you: if you try sneaking in again by the back door, I’ll make sure you never hear the end of it.