Social media notifications are incredibly pathetic and unnecessary. There's no good reason to have any social media notifications on. If someone really wants you, they will text you or message you on a chat app. Maybe they'll even call. Facebook notifications -- event invites, friend requests, trending posts -- are nothing but a sad, transparent plea to get you to open the app. I was getting about two of these begs a day, and that was two too many.

You can definitely skip Instagram notifications, which usually take the form of "someone posted for the first time in a while" or "someone added to their story." Again, these are just pathetic and desperate reminders to open the app. Now, there are definitely people out there who try to have conversations with you on Instagram, but I find you can deal with these people on your own terms -- unless you are in high school, because Instagram is where apparently a lot of adolescent conversation (and bullying) happens these days. Excluding conversations, I was getting about one Instagram alert per day: better than Facebook but still totally unnecessary.

TikTok is the worst notification offender among the socials, which is fitting because it is one of the most facile social media networks out there. It's a Musical.ly-Vine mashup with an embarrassingly huge fan base (if its numbers are to be believed, it has 500 million active users). TikTok stars are lip-syncing/lifestreaming high school students, nurses on break and cops (seriously, there are a lot of cops on this thing!). You don't need notifications to stay on top of this network, but TikTok pushes me on average five to six alerts per day. TikTok was truly the worst part of this experiment: getting yanked out of a book on my Kindle to watch some muscle-bound idiot do push-ups to a Drake song. This happened to me multiple times per day, seemingly randomly. I began trying to put a positive spin to it. I'm a writer, and I tried to find some writerly advice here: Look, I thought, every time a TikTok alert about a rapping granny came in, it's OK to dumb it down.

NextDoor is by far the most hilarious notification sender. Once per day, I'd get a trending headline that would be something along the lines of "Found gerbil on Echo Park Ave!" or "Weird guy breaking into car????" The worst offender was the person who initiated an "emergency" network-wide push alert asking if anyone had seen his keys in the park. This went out to every phone with the NextDoor app. I received this alert -- loudly -- during an important meeting. Opinion: There should not be "emergency" push alerts on NextDoor at all. This option should not exist. For real emergencies, dial 911.

Twitter notifications can be useful in certain circumstances, such as turning on a good reporter during a major political event. The fact that Twitter lets you set notifications for specific people is a great thing -- one of the best thing about notifications, actually. And yet despite this one good thing, Twitter also engages in that same sniveling, shameless begging of you to open the app for non-reasons that all the other social media companies do: This person liked a post, these people have followed the same person. It's actually pretty pathetic how badly the social networks want you on them. If someone is that desperate for your attention, constantly pulling at your sleeve, begging you to look at them, they're usually someone you want to avoid, right?

In the spirit of going full Push Hell, I turned on Tweet alerts for the president of the United States' personal Twitter account. These alerts came in randomly but more often hot and heavy in the mornings, usually right before my alarm. Quite often, they woke me up. But only rarely did I get any real news from them. You probably don't need me to tell you that they are mostly just complaints, name-calling, shot-taking, score-keeping and lots of feel-good messages about America, with the occasional surreal typo-ridden missive. Regardless of your political affiliation, I highly suggest you do not turn this on.

Dating and the rest