Thank goodness we can all leave Twitter now
we just needed a convenient reason
I started a new comedy-variety show in Los Angeles called ThunderPunch! Our first one is May 5, 2022, 8pm at Skiptown Playhouse, with stand-up, improv, and magic. Grab a ticket!
I don’t really know many people that positively interact with Twitter these days. Simple metric: you log on to Twitter, you spend some time, you log off. When you leave the website, do you feel better?
Most of us would say “no”.
So the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk is a perfect time to let go of the site. It’s had its run. I used to defend it by saying “Hey sure it has a lot of toxicity but it also birthed the Arab Spring” but it turned out that those claims were a little overblown. And I think for me, the negatives now outweigh the positives:
PRO: Twitter provides fun jokes sometimes
PRO: Twitter is a good place to check on instant reactions to things like the Will Smith slap1
CON: It’s an engine for generating outrage that you can’t do anything about
CON: It saps empathy and compassion digitally but doesn’t spur you to actual action
CON: It radicalizes people’s opinions and generally removes nuance, or at least makes it out of fashion to express nuance in the public space
CON: The signal-to-noise ratio has gotten worse in the last 5 years, requiring you to attentively garden your feed which becomes almost a job in and of itself
And hot off the presses…. CON: Adding to Twitter’s value now adds to Elon Musk’s net worth
So yeah this seems like a good time to let the straw break the camel’s back. I think a lot of us were already feeling some ambivalence to being on Twitter so this is as good a time as any to finally let it go. It hasn’t been that fun for a while.
Let it go.
Recommended Book: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. The subtitle of this book is “Time Management for Mortals” but it’s really not about time management, it’s about our relationship to time. This is more like a philosophy book (with a lot of stoicism mixed in) disguised as a productivity book. I was on board with his perspectives on time from the very beginning so the middle of the book dragged a bit for me (I was like, “okay I agree I agree but now what”) but I think if you are less pre-aligned to Burkeman’s way of thinking the first half of the book could persuade you. Even if you don’t agree with everything it’s worth a read.
This is why I’m keeping my account instead of deactivating it even I won’t really be posting anymore. I’m archiving my tweets, leaving one snarky pinned tweet, and deleting the rest. I want to keep my account so I can login whenever some awful sports fanbase loses so I can rejoice in schadenfreude and Twitter often makes you login at weird times just to search and read.