Recently, Elon Musk bought Twitter and took over management, instituting a series of increasingly stupid decisions in what one could almost mistake as intentionally trying to ruin the company but what is likely in actuality ineptitude because he’s a brainless baby man with thinner skin than an onion. Since Twitter is almost assuredly going to crash and burn, it’s left me feeling unexpectedly nostalgic. I’ve spent more than a decade on the platform, and I only just deleted my personal account a couple of weeks ago, so I’ve been reflecting on the role that Twitter and social media in general has had on my life, and how it will in the future.

Twitter has long been my social media of choice. I liked the micro-blog aspect and how I could express ideas in short, conversational bursts. There was a freedom to the brevity. When I write a blog post, I feel like it’s much more formal. I worry about the structure, the length, the grammar, the formatting, etc. Because of that, I don’t feel inclined to post unless I have Something to Say. On Twitter, because it was so casual, I felt like I could fire off random observations or idle musings with minimal concern about formatting or structure. And sometimes others would reply with their own observations and we’d have interesting conversations! It was great, and there are a handful of folks whom I have enjoyed talking with over the years.

In spite of this, for a platform full to bursting with people, I often felt isolated and alone. I wanted to be part of a community, but I’m not a very extroverted person, and in large social situations, whether online or offline, I tend to listen rather than talk. The point of social media isn’t shouting into the void, it’s talking with others, but when I would try, I would often feel like I was intruding on others conversations or that I had nothing to contribute. There have been countless times I’ve spent a half an hour on a reply to someone only to delete it without posting because I didn’t feel like it mattered or said anything of value.

On top of that, I have a day job and a family, so I’ve never been one of those users that’s active all day and keeps up with all the scuttlebutt, which probably added to the isolated feeling. It felt like if I wanted to be seen or heard, I had to post constantly, an since I couldn’t, my few meager posts were lost in the flood of more active users. But I was on Twitter for the community and social aspect. I wasn’t interested in “follow-for-follow” — where someone follows you with the expectation that you follow them back — which meant I never had more than a couple hundred followers. Stupid though it may be, the whole thing felt constructed to tacitly communicate that no one was really listening to me, and if no one was listening to me, if no one cared what I had to say…why post at all?

It was actually this aspect of Twitter that killed my desire to write fiction for a long time. The writing community on Twitter was huge, and there were countless people at various stages of their writing journeys — writing for publications, sharing rejections, discussing the craft of writing, promoting each other’s books and stories — and I often felt like I was standing outside looking in. It felt like just breaking into the community alone was an impossible task, much less going on to break into the writing industry itself. Plus, the community discussions about writing eventually left me nearly incapacitated when I would try to write anything — don’t write like this, don’t start like that, dialog should be like this, write everyday, or at least keep a weekly goal, make writing part of your daily routine, if you want to be a writer you have to treat it like a job and if you already have a job you have to treat it like a second job.

Eventually, I felt like I had nothing to say, and that nobody would care if I did, so I stepped away.

It wasn’t a conscious decision. I didn’t dramatically cut all ties with social media or anything like that. It started as a bone-deep fatigue from the relentless onslaught of awful from the prior six years. When I did get the occasional urge to pop in and see what was going on, it’d take me about fifteen minutes before something incredibly depressing, frustrating, or petty would cross through my feed, and I’d just close the app again. I periodically tweeted idle nonsense, but they rarely, if ever, got any attention or interaction, so I stopped really caring to do that either. The less I checked in or posted, the less I wanted to. The near constant urge to be plugged into the feed gradually faded.

I did get back on and quietly enjoy the slow train wreck that has been MuskTwitter, but when I saw the news about Twitter’s cybersecurity team quitting, I decided it was time to close up shop. I posted links to where folks could find me, but very few saw or acknowledged that I was leaving. When the day came and I deactivated my account, I told my wife that it felt strange — after spending almost 13 years on the platform, I left it basically unnoticed and unremarked. I was a ghost who’d finally moved on from the house I’d spent years haunting.

I spent a large portion of my 20s thinking that gaining a following, gaining readers, gaining an audience would validate me, would make me feel like I belonged somewhere. The fact that I hadn’t done anything to earn that audience by 30 hurt. I had yet to finish a novel, had yet to have anything professionally published, and if I came and went without anyone noticing, did I even exist at all?

I’m not sure how I’ll use social media going forward. I don’t really use Facebook. I deleted my Instagram and my Twitter. I still have a Tumblr for now, but I’m not really sure it’s a platform for me.

Currently most of my online interaction is in Discord — I have a few private Discords for friends and family that I’m in, and I’m in a few community Discords for crafting and/or D&D stuff. I’m also trying out Mastodon again since a lot of Twitter folks jumped ship to that platform.

For Discord, I don’t feel as compelled to be a part of things. The community Discords I’m in are very large and much like Twitter, I can’t bring myself to keep up with everything all the time and post all day every day. They’re friendly communities, and I certainly don’t feel like I’m unwanted when I do post, but I also don’t really feel like I’m a part of the community. But that’s okay. It feels less competitive than Twitter. It feels like actual conversations and not like countless people vying for attention.

For Mastodon, just like I said back in 2017, I think the interface is largely a vast improvement over Twitter. I like how content warnings and captions/alt-text for images are built into the platform’s basic function. I like that when you favorite/like/heart/star/whatever a post, it doesn’t drop it into someone else’s feed; it just says “hey…good post.” And although it can be a point of frustration at times, I like that post text isn’t searchable, so you have to rely on @-tagging and hash tagging if you want folks to find your posts — meaning no more people searching for and drive-by trolling if you shit post about Zach Snyder’s Justice League.

With that said…when I use Mastodon, I find myself feeling some of the same feelings of being alone at a party and butting into on-going conversations, so I’m not sure how much I’ll use it in the future. Maybe if some friends join and we start interacting more, it might be more enjoyable, but for now, I find myself using it the same way that I used Twitter — passively, boosting and liking posts but not saying a whole lot myself. And maybe that’s okay.

It feels stupid to write this much about a social media platform, but I wonder if that is the cruel joke our society plays on us. Social media is a large and significant part of our lives. It has demonstrable real world impact, so it can’t be completely written off as vapid and narcissistic. On the other hand, while the platforms have been used for important things — keeping people informed about overlooked news stories, political organizing, and providing a means to communicate events on the ground as they happen (such as the Ferguson protests) — it’s also mostly not that. And in some ways, the fact that it’s both a place where people discuss incredibly heavy topics and shit post about trashy TV shows creates emotional whiplash that I’m not sure the human brain is equipped to handle.

Pulling away from Twitter was one of the best things I did for my mental health. It didn’t cure my depression or anxiety by any means, but it helped me gain perspective on the fleeting nature of much our online life, and social media in particular. It helped me appreciate that I have achieved a lot of things in my personal life that I can and should be proud of. I have a job in a field that I really enjoy that pays me good money. I have friends and family who care about me, and whom I care about.

It’s easy to get swept up in the inertia of online spaces, to feel like the discussions being had there are dire, imminent. And obviously there are important discussions about racism and other real world impacting things happening — these platforms are being used to great effect for political organization and activism. But so much of it is noise and drama that is inevitably dropped when the next source of drama arises. I think unplugging from Twitter — and most other online social media — has reminded me, as the kids say, to go outside and touch grass.