So I haven’t posted a tweet in nine months. How am I doing? I’m still in recovery. Over the previous 10 years, I had written 180,000 tweets. Yes, I said 180,000. That’s 18,000 a year, 1,500 a month.
I was putting out an average of 50 tweets a day — while holding down a full-time job editing a magazine, with two firm writing deadlines every week, and raising three children with a wife who works full-time.
How was that even possible? Well, I’ve always written fast. And for much of my life, I’ve felt like a frustrated would-be stand-up comic. A tweet is basically a one-liner, so if you’re a compulsive quipster who never quite got up the nerve to stand in front of a brick wall doing bits, it’s the outlet you always dreamed of. Twitter worked well for me in many ways. Over the course of this decade, my follower count rose from near zero to 141,000 people. The tweets helped garner audience for my writing and for articles in Commentary, the magazine I edit.
I developed surprisingly meaningful relationships with writers I long respected but had never met personally. I found young authors who featured their own work through Twitter links and became valuable contributors to Commentary.
And it was a burnisher of my ego. I heard from people on an almost daily basis that they loved my feed. People would ask me privately to tweet out their links because my follower count was so high. And it is a writer’s medium, and the 140-character restriction (now 280) requires skill to master. Mastering any skill is a pleasurable achievement, and master Twitter I did.
Still, 50 a day. That’s crazy. And a sign of how crazy Twitter can make a certain kind of person. The only substance besides caloric food to which I have ever been addicted is tobacco, and I quit smoking 33 years ago. But I think it’s fair to say that over the past decade, in my 50s, I developed a Twitter addiction.
When I tweeted with my emotions engaged, especially when I responded to something out of anger, I could feel the dopamine rush. The tweet would resolve the emotion and bring me momentary and blessed relief. So, too, did the Twitter fights, which are seductive for a combative person confident not only in his own views but in his quick-wittedness.
Along with the highs came the lows. I once said “shut up and sing” in response to a tweet by a celebrated entertainer of color who had said something I didn’t like about the war between Israel and Gaza. His wife then accused me of being a racist — and suddenly I had thousands of people raging at me.
The very fact that I tweeted those words offers a sense of what Twitter can do to compulsive users — it was a childish and obnoxious riposte, and, I am ashamed to say, it was something I wrote when I was 53 years old. And the thing is, it took me 10 seconds to tweet it and days to live it down.
That’s the thing about Twitter; the (I still can’t quite believe this) 50 tweets a day don’t really matter. It’s the 3,401st tweet, the one that goes viral, that comes to define you — and its virality is usually not something that makes you proud.
I decided to quit Twitter this year after tweeting a joke about neutron-bombing a journalism school. It turned out only people my age or older got the reference to a 35-year-old controversy that itself gave birth to thousands of mordant jokes at the time — because, see, the neutron bomb was designed to kill people but leave buildings standing.
I was accused of advocating mass murder. Once again, something I did as part of a compulsive behavior pattern — time between thought and tweet: 30 seconds — ended up as a ludicrous controversy that made me sorry I’d ever begun tweeting. So I decided to stop. Full stop.
Nine months later, I still read Twitter — its utility as a news source is unparalleled — but I don’t participate in it at all. And yes, I miss it. I miss presenting my work to readers. I miss presenting my magazine’s work to readers. I miss getting off the one-liners that amuse me and seemed to amuse others.
If I could find a way to participate simply by tweeting out articles and gnomish would-be witticisms, I would. But I can’t see how I would be able to avoid sinking back into the mire.
There’s a reason Twitter has defined this decade’s communications. It’s the most interactive medium the world has ever known, and it’s great fun.
But Twitter has an oversoul now, and the oversoul is poisonous. It rewards bad rhetorical behavior, it privileges outrage of any sort over reason of all sorts, and it encourages us to misunderstand each other. It’s the devil on our shoulder.
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