I Quit Twitter for Six Months and Never Want to Go Back.
The lessons it taught me.
This isn’t the story of a valiant gesture or even an attack against Twitter. This is the story of needing to step back, take a look at my life, and try to relax a little for once.
Facebook being much more popular in my small French country town, I signed up on Twitter at the age of 17 which could be considered rather late nowadays, only to follow famous people and fashion brands that I liked to keep up with. To have a better insight into their daily life. To feel connected to the cool American kids that I desperately wanted to imitate.
After 10 years on the social media platform, and countless of hours of scrolling every single day each chance I got to refresh and consume, I realized that something was wrong. I prioritised Twitter more than my job, actual conversations or — even worse — real information.
Now. I am a post-graduate journalist. I was trained to know how to pick reliable sources and differentiate truth from lies. But somehow, Twitter had become my go-to news app to the point where my New York Times, BBC, and CNN apps remained untouched on my phone for months. I had to understand that while some links on social media might take you to well-grounded articles, people mostly post links without doing any research on credibility.
In our day and age, especially in 2020 it seemed important to make sure my intake of information was as pure as possible. Of course, thinking and researching is always necessary but when reading from actual dependable media the amount of workload is less and I know how lazy human beings can be. So getting information from sources other than Twitter or Facebook is what I would advise to do.
So, in June 2020, after a decade of roaming the platform and countless memes absorbed I decided it was time to step away. Now please understand that it was not an easy decision, I mainly did it because I ended a relationship and did not want to see said person on my feed and be reminded of them everyday. But after a couple of months it seemed obvious that it was the right path to take for many reasons.
Here’s what I learned in my six months without Twitter.
#1 Social media is not real life
As silly and obvious as it sounds, it is a lesson I had to learn the hard way. It should only be absorbed for entertainment purposes because it can lead to toxicity in private relationships and misinformation throughout any number of topics very easily. People take on a different persona than their real life’s on social media, a persona that feels fake when you know who they are outside of it. They have every right to choose how they present themselves to the world, of course, but it is well to remind ourselves that their life isn’t better or more successful than ours only because they have thousands of followers more than us.
#2 I am not made for Twitter and Twitter is not made for me
I have always been a very private person and treating my social media as a public diary was not very appealing to me. Most of the followers I had back then seemed to think that is how Twitter needed to be used and I always felt like an outsider because I refused to detail every time I had a fight with a significant other. I found that what it is mostly used for is to get attention from others. And as an introverted person I would frankly rather not be at the centre of attention, ever, but turn to friends and family privately if I need advice.
#3 You will never truly escape it
Over the past six months I have heard things such as “How do you do it? What do you do with your day? Are you not bored?” But the thing is, friends will always send you funny memes that they found on Twitter. Instagram alone is filled with tweets that made their way there such as posts from the account shityoushouldcareabout. My intake of Twitter decreased greatly over the past year and I honestly do not miss it one bit, but I will never be rid of it completely.
Don’t get me wrong, I know how important social media can be to create your own image especially as a writer. It is a great way to communicate with people and exchange point of views but the cons outweigh the pros for me. I needed to think about my own mental health first. Now instead of opening Twitter first thing in the morning, I open my emails and switch on the TV to news channels, like a true functioning adult. Right? Maybe?
I was worried at first that I would start missing out, or that I would lose my voice. But so many other websites have been created to answer to your needs, Medium being one of them in terms of putting your opinions and words out into the world. Skype is a great way of communicating face to face with your loved ones, without having to decipher their words and what they mean over not-always-very-clear sentences. I find that Youtube has a great entertainment value, whether it be with beauty, cooking or even comedy videos, and I would argue that it gives Twitter a run for its money in terms of distraction.
I am not trying to convince you to delete Twitter. This is simply my own experience and what I got out of it. Who knows, maybe one day I will feel the need to go back and experience the Twitter world all over again. For now, I am absolutely fine looking from afar and experiencing social media in a different way. I have often heard that Twitter is “the worst website ever created” and while I don’t know if I completely agree, I certainly know that I am a better person for having deleted my account. I really like who I have become, Twitter-less me, and this is all I can ask for right now.
