It should make me happy, is the problem. I know it should. For a little while, it actually did; I was on Bluesky and posting to my heart’s content, and I was following interesting people and reading and participating in interesting chats. It felt like the old days, back when Elon Musk was nothing but an eccentric billionaire, and Twitter was ours.
I was so excited about it, both because I’d missed this era of the internet, and because I’d started assuming that we were going to lose it for good. Twitter got worse and worse and worse but, for a long time, people just refused to budge, or just quietly went offline. That we have seemingly now managed to beat Musk and move to a kinder, safer and more fun place should be cause for celebration.
Why, then, do I have this uneasiness about it slowly but surely building in my chest? It’s what I’ve been asking myself over the past week or so, and I’m afraid I don’t love the answer. The truth is: I think a part of me had maybe, perhaps, possibly been looking forward to the end of social media as we knew it.
For years, long before anyone had started worrying about it, I’d fretted and obsessed about what a post-Twitter world would look like. How would politics and political journalism even work? Where would we go for breaking news? How would memes develop? Who would get famous instead?
Twitter had managed to embed itself so deeply into so many of us, and so many of our institutions. Why was no one else panicking about what would happen if it were to disappear, either suddenly or bit by bit?
Back then I assumed that this was because of my anxious nature, and my deep attachment to the platform. Looking back, I now wonder if part of my fixation was actually wishful thinking. What would a world without Twitter look like? Clearly, on some level, I desperately wanted to find out.
I first joined the site in 2010, at the age of 18. I am now 32. I have spent my entire adult life tweeting away. If I were to guess, I would say that the longest stretch I went for without tweeting was probably 72 hours, at most. In short: I have never known any other life. This is why I was so distraught when Elon Musk bought the platform. As I wrote in this newspaper at the time, it felt like having an orc coming inside your house and deciding it was his. It was awful.
Still, bit by bit, I ended up making my peace with it. I posted less and less, and so did the people I followed, meaning that I had less and less reason to scroll down my timeline. I started regaining some brain space, and some attention span. I watched more movies without glancing at my screens every 10 minutes, and I read more books.
I was less angry and anxious, and I was beginning to lose this unseemly urge I had, of seeing every real-life event through the lens of “would this make a funny tweet?”. I was beginning to truly live, in the real world. In a way, I was learning to truly grow up as well; deal with my problems by myself instead of endlessly whingeing online, and cultivating fewer, deeper friendships.
Of course, this has now ended. I’m back to posting about the daily minutiae of my life online, and engaging with people doing the same thing. I have no willpower when it comes to the internet; if someone gives me an opportunity to be online more, I will take it. If I’m honest, I would also say that I am, for the most part, having fun. It’s good to be back.
I just worry that I’m regressing, really. Living on social media means living in a bubble, where nothing is ever truly real unless it can get posted about. It also means never being truly alone, for better or worse. As long as I have a phone in my pocket, I can decide to talk to hundreds and thousands of strangers, instead of engaging with my own thoughts.
Is that really healthy? Again, I’ve never known anything else, so I would be the wrong person to ask. All I can say is that I feel like one of the Darling children if they’d decided to stay with Peter Pan in Neverland after all. It may seem like an attractive proposition but, deep down, we can all tell that it won’t end well.
Everyone must grow up eventually, and being this online really has begun to feel like I am voluntarily stunting my own growth, emotionally if not intellectually. I spent years worrying that somehow, for some reason, someone would shut Twitter down, but that wasn’t really what I was doing, was it? What I wanted was for someone to take the cursed amulet away from me, because I just can’t do it myself.
