Stepping Away From the Firehose

My experience stepping away from Twitter.

By Immo Greco

We’ve all had mornings when we’ve thought about the night before and wondered where the time went. We have a concrete memory in our head from sometime during the night, but gaps between then and our current miserable location in our bed. It's a terrible feeling. You know time has passed, but not what happened in those huge cavities of your memory. Sure, you may have had a good time, but you don’t remember any of it. 

I had a morning like that in December. I wasn’t hungover or anything. I just realized that I was 21 and had used Twitter for a couple of hours a day almost every day since I was 14. Time had passed—at least three presidential elections—but I could barely remember a tweet from memory. It was as if I had gone to the store for a really long time but had not come back with anything.

So I deleted Twitter. I changed my password to an un-memorizable string of random characters and numbers and I haven’t logged on since.

It's a decision I’m happy I made. Stepping away from the infinite firehose of global news feels good. Really good. It feels like I’ve gotten pieces of my life back. I find myself having more of those days that I’ve had at summer camp or on camping trips: immersed in what’s in front of me. It's nice to be relatively uninformed, unaware of the failures of the Texas vaccination strategy or the lack of representation in the latest remake of the Marvel movie. All of those issues matter, but I just can’t think about them every single moment of my life. I have a life I’d like to live, and the best way for me to live it is to have some choice and control over what I give my attention to.

But it also made me think about other portions of my life, where I hand over my attention, hand over fist, for some dopamine crumbs, as if I am a kid in elementary school, trading away all of my lunch for the quick rush of someone else’s candy bar. Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and LinkedIn—all of the apps except Twitter—still devour my attention. Sometimes I fear that the other apps simply picked up whatever attention was left over after Twitter, like picking up smoking to quit a caffeine addiction.

I really wish it could be another way. I genuinely enjoy using social media. I have a great relationship with Reddit, where I pop over to read career advice threads and discussions about a favorite podcast. I get what I need and I go. But that isn’t the case with Instagram, Snapchat, or Facebook. I really can’t fight them. No matter how much I prep, set boundaries, or try to make myself aware of my usage, my attention and time goes in a hole, as if by a natural law like gravity, and never returns. 

Again, it should be another way. I find great value in Instagram’s ability to let me stay in touch with old friends and peep over the shoulder of interesting strangers. But I want to be human, with thoughts generated from my own head or conversations with real people, not algorithms or an infinite timeline. I want a life that is organic and in balance. I can’t live with the weight of the world sitting a millimeter above my head, pulsing information as if by IV, straight into my brain. 

So, the best option seems to be to log off. Twitter and Instagram know where I live, what I want to buy, and when I want to do so. I can’t beat a telescope into my mind that can see the movements of my soul and the most hidden desires I have. My brain, already grey pudding, can’t compete with that. With Twitter, I had to close the door and leave the house. I’ll have to slowly do the same with Instagram and Facebook. One by one I’ll close them and leave the neighborhood. After all, there’s other places to live.