Well I finally quit Twitter. As in I stopped going there everyday, all day everyday intermittently, little bursts of scrolling, the networked reading version of smoking. For the first couple of weeks, Twitter would send me emails saying that I was missing notifications, and I would dutifully (that is, addictively) click over and see that the notifications were bogus. Someone had retweeted someone else, etc. No one was actually talking to me or about me. These emails seem to have stopped. Now Twitter doesn’t even care that I’m not there. 

It’s a strange feeling. At first, I felt completely lost regarding the news. For some people, for normal people, this would have felt freeing, but I felt anxious. Something out there was happening, and I didn’t know the first thing about it. I didn’t even know the bad jokes about it. I didn’t know the memes. I hadn’t followed its digestion through the memeplex. I was losing touch with the references. Has my other internet usage increased to make up for the absence? For sure. I admit this with shame. The problem is that Instagram is, at its core, hopelessly boring. It’s mostly bad pictures that are advertisements. Even the people who think they are being sincere are posting advertisements, ads for their own vestigial sincerity. I gave up reading the Facebook wall a couple years ago (helpfully blocked by an app). Youtube is briefly distracting, but it is filled with so much algorithmic garbage that it’s like the broader streaming services: unless you already know what you intend to watch, you’re already lost. Plus Youtube is enough like sitting on the couch and watching an old-fashioned TV that it triggers my goofing-off alarm more reliably. It doesn’t have the academic veneer of reading. It doesn’t give the clean-burning freebase jolt of Twitter. 

So there’s nowhere to go now. I have nothing to do. There are about five sites I routinely check, even though it’s mostly muscle memory at this point. They no longer spark joy, as the saying goes. There are three individuals whose tweets I miss. I will not name them. About every other day I google their names, and the search results include their last five tweets, which I can read without visiting the forbidden site itself. This has proven to be enough, a methadone for my madness. I don’t want to see all their tweets all the time anyway. I just miss their voices, their quips, their amusing links to other bits in the web of distraction. It helps that there are only three people who I can remember to google. There are others who are totally lost to me, who I only knew via Twitter and their prose-forged personalities there. I miss them, but I am also happy to be free of them because their near-constant presence was agitating. This is especially fraught for writers who are so composed in one form and so un-composed on Twitter. We’re all just so annoying on Twitter, myself included. 

I wish I could say I quit because of Elon or some political reason, but the truth is that I quit because it was ruining my life, if just in a small way. When your kids joke that you’re addicted to Twitter; when you go to the bathroom in the middle of a dinner out mostly so you can look at Twitter; when you keep erecting barricades to prevent yourself from seeing so much Twitter, only to figure out ways to tunnel through regardless, it’s time to stop. It’s embarrassing. It’s a waste of time. It’s corrosive to your sense of proportion. If you could have moderated your interaction with all that decontextualized language, you would have done so long ago. Except for the occasional promotional link to a blog bost I had almost entirely stopped writing tweets. It was the reading that was always a problem, getting caught in the machine zone, which had been fun, could still be fun, but in smaller and smaller proportions. One went scrolling for the 5% of fun to be found, somewhere. When had it stopped being fun? I don’t want to depress everyone, myself included, by doing that math right now. 

Of course none of this has solved the main problem, that being the internet and how it is the perfect complement to my own will to distraction. I don’t really mean the useful parts of the internet. Google maps is great. Zillow is provocative. Uber is handy on a trip. Having a boarding pass on my phone? Also neat. I like texting everyone. Big thumbs up for texting. Sending pics of the dog doing something cute. All that. I do have a thing now where the sound of texts arriving throws me into a medium panic, but that’s an essaylet for another day. What I mean really is the news, the updates, the media. I would say social media but really it’s anything that’s remotely close to “media.” Anything that moves faster than an ebook. (My review of all ebooks: convenient, but hard to browse.) Wikipedia is addictive in its own way, but it’s like gorging on steel-cut oats. You’ll get full before you do any serious attentional damage. Instead it’s the trolling for stimulation under the guise of being informed, checking one’s internet traps for tasty bits of dirt. What would it be like not to check anything, not to feel the need to check on stuff, to use the internet purely as a tool and not as a mechanism to goof off, which really is mechanism for entertainment, which really is a mechanism for self-soothing, self-care, if you will, a soothing agent, a drug, an opiate for the masses. Hey, if that phrase hasn’t been taken yet, dibs!

I like the idea of Lent, even if I never give anything up. Lent is a reminder, an italicization of the last third of winter, the final blow, the bleakest turn, the unambiguously worst part of the year. You should give up something for Lent, because you have to give up something for Lent, because the root cellar is nearly exhausted along with one’s patience for shoveling snow. My affinity is mostly gestural here in the south, where today it was in the mid-80s. This is one of our false springs. 

For years I have joked that “this year for Lent I am simply giving up.” But perhaps I should make it more literal and give giving up a try. I should give up keeping up. Stop reading the news. Stop diverting myself. Stop checking in. Stop refreshing. Stop looking, stop searching. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. Thus spake Bono, so many moons ago. You probably didn’t realize that he was singing about my problems with the internet back then. 

I don’t know what I would do with this free time created by not checking on the internet. It would take me being a different person to accomplish it, but through this effort I maybe then could become yet another different person. And maybe I would like that person better? Or maybe I wouldn’t recognize that person at all.