On Thursday morning, I thought a lot about Queen Elizabeth.
On Thursday afternoon, I didn't think much about her at all.
What was the difference? I deleted my Twitter account.
Temporarily.
Like a lot of people in my business, I'm addicted to Twitter.1 I don't make apologies for this: I'm a freelance writer. Living in Kansas. I think I'm a decent enough writer to be a good value for my various editors, and I've done this long enough I know a few people, but social media is a good chunk of the professional networking I do. It has to be.
Still, Twitter is a lot, isn't it?
I don't use the word "addicted" lightly. There are times when I find myself in a Twitter spiral, refreshing constantly to see what the latest news or one-liner is. This is even though I've blocked the trending topics and I use the "latest tweets" timeline instead of the default algorithm. I freely block and mute annoying people. I mute a lot of keywords I find annoying. (The word "Kanye" hasn't appeared in my feed for three years. "Game of Thrones" is muted, too.) I try to control my experience on social media instead of letting it control me, but I'm not always successful.
So when I find myself in that spiral, I delete my account.
Technically, this is pretty easy to do. Just go into the settings, click a button, enter your password, and you're out. This makes it impossible to post to Twitter, of course, and very difficult -- but not impossible -- to see what's going on there.
And it's kind of amazing the difference it makes.
Twitter is built to demand our attention, of course, but it's easier on a Queen Elizabeth-type day to flood your attention with something you don't really care about all that much. And I'll be honest: I don't care about the British Royals all that much. But for a day, at least, it's just about all that anybody -- or at least the media-type “anybodies” who make up a large part of my network -- was talking about online. Because all my online friends and acquaintances were thinking about Queen Elizabeth, *I* was thinking about Queen Elizabeth.
I didn't want to.
Maybe I could've muted a few keywords. But the discussion seemed more all-encompassing and pervasive than that. Plus, it was a Thursday. Account deleted.
Here's what happens when I delete my account: I get my attention back. Like, immediately. I can read books and long-form magazine articles without flipping back to Twitter every three minutes. I don't find myself suddenly obsessed about a random topic. And I don't find myself suddenly enraged all that often, either.
It's tempting to leave it deleted entirely, honestly.
But there's the work. And I do enjoy the give-and-take. Some of the people I follow online are even -- dare I say it? -- wise. In a real sense, I might find myself feeling lonelier without Twitter. (Should I admit that? I have IRL friends too.) That surely was the case during the first year of the pandemic.
A break is good, however. So once every week or two, I shut down my account for a day or two. Delete it entirely. Twitter wants you to stick around, so the site makes it real easy to re-activate when you're ready. And that gives me the opportunity to feel a little more human, and a little less addicted.
It's a form of détente, in other words -- a way of accepting Twitter's existence and necessity in my work without surrendering entirely to it. Hopefully, peaceful coexistence is possible.
I permanently deleted Facebook years ago. Don’t miss it. A network that seems to mainly exist to make me hate my high school and college classmates is worthless.