After the school shooting news yesterday, I decided, as a transwoman, that I should just stay off Twitter for a week or two and avoid the worst of the discourse. I already have a bad habit of diving in to any transphobic thread I see quote tweeted on my feed, and I felt like the things I would see would be unbearable this time.

Almost immediately after I took steps to quit, like removing the shortcut, signing out, and blocking it on my desktop browser, I realized how addicted I truly was. I keep opening the site that took the spot on the shortcut and opening up the blocked page. It feels like a "default action" that happens after I check my phone (already a muscle memory-type habit every time I have a free couple of seconds) and see that I have no other notifications I need to address. Once I realize how bad this had gotten, I felt even more sure that I need at least a long break.

I first started really "getting into" Twitter around the start of the pandemic, when I followed a bunch of people I found interesting (mostly leftist shitposter types) and started habitually checking my feed. It was an extremely miserable, lonely, frustrated time in my life. Nowadays I'm happy and fulfilled, with active social and love lives, many things to see and do, the largest and best "offline" world that I've ever had. Why had my Twitter usage not declined?

I think the most honest answer is that I was addicted to the feeling of righteous indignation that Twitter steadily provided. My feed was an endless barrage of topics, from AI to China to capitalism to transphobia, where I would be left thinking "almost everyone besides me is an idiot and/or evil". I wouldn't say it was a pleasant feeling... more upsetting and exhausting than anything, and sometimes very despair-inducing. But it was an addictive feeling, stimulating, ego-feeding, a rush...

It was also a bridge for communication, and I think this is the second biggest reason I clung to it. A good number of my friends, including my boyfriend, are also "terminally online". It made me happy to "fluently speak" this esoteric twitter language of many memes and many layers of irony and many targets of shared revulsion. It feels very bonding, to share in something so small and obscure. I also felt happy that if more "normie" friends asked me about some "discourse" topic, I'd be informed enough to share some context, some history, and how personally I felt about it.

And I think that's really the only reason that remains compelling to me... I want to be informed. I want to have takes that aren't just surface level regurgitation, but nuanced, historically-founded takes that represent digging deep into many perspectives. Not just for my ego to feel smart and cultured and whatever, but because I feel like it's my duty as a member of society to arrive at the takes that are most empathetic, have the most perspective, reflect my fundamental values the most. When the shit hits the fan, I want to know where I'm showing up and which side I'm standing on. Twitter spurred me to get up to speed on way more topics than I would have otherwise.

But to be informed and a good person and such, do I really have to spend hours a day scrolling through tweets, maybe idly chuckling a few times, but mostly just subjecting myself to the worst opinions beyond my imagination? Probably not! So what should I do instead? Stick to Hexbear, where things move a bit slower and no one is advocating for my death? Check out some leftist news sites?

Sorry for a long post, but I thought probably some folks on here could relate to this and I'd be curious what other people have done.