I’m trying to remember exactly what it was that made me realize I needed to truly get off Twitter for a while.
I think it was some spat between two fairly public figures that had turned into a giant Twitter Rat King. The spat didn’t need to become some giant, devouring Online Thing—it felt rather personal in nature, something that ordinarily would not have been anyone’s fucking business. But because the people involved are Extremely Online, it somehow became everyone’s business.
That felt weird, to me. It was upsetting on a few different levels. And I realized that this was happening a lot, and that maybe I should think less about things that are purely other people’s fucking business. A good way to start doing that would be to stop looking at Twitter for a while.
That felt weird, too, for a bit. The muscle memory I’ve acquired from… oh, god, more than an entire decade… of navigating to Twitter—first the website, then the Tweetdeck application—is, frankly, depressing.
And then there is, too, the psychological addiction. What did I do to procrastinate before Twitter? I suppose I read blogs, but those mostly don’t exist anymore. I’m certainly not going to just go read through the Washington Post. I needed something.
I didn’t love the Chris Zylka/Amy Brenneman storyline in S2 of The Leftovers as much as the other storylines, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t good or vital, because it was. Spoilers for The Leftovers through Season 2 I guess, but for those not in the know, Zylka and Brenneman play a mother and son; mom had joined a cult called the Guilty Remnant after 140 million people disappeared into thin air. Now, mom and son are trying to get people out of the cult. And they’re succeeding in getting them out, but failing to provide them with a different mental framework for dealing with a world in which 140 million people can simply vanish. They’re leaving the Guilty Remnant, but they’re killing themselves, or slipping away otherwise.
“They’re giving them something,” the son says. He and his mother are taking, not giving—and yes, they’re taking something toxic and bad, but there’s still the absence to reckon with.
So I guess now I’m addicted to Reddit. Not the bad parts—Reddit is like a large, sprawling city in that there are some well-trafficked areas that are fine, some genuinely kind of lovely little neighborhoods as well as some places you absolutely shouldn’t go, as a tourist, and you should at least try to speak a little of the language before going there (and always be on the lookout for alt-right shitheads).
I stick mostly to the r/relationships and r/AmITheAsshole subreddits, with a few other wholesome things like r/WhatsWrongWithYourDog thrown in. I’m less of a fucking moron than I used to be, and I think I may have actually helped a few people with some advice drawn from deep wells of bad experience.
You wouldn’t think that Reddit would ultimately be a better social media experience than Twitter, but even though Reddit is just as anonymous as Twitter, if not more, the goal with these subreddits is to form a community, one much more similar to those you find in the physical world. It’s not so much about simply stuffing as many miniature shit takes into your eyes as you can find. There’s less drive-by-shittery, and it’s easier to ignore pile-ons, which also tend to be more constructive—if you’re in the right community.
Plus, y’know, nature abhors a vacuum. What else am I supposed to do to waste time?