If you were gearing up for this week’s midterm election in the United States and were solely relying on Twitter to manage your expectations, you were likely either in a panic about a) a massive tsunami of 2020 election conspiracy theorists sweeping every single state and county and soon establishing a theocracy or b) a massive case of voter fraud in every single part of the country, perpetuated by shadowy transgender super-soldiers or whatever.
I don’t think these two different panics are equivalent. Panics are usually not a good idea, but the latter is more corrosive to our republic than the former.
However, what’s important is that the former, more realistic scenario turned out to be as wrong as the conspiracist fever dream. While Twitter is good at perpetuating and multiplying doomerism AND utter delusion, it is not a good political barometer.
Why?
Because Twitter is not real life.
“But Natalia,” you’re going to say. “People have burned down their careers on Twitter. How is that not the very definition of real life?”
No, that’s just the phenomenon of a delusion breaking loose. Twitter encourages bullying, pile-ons, collective rage, and other ultimately toxic behaviors, and it makes sense that these behaviors wind up having real-life consequences.
What’s frequently illusory is the value of our rage and the character of the people we get mad at. That’s why, in recent years, I’ve mended fences with some local people I used to fight with pointlessly on Twitter after finding out from others that they’re good, normal, and safe to hang around with.
An illusion contained in just a few characters had convinced me these people were the devil. Maybe we disagreed on some things, but they were nothing like the caricature created by mean tweets and claustrophobic, Salem witch trial-like group chats.
I owe a lot to Twitter. It helped my writing career. It helped me get bylines in publications I love. It connected me to amazing people I now consider good friends. It allowed me to have a lot of fun! It also helped me build this newsletter. However, I have also paid for that level of exposure with stress, wasting my time on superficial connections, allowing myself to get roped into shitty behavior and thus compromising my values, and even having to deal with credible threats.
So while I’m not saying that I want Twitter to get nuked, I also have to be realistic about it.
We’re always better off using Twitter as a tool, knowing its limitations, and sticking to a narrow, manageable range of subjects we choose to engage with. Otherwise, we risk taking what Twitter algorithms determine to be entertaining as too important.
I believe that reality is subjective. Physics will mostly agree with me. For more on that, you can read this essay.
But physics aside, think about this: There are many things you probably can’t change right now, but you can change how you manage your reactions to them, and exhausting yourself through Twitter’s endless outrage cycle is a poor way to exercise your agency.
Maybe, in the future, Twitter will change. Or maybe it will just go away, like MySpace.
Either way, I hope you can use this midterm election to consider that social media doomerism is not healthy, and that while being realistic about problems — both on the personal and the macro level — is very important, you can’t do much about those problems if you’re constantly stressed out.
Stress is not good for you. You don’t owe anybody stress. It’s OK to take breaks and to be happy. You can’t take care of anyone if you don’t take care of yourself first.
Remember that next time you’re glued to Twitter. If you get glued to it at all (I am still learning how to better manage my time on there — and that’s OK!).
Take care of yourselves and take care of each other.
Here, take a cue from Flaming June by Frederic Leighton, a masterpiece that was nearly lost (talk about shifting values — the Tate wouldn’t buy it in the 1960s, and its frame was once considered more valuable than the actual painting, lol):
And don’t forget that you can give a gift subscription to this useful (in my biased opinion) newsletter:
Nat, quit stealing my tweets for your article titles!
~~Blocked on Twitter???