The sweet release of deactivation
I did it! I quit Twitter.
Despite what the timing would suggest, my decision is not (entirely) about Elon Musk’s recent purchase of the platform and the troubling, chaotic week that followed. I’m not going to go into what he’s done here, because if you’re at all interested you already know. For me, Musk’s acquisition and subsequent (ongoing!) actions were clarifying but not determinative. I strongly suspect I would have arrived here pretty soon, he just pushed me to move a little quicker.
Before it happened, I didn’t expect Musk’s purchase to matter to me one way or another. A mere three weeks ago, when (I think?) the sale to Musk looked likely, I wrote a reasoned justification for upping my engagement with Twitter, and I didn’t mention him once. I was never on Twitter because of the platform’s unimpeachable ethics, and I still don’t think anything he’s doing or promising to do would have changed my personal experience of the platform. I did not care about his plans, until I did. I was shocked at how much I cared, at how I couldn’t (can’t!) get enough Twitter news, at how I started logging on and scrolling with a feverishness I hadn’t felt in years. At how desperate I was for people to be leaving, so that I could have permission to leave too. What follows is my attempt at understanding why.
Twitter is not fun
I still agree with everything with I wrote three weeks ago, in theory. I still think it was a good idea to try to engage a little more in the name of self and book promotion, and I think more aggressively sharing my newsletter was a good way to try it. I don’t take lightly that more than 6,000 people cared enough about my work and my perspective to follow me, even if it pales in comparison to the audiences some writers have there. It was, and is, scary to walk away from those potential readers when my livelihood depends on my public voice. But when I actually started tweeting again, it felt bad.
As a millennial who really was once on these sites only to talk to her friends, I believe that if there’s any secret to social media success, it’s that you MUST be have fun doing it. Real, genuine fun. If you aren’t, it will show in your content and turn people off. It will also make your real life worse, because you’ll be devoting some portion of it to creating an image (literal or symbolic) that you don’t identify with or enjoy inhabiting. I had fun on Twitter for a long time. Then I stopped having fun, so I stopped posting. It became clear after just three weeks of trying again that the fun wasn’t coming back, especially not in the current and future Twitter environment.
Twitter is not useful
Not only did being back on Twitter feel bad, but it clearly wasn’t making a difference in how many people read or subscribed to my newsletter. Three weeks and two issues is arguably not enough time to know that, of course. If I had stuck around, I would have almost certainly accreted a subscriber from Twitter here and there, once in a while. But I mysteriously accrete subscribers without being on Twitter too. In the three years this newsletter has existed, its readership has more than tripled without me doing anything except writing it. I’d like it to grow more, and I’ll be taking more steps in that direction. But the truth is, this isn’t the kind of newsletter that’s naturally able to create a positive feedback loop with my personal Twitter account. That’s probably a good thing. (Your recommendations, readers, matter far more than any self-promotion I could do. So please continue to forward, like, share, and, if you can stomach it, tweet!)
At this point we all know that Instagram and Facebook give you the illusion of connection to your friends and family while sapping you of the motivation and energy it takes to actually nurture those connections. I’m starting to believe that Twitter has been doing the same for my sense of professional standing as a writer and journalist. We already know that statistically speaking no one clicks the links on Twitter, but I’m talking more about vibes. I got my first media internship in 20121, so my idea of what being a successful journalist looks like has always involved Being Good at Twitter. Letting go of that standard is terrifying, because it’s been baked into how I imagined my career from the very beginning.
The operative word there, however, is imagined. It was always an illusion, and always just out of reach. Instead of continually trying and failing to achieve it, I could just let it go. So I did. As I said in my final tweet, I will miss what I once believed Twitter gave me, and not miss what it actually currently gives me. Which is nothing, except for a pit in my stomach and the creeping sense that I was sacrificing my values, time, and wellbeing to my fear of the unknown.
So what are we afraid of?
The fear of quitting Twitter is the fear of uncertainty, irrelevance, and impermanence. It’s the fear of having wasted our time on something that turned out to be meaningless. It’s the fear of being forgotten by the people we know and love. It’s the fear of admitting we never had as much as control over our image—our existence!—as we thought we did. The fear of quitting Twitter is the fear of death.
Twitter, like all the platforms, offers a way to annihilate yourself in small, daily ways while also convincing yourself that you (or rather, your image) can and will live forever. Online, you don’t have to die, as long as you’re willing to sell your soul. And we all know how that tends to turn out.
Now, a practicality: You can’t actually delete your Twitter account. You can only deactivate it, a limbo state that lasts for either 30 days or 12 months, depending on the option you select. If you don’t log back in during that time, your account is erased. If you do, everything is right where you left it. I plan on keeping my account deactivated but not deleted for a while, because anything could happen, and if it does, I want my familiar user name back. (Again: fear of death!) The most likely scenario is that at some point I’ll realize I’m ready to let it go, I won’t log back on, and that will be that.
Despite my desperate scrolling in search of the airtight case for quitting, no one else was ever going to give me permission to leave. I had to give it to myself. Permission to prioritize vulnerability over performance, to listen to what feels right over what I can logically defend, to embrace my mortality instead of living in fear of it.
My disappearance from Twitter won’t matter one iota to the company’s traffic, reach, or profitability. It won’t affect Elon Musk or his plans for the platform in the slightest. It doesn’t make a difference to anyone except me. And maybe you. I can’t give you permission to quit. I can’t promise you’d suffer no professional or personal consequences. I can’t make the uncertainty any less scary. I can only ask, what are you really afraid of?
An earlier version of this essay said 2011. It was, in fact, 2012. Whoops!