2019 was a pretty great year, both personally and professionally. Yet something about how I'd been living my life was causing me mental stress and I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Or maybe I just wasn't prepared to face the truth.
To misquote the great, departed Mitch Hedberg “I used to use social media as a crutch. I still do, but I used to, too.”
I first deleted my Twitter account permanently four years ago. It (or rather the people I interacted with) saw me through depression and a marriage break-up. But not only did the desire for likes, retweets and followers affect me negatively, it became obvious to those around me too.
The funny thing is I didn't actually mean to permanently delete it at the time – I just miscounted the number of days I had to reinstate it. This meant I would have to start again and that seemed like way too much effort for a lazy fucker like me. I didn't know at the time that what I was struggling with was my part in the Attention Economy.
And then one random day I signed up again, the positive impacts of my account being deleted long forgotten. It was almost certainly because I felt I had something important to say – yet was surely just another mindless rant into the ether, hoping for some reactions to give me my fix. And with that quick fix providing the serotonin high I so desperately needed, I was hooked all over again.
I spent another few years building back up my followers, using it to rant and rail against whatever was pissing me off as well as meeting and interacting with many new people. But at what price?
A few times last year I deactivated Twitter again for varying lengths of time and each time, without question, it had me feeling better about things, particularly mentally. But I always found a reason to go back. Work needs me to be on top of what's happening. I need to sell that spare U2 ticket. I need to call Donald Trump by some new clever nickname.
It doesn't matter why – I just knew I needed it. Until I didn't any more. The constant terribleness happening in the world, the inhabitants of the White House and 10 Downing Street, the anger, the echo chambers – it just became too much. The good was simply outweighed by the bad. A million times over.
The straw that broke the camel's back? When I wrote a Tweet defending Bob Geldof and Midge Ure for writing a flawed song that raised multi-millions for the starving in Ethiopia because someone had decided to be extra snarky and dismissive about its impact. Is that what my life had come to? Defending a 35-year-old song from someone who wasn't alive when it was written and who clearly misunderstood some of the lyrics? (The line “do they know it's Christmas time at all” isn't about whether they're Christian or not as the author implied, but about the fact that there's nothing to fucking eat or drink, so the exact date probably wasn't the highest priority for the 1.2m who died or the 400,000 refugees.)
Better people than me have written critiques of the song and how it reinforce the idea of colonialism and have analysed just how much of the money raised went to the starving instead of warmongering leaders – but if you believe Geldof's intent was anything other than trying to be good then I'm sorry, you're an arsehole.
There, I've said it. That felt good. And deactivating my account for the last time felt better.
I've made a lot of friends via Twitter. Or at least I thought I had. Then I realised in all my absences only one person had inquired as to how I was. And that felt good because he took time out of his day to make sure I was okay. It felt weird at the time but only because it happened so rarely. It came from a very genuine place and not an artificial one. Others that really struck a chord with me, and there have been a few, I've tried to connect to via alternative platforms and I'll continue to do that. But it's time to make that step back permanently. And I know I've made the right call.
How many people have missed me on Twitter since I permanently deactivated my account a couple of weeks back? Zero. Zilch. Nada. How about that for destroying your ego a wee bit more, eh? Or at least, in my case, it reinforces my decision to leave. It's time to put the phone down, stop worrying about all those thumbs up, hearts and loves and to live my life a little. I've got a book to write and creative desires to be harnessed – and I can't wait to get on with it!