It’s a new year which means it is time, once again, to make solemn vows to improve as a human being and set reasonable and actionable goals for myself for the coming 8,760 hours of my life. Goals like not using ‘actionable’ outside a purely work context, perhaps?

I’ve been on vacation for about a month (hell yeah!) and since it is the COVID times that means I’ve basically been spending an assload of time at home. We live in the Seattle area so outdoor activities are a bit limited at this specific time of year, and even more than usual as a result of the pandemic. So other than taking some nice 2 - 3 hour long walks when it isn’t raining I’ve mostly been getting high and playing videogames and what-have-you, real productive shit. Oh, and spending way, way too much time on Twitter.

I actually fucking LOVE Twitter. I’ve made friends and meaningful connections there, it routinely provides me with excellent reading material, comedy, and catharsis. However, it also enables most of my worst habits in a truly pernicious fashion. Off the top of my head I’ve found myself extremely guilty of at least:

  • Doomscrolling (which went from not-a-word to having a solid Wikipedia article in less than a year! ggwp!)
  • Hate-watching
  • Troll-feeding and bait-taking
  • Covetousness (not the wife bits but just generally)
  • Procrastination (I just spent 30 minutes on Twitter not setting up a new blog, ffs)

It’s not that Twitter is built to enable this bad behavior, particularly, but that I am built to slide into spirals of life-avoidance because I can. While media in general is a great (and honestly valuable) mental energy sink, there’s something really special about social media. It’s pervasive, accessible, and can basically fulfill as many weird hyperspecific information to scratch a current itch scenarios as you can dream up.

The single biggest and worst contributor to most of these bad habits is reading the comments. I use a browser plugin to disable YouTube comments because I know I can’t trust myself, and I find myself wishing I could do the same for Twitter. Even just a polite nag / dismissable warning (“do you really want to see what some Trump fan account has to say? I bet you don’t!”) to make me stop and think real fuckin’ hard about whether this is a good use of my time or what would probably go a long way.

Outside a patched client I don’t actually have a solution, magic or otherwise, for all these bad habits. A lot of them aren’t even really about Twitter (I’ve been a god-tier procrastinator almost my entire life) but are more about my own psychological tendencies. The only thing that has ever worked for me to correct my behavior is to think about it after the fact enough that I start catching myself in the act and, sometimes, correcting it.

Here’s hoping to a brighter 2021 with less comments read.