Why I Love Twitter
Or: What happens when you stop trying to win online arguments
Author's note: I apologize for sending this piece out on Sunday rather than the usual Thursday. It wasn't gelling at all Wed-Sat; and I would much rather send you all my best thoughts on a given topic rather than send something out that's only half of what I feel it could be.
I sometimes think I must be the only person in the world who actually enjoys being on X (formerly Twitter).
Don't get me wrong; I know the site's a cesspool. But after a lot of years of trying, I think I've found a way to navigate the cesspool in a way that brings me genuine joy.
It didn't used to be this way. I was on social media a lot in my 20s, responding to comments and feedback on the articles that I wrote; and I was miserable. I would stay up until 2am arguing on Reddit, determined to beat my opponent into the ground and getting more and more frustrated by what I saw as their obstinate refusal to see sense. I spent hours every week on Twitter and Facebook, trying to argue people into my preferred political positions. When a friend of a friend insulted me on Facebook, I led the online mob that rose up to defend me and (I am sorry to say) then proceeded to flay the skin off of her.
Overall, my time on these sites was awful. I built a couple of good relationships; but mostly I remember the feeling of banging my head against a brick wall, over and over and over again. I thought I had to win every single interaction, and so I felt insecure and pissed off whenever someone offered up a point that I couldn't rebut. I wasted hours and days that could have been spent hiking or meditating or being with friends, staring into my screen and cursing at the commenter I was arguing with who refused to simply roll over and admit that I was right.
I took a break from writing about the world around the time of COVID-19. And when I felt called to come back to it, I knew that a lot of things had to change.
One was my relationship with social media.
The biggest change I made was to consciously let go of my desire to win. To let go of my desire to beat people.
I'm not going to lie: part of this was simply strategic on my part. I read Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, and I realized why so many of my online debates were futile: people choose what they want to believe, and then we find arguments and rationalizations to justify those beliefs. When two people are doing that (because I most certainly was), the odds of either person changing their minds are approximately zero. I realized that if I wanted to change the world, then I needed to put time and energy into doing something more effective than yelling at strangers.
But I also made this decision because I wanted a better life than I had in my twenties. I thought back on all the time I had wasted in online arguments, trying to make someone else see the world the way that I did. I thought of all the things I could be doing instead. And I asked myself: "Do I really care if I convince XYZ stranger that I'm right?"
Or to put it more precisely, because time is finite in this world: "Do I care so much about convincing a stranger online that I'm willing to neglect other things in my life? Am I willing to skip a meditation session, or cut short a date with my now-wife, or hit pause on reading an absolutely fascinating book or on writing the next article that I feel called to write; so that I can beat someone over the head with my beliefs about the world?"
Letting go of the desire to win online arguments was the biggest change I made that helped me to cultivate a healthy relationship with social media.
But a year or so later, when I started to get back into writing more seriously, I made a second change. I was doing a lot of podcasts and radio hits back then, and I realized something about myself: I really love the spotlight. I care a lot about what people think of me, probably far more than I should.
When I realized this, I made a second decision about social media: I wasn't going to defend my reputation online. If someone said something egregiously wrong about me, I might step in to correct the record; but I wouldn't try to change their minds. I would let people think about me whatever they wanted to think about me.
It turns out that when I let go of the desire to win arguments, and to use social media to polish my brand and dictate how people saw me, there were only a few things things left to use social media for; and all of them can be deeply joy-inducing.
Let me talk about one of those things today. One of my favorite things to do on X is to meet and become friends with fascinating people.
The truth is that X is absolutely full of incredible people. In some ways it's the greatest networking space ever invented, because it's almost completely flat. Anyone can talk to anyone.
Of course, part of the gold that social media offers is the chance to talk to people who I already think of as amazing. I've used X to meet my idols, to find wonderful organizations to volunteer with, to find writing gigs and to ask some of the deepest thinkers in my industry what they think about XYZ question that I've been grappling with.
But I think an even bigger part of this gold—a part that I didn't used to know existed, and that I've been absolutely thrilled to discover—has been the joy of meeting amazing people who I didn't initially think of as all that amazing.
My friend Angel Eduardo likes to say that “Social media is the boss level of discourse.”
I think he's exactly right. But the thing about boss levels isn't just that they're extremely hard; it's that, if you win, they're the levels that give you the most treasure.
One reason that having genuine interactions on social media is so difficult is that we only see a small sliver of the other person—and they only see a small sliver of us. That, in turn, means that we're both making a lot of assumptions about the other person, some of which may not be charitable. That can make connecting feel next to impossible.
In my 20s, I let this fact blind me to the sheer radiant beauty of so many of my interlocutors. I would see someone post XYZ, and I would immediately jump to all sorts of conclusions about them: they must believe ABC, they're probably mad at me, they seem like a jerk…on and on. And then I would respond to those assumptions rather than responding to the person, with the result that then they got fired up too. I perceived them as hitting me, so I hit them "back", so then they actually tried to hit me; and pretty soon we were both stuck on Reddit at 2am, our tired faces lit only by the pale glow of our laptops in the night, yelling at each other.
But once I realized that I was only seeing a sliver of the other person, and that they were only seeing a sliver of me, I started to behave differently online. I started to ask my interlocutor questions, and to show my genuine interest in them, and to invite them to tell me more…more about their perspective, more about their life, more about who they were as a human being.
And when I did that, something amazing happened. People responded.
I got to see this interaction at play a bunch this past week. My last Heal the West article went mini-viral. It has more comments on it—by far—than all of my other Heal the West pieces put together. It blew up on X. A lot of people got pretty mad about it.
And one of the genuine highlights of this past week has been hearing those peoples' anger, responding to their criticisms with civility and respect rather than brushing them off the way I used to, and watching the whole paradigm shift. One woman yelled at me; and, when I responded back politely, she apologized and said that she was just having a bad night. We've all been there. I thanked her and wished her well, and we went on our way. Another person criticized my piece, and I found myself making some knee-jerk assumptions about her. But instead of acting from those assumptions, I asked her questions and opened a dialogue; and we became friends. It turns out she's a lot more vibrant and interesting and wonderful than I was willing to give her credit for when all I saw was a sliver of her; and maybe she ended our interactions feeling the same way about me.
To me, these interactions are the treasure that the boss level of social media discourse offers. The chance to let go of my own assumptions, to open a deeper dialogue, to turn what could have easily been an acrimonious exchange into something that perhaps brightened the days of everyone involved.
I kind of see every interaction online as an opportunity to take one of two forks. I can use it to add more pain into the world: I can yell at the other person, or slap down their ideas, or insult them. I can be the brick wall that will leave both of us feeling just a little bit more angry and frustrated at the world. Or I can use it to relieve some of the pain in the world, to create just a little bit more love and joy and peace and connection. I can open the door to real dialogue and show the other person how much I care about them as a fellow human being; and maybe, if I do it right, we can both leave with just a little bit less fear and guilt and shame, a little bit less anger at the world and emotional pain, than we came in with.
When I use social media that way—as an opportunity to untangle the knots inside each of our souls, to add just a little bit more joy and connection to the world—it becomes one of the highlights of my day.
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