The last few weeks have been spent loping between tall buildings and puddles of garbage water, trying to look cool so that the thousands of evaluating strangers I pass will think I’m cool. They’ve also been spent thinking, thinking about me and you and the rest of the world, and how we all relate. And I believe I’ve stumbled on to why Twitter is popular.
Even if you use Twitter, I can hear the bafflement in you voices every time you send a message into the void. “Why am I doing this? Because a lot of other people are doing it. But why are they doing it?”
They are doing it because they are lonely. And because they would rather give up the power of being alone in exchange for the comfort that comes with not.
Loneliness and self-serving independence are actually two edges of the same knife. When you are alone, you are unconnected to everyone. All your actions cease to exist- if I am alone, and none of my friends know where I am or what I’m doing, I could be at a really fun party, or eating sushi off naked models, or I could be reading a book about reading books. It doesn’t matter what I’m actually doing- the void is all possibilities. And while this lack of connectivity is disconcerting- the feeling of not existing, despite clearly existing (the garbage water smells too real to not be) is soul-crushing- it’s also power. When there are no judges, you can do anything, anything, without fear of being judged
Twitter allows us to give up that power. By blasting the world with what I am doing, thinking, getting ready to do, reading, watching and wishing I was doing, it becomes easy for others to construct a framework of what my life is like. This makes me feel real again, but it also creates the anxiety of expectation. If my peers know more about my life, I worry that what I’m doing isn’t sufficiently interesting, and so my own agency decreases in the service of my insecure ego.
A lot of people are going to read this and think, “oh, well, that’s only for people that give a shit about what other people think. I don’t, because I’m awesome”, and that’s fine. Keep believing that. Just don’t tell anyone else. Because then you’re turning the knife around again.
Loading ...
