Not-Cults, Dramaland, and Escaping the Twitterverse
How one author escaped the Twitterverse — mostly.
So, funny story. I accidentally kicked a bad habit recently. Didn’t mean to. Didn’t even realize I was doing it. But here we are, and I’ve got some thoughts.
My Twitter timeline is a strange place to be. It’s the disjointed ramblings of someone who doesn’t know what they’re about. Some parts are cringeworthy. Others, abrasive.
I do my best to forget it exists.
It’s not a good representation of who I am. But it’s there, and I like the feed I’ve curated, so I don’t want to delete it.
I used to spend a lot of time doomscrolling Twitter, posting when the mood struck and regretting it almost immediately thereafter.
This, as you might imagine, sucked for me.
While rationalizing my behavior — my erratic posting, my fleeting desire for fame — I listened to a podcast by a famous person who deleted Twitter. This isn’t something I’ve heard of before. Famous people don’t leave the interwebs. They stay. It’s why they’re famous.
This person was Sam Harris. He claimed, during a conversation with someone smarter than me, that deleting his Twitter improved his mental health. I figured, hey. Maybe there’s something to that.
So, a few months ago, I deleted Twitter from my iPhone.
The change was small. Insignificant, as changes go. But it made an impact. An immediate one, in fact. The day after I deleted the app, I found myself searching “Twitter” on my iPhone (fun fact, you can do this, even though Elon Musk has rebranded it to ‘X’). I failed. I’d deleted the thing. I stared at my iPhone, blank-minded. Then I wondered what the hell I was doing on my iPhone, shoved it in my pocket, and returned to whatever I was doing moments prior.
The following week, I hopped on Twitter less than seven times, which is at least seven times less than typical. (I averaged twice a day, minimum. That’s probably generous. I scrolled often, for hours.)
Today, a few months later, I hardly think about Twitter at all. It is only when clicking links in my daily newsletters that I ever log on. It’s a drastic change from two months ago. But, it doesn’t feel drastic. Not using it felt natural. Easy. I hardly even noticed the change until after the fact.
I was no longer using Twitter, period.
How odd! Twitter was my life. It was how I plugged in. How I digested my news, how I brainstormed article headlines, how I spun fun stories at the dinner table every Tuesday. It was a source of anxiety — so much going on, all at once! — and excitement. It was where I spent hours of daily attention. Twitter was my second place, my information highway, and my hobby wrapped in one.
And yet — poof! One small change. Habit, gone. My account lives, but only in the sense that it takes up space in the digi-verse. The feed remains static.
What does this mean? Did it ever matter? It feels like it did. But then, why do I care so little that it’s gone? The answers to these questions emerge from an experience I attended almost a year prior.
The Not-Cult Says I’m Not How I Feel
Less than a year ago, my dad offered to send me to an all-paid event. Some life coaching thing, it promised to change my life for the better. I checked the website. It was vague.
For context, I’m an atheist who has resisted religious conversion for many years. I’ve been told by family or strangers I am destined for heaven or, in one special case, for hell. I’ve been told this is because I am baptized/I was born evil/everyone sins/an invisible sky deity is responsible for basically everything but it’s my fault anyway, but the guy’s all-knowing and all-powerful, so just roll with it/etcetera.
My feelings on grand promises with few specifics are, to say the least, negative. But my dad had made the offer before, and I didn’t want to refuse a second time. Plus, I figured I was well-equipped enough to sniff out any skullduggery lurking in the pulpit of this so-called “life-changing” event.
(The event is part of a series called Gamechanger, if you’re wondering.)
I went. To make a short story shorter, I enjoyed it.
The man who hosted the event, Devon Bandison, pulled attendees through a series of experiences. These put into practice abstract concepts like the ones outlined in famous self-help book Atomic Habits (one of my favorite books of all time, FYI).
From that three-day experience emerged many lessons I still apply to everyday life, months later.
The lesson that I drew upon to answer my Twitter questions: you are not how you feel. The idea is that you can and should separate your feelings from your identity. Just because you do a bad thing and feel badly about it doesn’t make you a bad person, it makes you a good person who did a bad thing — etc.
I’m simplifying. But it’s all you need to know to understand how I arrived at the answers to the following questions:
Was deleting my Twitter app a big deal? If it was, then why didn’t it feel big? Why did the action feel like such a small, insignificant thing? Why did it feel like it hardly mattered at all, when in retrospect, deleting the app clearly changed my daily habits in a big way?
In short, I initially felt that Twitter was a major part of my life. But when Twitter disappeared from my iPhone, it no longer felt that way. That feeling of this is important, I should log on or I’ll miss out, no longer triggered. It died on the vine, withering as soon as I introduced a bit of friction to the process of opening my Twitter account.
When it came down to it, opening Twitter was no longer worth the effort.
Then, why had I felt so strongly against limiting the time I spent on it? Why had my prior attempts at limiting my Twitter usage failed?
Somewhere along the line, I’d tangled my identity — who I was — with how I felt about Twitter, i.e. that it was important. I was a Twitter user. Using Twitter is what I did. Therefore, deleting my account completely, or limiting the hours I spend on it, felt like a big deal. An attack on who I was.
So, I didn’t. How could I? I’d invested so much time in it! No. I settled on making a small tweak, deleting the app from my phone. I was still a Twitter user, so that was fine, I felt.
And, well. You know what happened next. Months later, no more Twitter.
It was freedom. I’d been wanting to put Twitter down for some time. Sure, I’d had mixed feelings — it really is a good source of news, and news is part of my job — but rationally, I knew it was sucking up too much of my limited time and attention. The problem was, by the time I realized this, I opened the app habitually. I felt like opening the app between writing articles or long car rides was natural. So, I did it.
I did it again and again and again.
Right up until I didn’t.
The death of this habit stemmed from one, seemingly-tiny change. It was a good thing, I felt. I like good things. I want them to happen to me often.
Which leads me to the following set of questions:
How do I do this sort of thing again, but on purpose? How do I make big changes even when they feel like little changes? How do I make this one-off accident a repeatable strategy in other areas of my life?
The answer to this set of questions lies in the book I mentioned earlier. The author calls it Atomic Habits.
Famous Author Says Make It Invisible
The two most useful books I’ve ever read are James Clear’s Atomic Habits and Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money. They met me where I was when I picked them up, and they gave me the context I needed to create meaningful changes to my habits.
Of the two, Atomic Habits is more broadly applicable. In essence, it’s all about creating and breaking habits, and doing so effectively, in a way that considers how you think and how you feel.
One of the lessons the book teaches is to make bad habits hard. The idea is, by placing obstacles between yourself and bad habits, they become easier to break. Sometimes, that’s all it takes to break a bad habit.
You can probably see the parallels between this and my Twitter experience.
By deleting the Twitter app from my iPhone, I made it harder for me to open my Twitter account. I introduced friction. Not a lot, but clearly, a little was all it took. By deleting my Twitter app, I tipped from “spend two to three hours a day on Twitter” to “spend ten minutes weekly on Twitter.”
It was an eye-opening revelation. Not only had I put a lesson taught by a self-help book into practice. I’d done so effectively, with hardly any thought at all, and zero expectations for what might come of it. If I’m being honest, I thought I would quickly re-download Twitter once I grew irritated at having to constantly log into my web account.
I was wrong. The seemingly-insignificant change I made was enough to shatter what felt like an unbreakable chain of habitual doomscrolling.
The question is, can I shatter a bad habit again, but on purpose?
Who the Hell Am I, Anyway?
Teachers and parents taught me that the way to change bad habits is to set goals. Don’t do your homework enough? Set a goal to study for one hour the moment you get home from school. Don’t have muscles? Set a goal to work out three times a week. Etcetera.
Sometimes, goal-setting worked. Oftentimes, it didn’t.
Atomic Habits addresses this by calling out the heart of the problem. Your identity is more important to you than your individual goals. When a goal comes into conflict with your identity, your identity tends to win out.
An example in three steps:
1. I wanted to spend less time on Twitter. Goal.
2. But I was a Twitter user. Identity.
3. I failed to muster up the willpower to delete my Twitter account. My identity won out. None of my goals, i.e. “only spend X hours on Twitter” or “only open Twitter X times per day,” ever stuck.
Yet, I did successfully reduce my time on Twitter. Quite on accident.
I did so by making a habit harder. I didn’t set a particular goal, like “spend one hour less a day on Twitter.” Nor did I attempt to brainwash myself, i.e. “You never liked Twitter anyway, who cares if you delete it?”
None of that happened. I made a habit a little harder, is all. And gradually, without me realizing, I stopped thinking of myself as a Twitter user. That part of me exists — I still use Twitter occasionally — but it holds little sway. I don’t feel Twitter FOMO. It doesn’t feel important. It’s not who I am.
This is a long-winded way of saying, I’m pretty sure I can copy the shit out of this. I can do so without setting lofty goals or attempting to brute-force my way out of bad habits through sheer, Hollywood-level willpower.
Dramaland: Next on the Chopping Block
I like watching dramas. Kdramas, specifically. The pastel-colored, swoon-heavy rom-coms appeal to me in a way that American television doesn’t. It’s gotten to the point where I log into my drama app without thinking about it. It’s just what I do when I’m tired. I spend hours watching them.
It’s a bad habit, one I’m putting energy into breaking.
I’m doing so by using what I’ve learned from Gamechanger and Atomic Habits.
Gamechanger taught me I’m not how I feel. Just because I feel like something is important to me, doesn’t mean it is. I’m actively examining how I feel about parts of my life I’ve accepted until now. In this case, my TV habits. I watch a lot of dramas. I like it. I feel like a Drama Fan. The problem is, time I spent watching dramas is time not spent on writing novels or Medium articles, which happens to be important to me. More important, in fact, than watching Asian dramas.
Am I a Drama Fan Who Occasionally Writes, or am I a Writer Who Occasionally Watches Dramas?
Right now, I feel like I’m a Drama Fan, but as we both know by now, you are not how you feel. You can prove to yourself, through small changes, that you’re someone more in line with who you’d like to be. (Atomic Habits and Gamechanger tell you this over and over in pretty much the same exact way.)
I’d like to be a Writer Who Occasionally Watches Dramas.
But Atomic Habits has taught me that leaping from one identity to another by making massive, one-off changes is a fool’s game. The key is to make small, incremental changes. Delete the TV app from your phone. Make watching TV, a bad habit, a bit harder. Let yourself write tangents when the creative juices aren’t flowing. Make writing, a good habit, a bit easier.
If I do this enough, I’m optimistic my habits will change for the better. It’s not that I’m confident — I’m not. I’m new to this strategy. What worked once may not work again.
But, oddly, it’s very difficult to deny the opposite. That if I make a dozen or a hundred small changes, nothing will change. Because something must change. That’s the nature of living. You make a change here, something changes there. Etcetera. It’s so intuitive it feels dumb to say aloud.
This is the logic by which Atomic Habits operates.
We’ll see how things pan out. Interestingly enough, my anti-Twitter habit has already decreased the time I spend watching dramas. I guess, I was so used to hopping from one habit to another, that destroying one habit (doomscrolling Twitter) made the other (watching dramas) less appealing.
All I did was delete the Twitter app from my iPhone. Like. What?
I’ve since deleted every other app that I spend too much time and money on. Doordash, Instacart, Instagram, and Facebook have all been shuffled to my desktop. The results have been surprisingly effective. I use them all a little less. I don’t log into Instagram at all anymore. (To be fair, I only opened it a few times a week prior. But the change is still interesting.)
All of this has gotten me thinking about systems and how to change them so that I build good habits — and break bad ones — without feeling like I am. It’s a weird journey, this whole self-improvement thing. Sometimes you stumble into changes you never knew you needed. And sometimes, those tiny, accidental changes end up reshaping your whole day-to-day life.
Who knows? Maybe next time I’ll actually mean to make a change. Or maybe I’ll just keep accidentally improving my life, one deleted app at a time. Either way, I’m kind of excited to see where this goes.
