How I actually reduced my Twitter Usage
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How I actually reduced my Twitter Usage
X things out, 3 pages a day.
I started this blog as I thought Elon would sink Twitter like the Titanic thinking it could sail over a suspicious icecube. Frankly, the blog didn’t work in that regard, although it did absolutely deepen my appreciation for everything related to games journalism. Personally, I’m pretty terminal when it comes to twitter. It’s where all my friends are at and my enemies are borderline invisible. When they do pop up, their moments are curated by my friends, dunking viciously on my thought-foes. The feedback loop is absolutely complete. So how in the hell am I breaking free?
On occation, my brain finds a way to intersect with completely non-gaming related things. Morning Pages, 3 pages of handwritten mindpuke, are my cure for social media abuse. Julia Cameron’s book The Artists’ Way is the big one here, although you can really just see the concept on Youtube whenever you feel like it.
How’s it working for me? Check it:
It’s Out There, Somewhere
Morning Pages are the unreal made real. Those crazy thoughts inside of your head, bouncing around like caffiened-cracked fortnite builder kids. Emotional cues, guilt, tourettes spikes, external stimulus, so many things! They’re so invasive but so ethereal that they become the fuel for habits. When they are handwritten and visible, you can see how dumb, worthless, or silly they are in their natural form. Heck, even the good ones aren’t really worth much. They are not channeled to become something other than existent.
You get a good mix of natural needless thoughts and good ones, but you thrust them into the pages regardless. The exercise of trashing both is really critical. Good ideas come back a second time because you will them to be. They are not always lost forever like a shower thought. You don’t always need to be alert, but it helps when you’re less cluttered, right?
The lack of requisite energy is really important here because Twitter really takes energy to compress thoughts into something funny. That whole process of constant packaging often validates stupid thoughts to be more important than they actually are.
Exhausting, but that’s the point
Why handwriting? You have to finish the thought. The time it takes to scribble something is definitely slower than the actuation point of a keypress, so my thoughts start queuing as they start spewing. After 3 or 4, the stack gets full and everything shuts down. Things get quiet for a milisecond then it starts again. This process circulates until you just don’t have thoughts. This process culls thoughts that have no explanation. The ones that take shape get to be on the page, but they are not especially special.
Sometimes the shapeless thoughts start getting substance and come back again. There’s that big mindfulness metaphor about watching emotions like leaves on a stream. When you’re writing each individual dihydrogen-and-oxygen molecule, it becomes easier to see where the plants are. You can see the seed grow into a tree, the branches stretching out to birth green leaves, then see them wither and fall into the stream. (By the way, that leaf says, “Your ass itches.”)
The Void does Not Scream, Like, or QT Back
“No feedback. It’s not a game, it’s purely an exercise." That’s what my brain thinks after doing these things. Like a button press with no spring, you discover all these thoughts that used to absolutely rule your every waking moment suddenly don’t have any substance.
Thoughts like, “I suck” tangibly dissappear. Can you remember how many times you wrote that in your morning pages? Even a rough estimate? Nah, too hazy to recall. Invasive thoughts are becoming more like games in my steam backlog. Oh, sure they definitely exist, but you could put a gun to my head and I wouldn’t remember 75% of them. So maybe you don’t suck. Maybe that’s just a thought.
So yeah, they work.
I’ve done a lot of brain exercises but this is the one that I’ve managed to stick with. I feel a lot lighter because thoughts are 5% less grippy than usual. Its helped me eat a better breakfast of overnight oats and I actually exercise every other day. Stuff’s crazy! Highly recommend. Oh yeah, I’m on twitter less and definitely don’t post as feverishly. Big win.
Armored Core 6 NG+ is my current lovely grind with a side of GW2 dailies (Still loving that I do them in like 15 minutes a day!) Thinking about buying a Playdate because I really do value small, weird indie excursions.
Also, really struggling with Starfield. That’s a huge can of worms, but the thoughts that escaped my morning pages are:
Not into space enough to care about the fantasy of being a NASA-Punk
Too many menus
I really like books written by in-house writers