Complexity, Certainty, and Digital Selves

reflecting on what we think we know

Picture I took at breakfast with Jim, May 2022.

Yes, this is another essay where I have propped a great big mirror up in the choir loft and am preaching directly to…me, about something I really need to remember.

Because they knew that he and I are friends, a few people from Twitter approached me privately about James Lindsay’s perceived “going crazy.” This happened occasionally until he and I had breakfast together; then it happened a lot, almost daily between my tweeting the breakfast picture and leaving Twitter entirely later that summer.

I told them all the same thing: they were seeing occasional tweets that happened to hit their timeline, either because they were online when he was actively tweeting or because his tweets hit their timeline another way. “You have to go to his page every day and read ALL of his tweets to get the whole picture.”

The ones who took my suggestion inevitably got back to me going, “Ah, of course. I see what he’s doing now.”

If you saw the occasional, out-of-context tweet, you saw someone who self-described as on the left, a PhD with real intellectual street cred, saying things that were at times silly, provocative, or puerile. When you saw the whole picture, you saw that he was actively fighting the fight, and the context made the individual tweets make sense.

I think about this a lot. Mostly, I deeply admire the people who asked me. They are the people who realized that they didn’t know what they didn’t know, and wanted to find out more before coming to a conclusion or making a judgment.

The number of people who were, and are, absolutely certain in their view of Jim — that they know exactly who he is, what he thinks, what he was doing on Twitter and why, what’s wrong with him, how and why he “changed,” how and why it happened, even the proper psychological diagnosis to apply — it’s still a little stunning, when I think about it. The person I know and the person they are certain he is aren’t even close enough to be Mirror Universe (a Star Trek thing, for you non-nerds) versions of the same person.

But this is not meant as an indictment of those folks. Something about the internet makes people entirely certain in their judgments of other people.

On several levels — the need for a whole picture, the danger of seeing only pieces and drawing conclusions about a whole, and the absolute requirement of epistemic humility being applied to judgments of people — it’s a good analogy for how people’s digital selves relate to their overall being.

I Used to Do It, Too

Before I had a high interaction Twitter account, I too was certain that I understood people based on their social media posts. When I saw how a high interaction social media account, especially on Twitter, the worst platform of all, required the account holder to either mortgage her soul to a social media platform just to handle the volume of notifications or become willing to silo herself intensely, I understood how many of my previous judgments had been off-kilter. So many people on Twitter were certain they understood me, when all they really knew was how I reacted to the unique pressures of a high interaction Twitter platform while dealing with the other stresses of my life.

Everyone curates their lives on social media to some degree. This is why Instagram is such a detriment to the mental health of teenage girls; they compare the performative, shiny-happy version of what their friends post to their knowledge of their own reality, and conclude that their own lives are wanting. Social media use requires a type of performativity that comes with the medium itself; it makes fragmentation a norm, and it creates parasocial relationships that are poisonous for all concerned.

I wrote about some of this as part of my essay about why I was leaving Twitter:

Parasocial Relationships Are Poison

Additionally, my Twitter account caused me to have parasocial relationships with many people who didn’t understand that they were in a parasocial relationship with me. I would sometimes get long emails of contrition about a twitter spat, and felt I couldn’t answer. The only honest answer would be cruel: Hi, thanks for your seven paragraphs of heartfelt contrition about our spat. Unfortunately, my twitter life is so crowded and busy that I have no idea who you are or what argument you’re referring to. It just didn’t register to me. Please send me your Twitter handle so I can unblock you. I’m sorry that something that made you do deep self-reflection and profoundly upset you meant nothing to me.

I never, ever, ever, ever wanted to be someone who had this kind of relationship with even a single other human being, much less many of them. It happened without my understanding or intention. I can’t go back and make it not have happened, but I can damn sure stop it.

I will add to the above, something that only occurred to me after I had been off Twitter for a few months. Likely there are people who didn’t write me after a blocked/muted spat, at least some of whom likely still remember it, possibly speculating on what really happened, making up their own stories akin to the ones that people made up about Jim.

None of them are likely to ever believe the truth — an account I started specifically so I could stare at my phone, and not the strangers on the bus, and as a way to get a little socialization into a lonely life exploded into something I was wholly unprepared to handle. And I was always (never moreso than when I was feigning confidence to try to keep bullies at bay) badly overwhelmed by it. I blocked and muted for the same reason that I pop my hearing aids out to focus and that I keep my apartment obsessively clean: anxiety management and stress reduction, necessities for someone like me. I am exceptionally good at dealing with crisis, the absolute best person imaginable to have on your side for anything with life-and-death intensity—but still have a long way to go to build resilience for ordinary, mundane levels of coping.

But Twitter drama is something that people take very seriously and rarely change their minds about, just as the people who are completely sure that Jim was “radicalized” and/or that he “went insane” will never accept that they’re seeing one piece of a complex puzzle—and seeing that one piece from a limited angle at that.

The Fragmentation of Developmental Trauma

This is the most complex reason [for leaving Twitter], and many of you will probably not understand it. Developmental trauma is fragmenting. Developmental trauma makes it very, very hard to be a whole, unified person—a person with stable mood states whose feelings, thoughts, and views originate from integrity. (I am using the word integrity here to mean wholeness, being in one piece; not the way that word is typically used, as a synonym for “honesty.”)

Twitter is a powerfully fragmenting medium. In even a ten-minute stint on Twitter, a high-interaction account might respond to five people posting about good news and five people posting about bad or even tragic news; three news stories about genocide or other genuinely outraging situations; two funny or heartwarming videos, a couple of insider jokes, and a couple of pop culture references. One can hit every emotion on the 1 to 10 scale from rage to joy, easily, and in a busy day on twitter, could easily hit every point on the scale multiple times. Constant emotional whiplash is the Twitter norm, not the exception.

The emotional whiplash of Twitter is not healthy, but neither is the only way to use it without emotional whiplash—by not actually feeling anything about the words, images, and videos you see. There is no way to do Twitter actively that is healthy, in my opinion, and this is especially true for people like me, who are deeply fragmented and have a lot of healing work to do in order to better unify ourselves.

Who Am I? Who Are You? Who Is Anyone?

I love this quote:

My conception of my being was programmed in childhood, as is the case for all of us. I’ve been working very, very hard at changing it for a long time now. Much like I wrote about Twitter and the inherent fragmentation it promotes, my self-conception is fragmented. Some days I feel so wretched and unlovable that I am entirely certain that I could end my life and it would only improve the world. Other days I feel significantly better about myself—that I deserve to be alive, I help others, I am a good friend and even a good person. Most days, I’m in the middle but leaning towards the negative.

But there are days—fewer than there used to be, but still a lot of them—when I experience both of these extremes. Often several times.

Does that sound hellish? It is. It’s a problem only I can fix, and I’m trying. I’m trying to create a coherent, positive conception of my being, and it is the hardest work I’ve ever done. I don’t know how to measure how well I’m doing, because I don’t know how to measure these things.

How well do most of us know ourselves?

How well do most of us know even our intimates, the people we do know in “meatspace,” in 3D, in the flesh?

How many people are shocked to learn that they have a cheating spouse, a depressed child, a boss who despises them behind their back, a gender dysphoric teen, a philandering clergy member, a neighbor dying by suicide?

I don’t have a strong conception of my being on my best days, and while others are likely not nearly as screwed up as I am, it behooves me to remember that everyone is much more complicated and complex than the 1s and 0s of our online lives can possibly allow us to experience.

My time on Twitter continues to provide fodder for reflection here.

The person I was on Twitter was both accurate and a performance, something I suspect is probably true of most people, both online and off. People perform the role of a good parent, because they love their kids and care about being a good parent, though they aren’t feeling it and what they want to do is scream or even hit. They perform the role of a good spouse because their married life is tolerably pleasant and they don’t want to end up divorced, but they know that the days of passionately being authentically “in love” are long over. I perform the role of a client-focused data scientist, patiently repeating explanations for the fifth time when a client doesn’t understand some math—though every authentic emotion, instinct, and impulse is telling me to scream in frustration. My friend Josh does a political podcast where he performs his real views in a flamboyant, florid, provocative manner, and it’s only recently that I’ve stopped expecting the Josh from the show to be the one I hang out with in person.

“All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare wrote, and I suspect that this is true. If it is, then our human task is to get to know ourselves, to grow in self-understanding. It is difficult, often painful, and confusing. And I have much farther to go in this area than most people, which can be demoralizing.

I must force myself to nurture my real-life, “meatspace” relationships, and make more of them. I must remember that the digital world is the worst possible place to try to do this work. Every time I meet someone in person who I previously knew online, this truth is reinforced. Digital identities are always fragmented and at least partially performative—the medium cannot allow them to be otherwise—and it sets us up to feel certain that we know others in a way that we can probably never know our real-life friends and family, much less the real person behind any internet screenname, twitter account, etc.

Grace, flexibility, and humility are the only tools we have.

I am not good at extending them to others, and worse at extending them to myself.

I’m going to try harder.

Reminder of the Christmas Contest

On December 1, 2022, I will draw five winners from a list of paid subscribers. Three will win 11x14 framed versions of this photo from my October 2022 Vermont foliage collection. The other two will win other foliage pictures from my collection. If you are a paid subscriber by 7am Eastern on December 1, 2022, you’ll be entered automatically.

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