In news that will surprise absolutely no one, within five minutes of posting this, I got email from someone wanting to argue that I don't understand Jim at all -- they do, based on his former Twitter presence! He "lacks wisdom" and is bad at educating people. Imagine thinking that an "insane" tweet is proof that JAMES LINDSAY is bad at educating people. The conviction that digital interaction, particularly Twitter, produces in people that they know other people, and can arrive at accurate and insightful grand conclusions about the person's life work, in a way that they absolutely do not and cannot is just jaw-dropping. Thank Zeus for email filters.
And it really makes me wonder -- if people are *this* committed to never, ever, ever learning a new thing and only seeing what they want to see through a screen, and the digital world plays so heavily into our culture these days, to a greater extent than physical reality in most cases -- how much of what all of us think we understand about the world is bullshit along the lines of "James Lindsay is insane and bad at educating people" ? It's a little scary, huh?
I have never used twitter, I quit facebook early in the pandemic, and I’m too old for any of the others. There was absolutely no room for nuance, no room for “I’m going to wait and form an opinion when I know more about this situation,” and no way to be sure that anyone reading my posts knew me or my background well enough to know where I was coming from. I do not miss it.
I also know that I’m *very* susceptible to forming those parasocial demi-relationships, and I use this Substack to do a little work around that. It’s cool when the author likes or replies to my comment, but I know that I do not know any of you, and that’s ok. I’m working very hard to make real friends in the real world these days. (On a related note, I recently learned that square dancing is a real hobby and the people who do it are a ton of fun!)
I have a strong suspicion what you describe of yourself and your relationship with Twitter in this piece is true for many people. I have no way of proving that, but there it is.
Unless one has a very stable sense of self, social media (not just Twitter) is fundamentally fragmentary.
I recently was suggested by the algorithm a video by a family blogger mom of 8: the video was her revealing that social media is a lie and her “loving husband” is actually a piece of shit who has left them high and dry for a third time.
I was a small-time “mommy blogger” in the first wave of that, but I had a lot of trouble accepting turning my life into a brand. That’s not why I started writing and it’s not what I wanted, so I didn’t write consistently online for years. It was hard in real-time to realize that the fairly new social media was doing exactly what you’ve said here, and to pinpoint why I was so unhappy with it.
We DO perform ourselves all the time, even in meatspace, because pro social filters cause us to censor ourselves, or stop us from reacting impulsively, or prevent us from fighting in the street with every stranger who annoys us. Twitter, from what I can tell (I didn’t last long on Twitter), does just the opposite: for many people it removes the pro social filters.
Rather than trying to “live authentically” or whatever, I think it’s more useful to understand what filters we’re using (or not using) and why. So much of the meme-ified self help and social justice advice is also about removing pro social filters, not “owing anyone” anything, feeling unencumbered by the very pro social filters that make good relationships, rather than examining those filters and when it’s appropriate or not to use them.
This Twitter world of which so many speak, almost never in a positive way, is foreign to me. But then, so is all social media. Is Substack social media? Is You Tube social media? If they are, then they are the only ones I engage with. Never had a FaceBook account.
Here's how I know I would be done in if I got involved with a platform like Twitter - I have one email account that is separate from my work and personal email. All my Substack subscription notifications go to that address. I read the Substacks and then delete them. What I keep are the likes and replies I receive from the comments I've made on various articles, essays or stories. Most of them are just likes, but I hoard them along with the comments like pieces of treasure. As if these are indications of my worthiness or something. From this, I can only imagine how crazy my sense of self-worth would be and the warped understanding I might have of people if I were on social media. Nope. Best I stay away from that.
I only know James Lindsey from his New Discourses channel - his calm tone of voice, peppered with frustration, disdain, and disbelief as he describes the roots of education and the mess that's been made does not indicate to me that he's lost it or gone crazy. He's a passionate defender of education undefiled by the woke monsters who seek to mold and then destroy the mental health of children. He's performing a valuable service by exposing it.
> "[A] whole, unified person—a person with stable mood states whose feelings, thoughts, and views originate from integrity."
Wait, that's like, a thing? I think you just made that up. **I've** certainly never experienced it...
> "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.
Yeah. I feel that one a lot. And it's slightly uglier cousin, the one that says that I **should have already killed myself** like, years ago, so as to have limited the amount of harm I've done in the world. Which is primarily vastly overwrought whinging about projects I haven't finished and people whose feelings I've hurt, and whose feelings I will likely hurt in the future, and whose feelings would be hurt if I actually did kill myself.
I got very ill on a trip during a military move shortly after I turned ten. We were moving from Northern Virginia, where I'd started Kindergarten and made it through half of fourth grade, to Hawaii. (My father was a US Naval officer.) We drove from NoVA to Long Beach, CA so the cars could be shipped over to HI, and we stopped for Christmas in Albuquerque, because that's where all of the grandparents were. I was really excited about moving to Hawaii, because I didn't know any better yet.
I have often thought that it would have been just about ideal (for me) if I'd died shortly after Christmas that year. I haven't really been truly happy since about three months after we got there. I realized sometime within the last several weeks that I've been exhibiting what I can now recognize as symptoms of severe clinical depression since I was twelve. Obviously, my parents would have been very upset. But I have on numerous occasions referred to the time when we lived in NoVA as "back when I used to smile".
My experiences in Hawaii are also why I react **very** negatively to the claim that it's impossible to be racist towards white people. Even using their bullshit made up "bigotry plus institutionalized oppression" definition, when one's elementary school teachers are using ethnic slurs to refer to them, that is about as institutionalized as it gets for a ten year old.
Wow. It's hard to decide where to even start with this since I think I could write entire essay replies on just sections of it.
Parts of it just read to me like mental sulphuric fog that's obsuring things for you while hurting you.
An analogy I use to communicate the dissconnect between online vs IRL (especially to the terminally online :P) is comparing interacting with someone online to talking to them thru an elaborate latticework fence. You get the rough approximation of a whole person and sometimes entire small pieces (aha, there's a full eye!) but never the full picture. Video chat? A transparent latticework fence at best even with both cameras on.
One thing my father told me ages ago was that: "People everywhere...they're all the same. Hopes, needs, dreams, fears... only the language & scenery changes." I know that may read as cold to some but he sounded extremely weary when he said it to me. It stands out in my mind to this day since it was one of the few conceptual things he said about other people that wasn't said disparagingly.
Last thing - that's NOT the #1 complaint I hear online about James. His business financial connections to Micheal O’Fallon are. His past twitter behavior is usually the second thing brought up. I don't think it's fair to condemn a whole person over some tweets but I'm also not sure how reasonable it is to insist people read hundreds upon hundreds of tweets to 'get' what James was trying to do. That just sounds to me like he ultimately chose the wrong medium for the message.
TLDR: I'm glad you wrote this out & the fact that twitter was ultimately designed to be terrible for everyone is a feature - not a bug.
Nov 18, 2022·edited Nov 18, 2022Liked by Holly MathNerd
I went to a memorial for a man yesterday. I didn’t know Brett very well. I met him at the pool and we talked about dogs and cats, my girlfriends needed heart surgery, and the 4th of July potluck that was coming up. Our last names gave us the assignment of making a salad. He usually made a fruit salad but said he wasn’t this time so I said I would. He then told me everything he did when he made one. After the pool the hot tub. When I left he asked if I’d bring him his pool noodles so that he wouldn’t forget them. He seemed a bit strange but in a good way. He had a bit of a slur and I wondered a bit if he’d been drinking. When talking about dogs he said something funny and off color.
A bit after that he told me about a golf cart parade he was going to be in. Everyone decorated their golf carts for the 4th and there was both a dry parade and a wet parade. My girlfriend and I wondered if the wet parade meant alcohol and golf carts. It was water guns and golf carts. His cart won the contest for best decorated.
At the Halloween party he was a werewolf. He was a big man, looked kind of like Hulk Hogan, and so was a good werewolf. He danced almost every dance in that mask. When I first saw him there we talked a bit, he pretend attacked me… I think he gave me a hug.
A couple of days before he died my girlfriend Karen and I were talking to him. He congratulated her on her 2nd place Bob’s Big Boy costume win. He wanted to come over some time and take pictures of our cats. One of his cats was older and he was interested in seeing other types of cats for when it was time to add a new one. That time never came, he died and my cats didn’t get their pictures taken.
Reflecting on what we think we know. I knew a kind, funny man. I man who said exactly what was on his mind, a bit of an eccentric but someone who was becoming a friend, someone who danced almost every dance until he was huffing and puffing.
At the memorial I found out lots of things. His brothers and sister and nephews and nieces cherished him as did his friends that knew him much longer than me. Many called him their best friend.
His brothers helped him out quite a bit. When he was born he was deprived of oxygen. He was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. He had an IQ of 69 and was either retarded or autistic.
It’s hard for my girlfriend and I to believe he was anything near retarded.
I wonder if I would had treated him any differently had I known. I hope not.
Anyway, he was a million miles away from Twitter.
At the end of the service a brother and nephew got out their guitars and did their version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah with a few lyrics customized for Brett and between tears Karen and I sang along with the chorus…
Several years ago, my precious daughter developed health problems severe enough to require my full time care. The stress of caregiving, seeing my child struggle and suffer, dealing with a largely apathetic medical community, lack of sleep/exhaustion, isolation, anxiety, and depression have taken a tremendous toll on me. It’s affected my health, memory, cognition, and even my ability to communicate the way I used to. It’s been devastating.
I also have struggled for decades with a lack of sense of self from an abusive childhood. It certainly adds to the challenges of life.
I, too, joined Twitter with a hope to “get a little socialization into a lonely life.” I really appreciate the perfect clarity you have given me on what I was feeling but couldn’t put into words about Twitter. The fragmentation and emotional whiplash are REAL. It has been making me feel worse. It is poison.
I often feel like I just robbed a bank after reading one of your pieces. :) Your writing is so value packed, so many great, helpful take aways. Thank you, Holly.
This was a great article, Holly. I haven't completely quit social media, but I've scaled way back over the past 3 months. I've set a time limit of 1 hour for all of my social media apps combined (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) and had a friend set the screen time password on my phone so I can't cheat and extend the time limit. It has greatly improved my mental health and given me back a lot more time for more productive things. Restricting my social media use has taught me a few things: For me at least, Facebook and Instagram weren't really a problem. I only follow friends and family on both platforms (plus a couple of photography and pet accounts) and I mostly use them to keep up with birthdays, anniversaries, family vacations, what the kids are doing in school, etc. I don't see a lot of political craziness in my timeline on either platform, and I think that overall they play a positive role in helping me keep in touch with people I know IRL. Twitter, on the other hand, is everything you described it to be. Rather than improving my relationships with real people, it was actively harming them. I have a really good friend who is far more to the left than I am, and we have unfollowed each other on Twitter because our interactions on there were starting to affect our in-person relationship. I didn't like who either one of us were becoming (or appearing to be) on that app. How he appears in his tweets is nothing like the warm, funny, caring person that I know and love in real life. It's much better if we just hang out in person than try to interact with each other through social media.
The rise of the parasocial relationship and your awareness about it forming with you is very interesting.
I myself think about the consequences of parasocial relationships becoming a norm.
In some cases I think its ok, in a sense- Twitch streamers who play video games for an audience, have a parasocial relationship with their audience.
Where I think things could become toxic is when parasocial relationships are taken to the next level- one where the illusion of friendship and romantic attention is given in order to milk their viewers, or simps as I guess they're called now, over a long time period held on with the illusion of hope that perhaps one day the host will make good on the illusion of hope.
It's interesting to hear about your experience as someone who didn't even set out to create any parasocial relationships and that it just happened organically as you twitted.
In news that will surprise absolutely no one, within five minutes of posting this, I got email from someone wanting to argue that I don't understand Jim at all -- they do, based on his former Twitter presence! He "lacks wisdom" and is bad at educating people. Imagine thinking that an "insane" tweet is proof that JAMES LINDSAY is bad at educating people. The conviction that digital interaction, particularly Twitter, produces in people that they know other people, and can arrive at accurate and insightful grand conclusions about the person's life work, in a way that they absolutely do not and cannot is just jaw-dropping. Thank Zeus for email filters.
And it really makes me wonder -- if people are *this* committed to never, ever, ever learning a new thing and only seeing what they want to see through a screen, and the digital world plays so heavily into our culture these days, to a greater extent than physical reality in most cases -- how much of what all of us think we understand about the world is bullshit along the lines of "James Lindsay is insane and bad at educating people" ? It's a little scary, huh?
I have never used twitter, I quit facebook early in the pandemic, and I’m too old for any of the others. There was absolutely no room for nuance, no room for “I’m going to wait and form an opinion when I know more about this situation,” and no way to be sure that anyone reading my posts knew me or my background well enough to know where I was coming from. I do not miss it.
I also know that I’m *very* susceptible to forming those parasocial demi-relationships, and I use this Substack to do a little work around that. It’s cool when the author likes or replies to my comment, but I know that I do not know any of you, and that’s ok. I’m working very hard to make real friends in the real world these days. (On a related note, I recently learned that square dancing is a real hobby and the people who do it are a ton of fun!)
I have a strong suspicion what you describe of yourself and your relationship with Twitter in this piece is true for many people. I have no way of proving that, but there it is.
Unless one has a very stable sense of self, social media (not just Twitter) is fundamentally fragmentary.
I recently was suggested by the algorithm a video by a family blogger mom of 8: the video was her revealing that social media is a lie and her “loving husband” is actually a piece of shit who has left them high and dry for a third time.
I was a small-time “mommy blogger” in the first wave of that, but I had a lot of trouble accepting turning my life into a brand. That’s not why I started writing and it’s not what I wanted, so I didn’t write consistently online for years. It was hard in real-time to realize that the fairly new social media was doing exactly what you’ve said here, and to pinpoint why I was so unhappy with it.
We DO perform ourselves all the time, even in meatspace, because pro social filters cause us to censor ourselves, or stop us from reacting impulsively, or prevent us from fighting in the street with every stranger who annoys us. Twitter, from what I can tell (I didn’t last long on Twitter), does just the opposite: for many people it removes the pro social filters.
Rather than trying to “live authentically” or whatever, I think it’s more useful to understand what filters we’re using (or not using) and why. So much of the meme-ified self help and social justice advice is also about removing pro social filters, not “owing anyone” anything, feeling unencumbered by the very pro social filters that make good relationships, rather than examining those filters and when it’s appropriate or not to use them.
This Twitter world of which so many speak, almost never in a positive way, is foreign to me. But then, so is all social media. Is Substack social media? Is You Tube social media? If they are, then they are the only ones I engage with. Never had a FaceBook account.
Here's how I know I would be done in if I got involved with a platform like Twitter - I have one email account that is separate from my work and personal email. All my Substack subscription notifications go to that address. I read the Substacks and then delete them. What I keep are the likes and replies I receive from the comments I've made on various articles, essays or stories. Most of them are just likes, but I hoard them along with the comments like pieces of treasure. As if these are indications of my worthiness or something. From this, I can only imagine how crazy my sense of self-worth would be and the warped understanding I might have of people if I were on social media. Nope. Best I stay away from that.
I only know James Lindsey from his New Discourses channel - his calm tone of voice, peppered with frustration, disdain, and disbelief as he describes the roots of education and the mess that's been made does not indicate to me that he's lost it or gone crazy. He's a passionate defender of education undefiled by the woke monsters who seek to mold and then destroy the mental health of children. He's performing a valuable service by exposing it.
> "[A] whole, unified person—a person with stable mood states whose feelings, thoughts, and views originate from integrity."
Wait, that's like, a thing? I think you just made that up. **I've** certainly never experienced it...
> "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.
Yeah. I feel that one a lot. And it's slightly uglier cousin, the one that says that I **should have already killed myself** like, years ago, so as to have limited the amount of harm I've done in the world. Which is primarily vastly overwrought whinging about projects I haven't finished and people whose feelings I've hurt, and whose feelings I will likely hurt in the future, and whose feelings would be hurt if I actually did kill myself.
I got very ill on a trip during a military move shortly after I turned ten. We were moving from Northern Virginia, where I'd started Kindergarten and made it through half of fourth grade, to Hawaii. (My father was a US Naval officer.) We drove from NoVA to Long Beach, CA so the cars could be shipped over to HI, and we stopped for Christmas in Albuquerque, because that's where all of the grandparents were. I was really excited about moving to Hawaii, because I didn't know any better yet.
I have often thought that it would have been just about ideal (for me) if I'd died shortly after Christmas that year. I haven't really been truly happy since about three months after we got there. I realized sometime within the last several weeks that I've been exhibiting what I can now recognize as symptoms of severe clinical depression since I was twelve. Obviously, my parents would have been very upset. But I have on numerous occasions referred to the time when we lived in NoVA as "back when I used to smile".
My experiences in Hawaii are also why I react **very** negatively to the claim that it's impossible to be racist towards white people. Even using their bullshit made up "bigotry plus institutionalized oppression" definition, when one's elementary school teachers are using ethnic slurs to refer to them, that is about as institutionalized as it gets for a ten year old.
Wow. It's hard to decide where to even start with this since I think I could write entire essay replies on just sections of it.
Parts of it just read to me like mental sulphuric fog that's obsuring things for you while hurting you.
An analogy I use to communicate the dissconnect between online vs IRL (especially to the terminally online :P) is comparing interacting with someone online to talking to them thru an elaborate latticework fence. You get the rough approximation of a whole person and sometimes entire small pieces (aha, there's a full eye!) but never the full picture. Video chat? A transparent latticework fence at best even with both cameras on.
One thing my father told me ages ago was that: "People everywhere...they're all the same. Hopes, needs, dreams, fears... only the language & scenery changes." I know that may read as cold to some but he sounded extremely weary when he said it to me. It stands out in my mind to this day since it was one of the few conceptual things he said about other people that wasn't said disparagingly.
Last thing - that's NOT the #1 complaint I hear online about James. His business financial connections to Micheal O’Fallon are. His past twitter behavior is usually the second thing brought up. I don't think it's fair to condemn a whole person over some tweets but I'm also not sure how reasonable it is to insist people read hundreds upon hundreds of tweets to 'get' what James was trying to do. That just sounds to me like he ultimately chose the wrong medium for the message.
TLDR: I'm glad you wrote this out & the fact that twitter was ultimately designed to be terrible for everyone is a feature - not a bug.
I went to a memorial for a man yesterday. I didn’t know Brett very well. I met him at the pool and we talked about dogs and cats, my girlfriends needed heart surgery, and the 4th of July potluck that was coming up. Our last names gave us the assignment of making a salad. He usually made a fruit salad but said he wasn’t this time so I said I would. He then told me everything he did when he made one. After the pool the hot tub. When I left he asked if I’d bring him his pool noodles so that he wouldn’t forget them. He seemed a bit strange but in a good way. He had a bit of a slur and I wondered a bit if he’d been drinking. When talking about dogs he said something funny and off color.
A bit after that he told me about a golf cart parade he was going to be in. Everyone decorated their golf carts for the 4th and there was both a dry parade and a wet parade. My girlfriend and I wondered if the wet parade meant alcohol and golf carts. It was water guns and golf carts. His cart won the contest for best decorated.
At the Halloween party he was a werewolf. He was a big man, looked kind of like Hulk Hogan, and so was a good werewolf. He danced almost every dance in that mask. When I first saw him there we talked a bit, he pretend attacked me… I think he gave me a hug.
A couple of days before he died my girlfriend Karen and I were talking to him. He congratulated her on her 2nd place Bob’s Big Boy costume win. He wanted to come over some time and take pictures of our cats. One of his cats was older and he was interested in seeing other types of cats for when it was time to add a new one. That time never came, he died and my cats didn’t get their pictures taken.
Reflecting on what we think we know. I knew a kind, funny man. I man who said exactly what was on his mind, a bit of an eccentric but someone who was becoming a friend, someone who danced almost every dance until he was huffing and puffing.
At the memorial I found out lots of things. His brothers and sister and nephews and nieces cherished him as did his friends that knew him much longer than me. Many called him their best friend.
His brothers helped him out quite a bit. When he was born he was deprived of oxygen. He was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. He had an IQ of 69 and was either retarded or autistic.
It’s hard for my girlfriend and I to believe he was anything near retarded.
I wonder if I would had treated him any differently had I known. I hope not.
Anyway, he was a million miles away from Twitter.
At the end of the service a brother and nephew got out their guitars and did their version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah with a few lyrics customized for Brett and between tears Karen and I sang along with the chorus…
I've come to the conclusion that social media should never be engaged with without a specific intention.
Several years ago, my precious daughter developed health problems severe enough to require my full time care. The stress of caregiving, seeing my child struggle and suffer, dealing with a largely apathetic medical community, lack of sleep/exhaustion, isolation, anxiety, and depression have taken a tremendous toll on me. It’s affected my health, memory, cognition, and even my ability to communicate the way I used to. It’s been devastating.
I also have struggled for decades with a lack of sense of self from an abusive childhood. It certainly adds to the challenges of life.
I, too, joined Twitter with a hope to “get a little socialization into a lonely life.” I really appreciate the perfect clarity you have given me on what I was feeling but couldn’t put into words about Twitter. The fragmentation and emotional whiplash are REAL. It has been making me feel worse. It is poison.
I often feel like I just robbed a bank after reading one of your pieces. :) Your writing is so value packed, so many great, helpful take aways. Thank you, Holly.
You have the wrong caption for the photo, it should just read "BASED".
This was a great article, Holly. I haven't completely quit social media, but I've scaled way back over the past 3 months. I've set a time limit of 1 hour for all of my social media apps combined (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) and had a friend set the screen time password on my phone so I can't cheat and extend the time limit. It has greatly improved my mental health and given me back a lot more time for more productive things. Restricting my social media use has taught me a few things: For me at least, Facebook and Instagram weren't really a problem. I only follow friends and family on both platforms (plus a couple of photography and pet accounts) and I mostly use them to keep up with birthdays, anniversaries, family vacations, what the kids are doing in school, etc. I don't see a lot of political craziness in my timeline on either platform, and I think that overall they play a positive role in helping me keep in touch with people I know IRL. Twitter, on the other hand, is everything you described it to be. Rather than improving my relationships with real people, it was actively harming them. I have a really good friend who is far more to the left than I am, and we have unfollowed each other on Twitter because our interactions on there were starting to affect our in-person relationship. I didn't like who either one of us were becoming (or appearing to be) on that app. How he appears in his tweets is nothing like the warm, funny, caring person that I know and love in real life. It's much better if we just hang out in person than try to interact with each other through social media.
The rise of the parasocial relationship and your awareness about it forming with you is very interesting.
I myself think about the consequences of parasocial relationships becoming a norm.
In some cases I think its ok, in a sense- Twitch streamers who play video games for an audience, have a parasocial relationship with their audience.
Where I think things could become toxic is when parasocial relationships are taken to the next level- one where the illusion of friendship and romantic attention is given in order to milk their viewers, or simps as I guess they're called now, over a long time period held on with the illusion of hope that perhaps one day the host will make good on the illusion of hope.
It's interesting to hear about your experience as someone who didn't even set out to create any parasocial relationships and that it just happened organically as you twitted.
This is all so highly charged and a real eye-opener. I want to reflect on all of this a while before saying anything else. And: Thank you.