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?
Man, I don't understand what's going on in my **own** head well enough to claim with absolute certainty I know what's what with **me**, so anyone who claims they can tell all about another person from reading a couple of their tweets is clearly blatantly delusional.
Also, you should check out another substack (if you haven't already) called "handwaving freakoutery" (hwfo.substack.com) and his articles on Egregores because I think you may find it very interesting stuff based on your second paragraph here.
Thank you. Zombies, I'd say. My friend, an artist, Garrett Stewart, who helped me get out of the single-wide behind the mortuary just outside Window Rock, the capital of the Navajo Nation, had a whole line on why Zombies suddenly figured hugely towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century: They were about people moving around but nobody's in there. & thx for the Kipling quote -- in this house, that tension figures hugely. (Also, the oblique W.B. Yeats allusion.)
There's that too, but for me it's more a matter of how I read. I might take my eyes away from the page for a moment and digest something, and if I realize I wasn't quite paying attention I can skip back easily. Audiobook controls are way too clunky for something I can automatically do myself instantly. Also, I read way faster than anyone can talk.
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!)
You are wise to stay as far away as possible. I've only been off Twitter for four months and the difference in what feels "normal" to me is quite noticeable. If I had a child, I would keep them off social media as long as possible, even if I had to bribe them. I am convinced we will eventually find it to be the mental health equivalent of heroin and it will, if we ever become a sane society again, become illegal to let kids be on it.
I'm trying to make friends in real life too -- it's hard, especially given my existing commitments, which take up so much of my time and energy, plus the fact that I'm fairly introverted and love solitude.
Holly, I agree totally about social media and kids. My children are currently completely screen-free, and I intend to deprive them of social media altogether as they get older. I talk about this sometimes and I get the sense that people think I'm being melodramatic about the risks/dangers, but I believe it is RUINING kids nowadays. Actually ruining their lives and their personalities.
You are being a very, very good mom, in ways your kids may not understand for decades. I know how confusing it was for me to experience the emotional whiplash of social media and try to still retain some integral sense of self, and I at least had some understanding that I was fragmented in an abnormal way. For kids, who are still *building* an integral sense of self? I am not sure that a cabal of evil scientists who got together to TRY to make it impossible for kids to build a stable sense of themselves could do much better than social media.
Yes. Thank you. I've tried to talk about this on Twitter and elsewhere and it's just... crickets. It drives me a little crazy because I think it's very obvious what's happening, and I agree completely with how your characterized it here. It's the same thing when I tell people that maybe they shouldn't post photos of their kids on the internet -- blank stares. How can people be so disconnected from what's happening here, and why it matters? It's a point of great frustration and discouragement for me.
Yeah, NO KIDDING, don't tell the world when you'll be away and what your kids look like and where they are! (What kind of people imagine it's safe to do so?)
Probably not post-Holocaust or post-Cold-War or post-any-other-traumas, like me; OR, they process these things by denying the knowledge to be gained from them in order to deny the enormity of what has happened, and what will likely continue for the foreseeable future. Thanks for posting, Nua.
Well, maybe that (people's being molded to have no stable sense of self, much as possible) was the point. Puts *somebody* "in the driver's seat," now doesn't it? (I don't think I'm being excessive here -- this is the kind of thing that at first I and others accuse me of being "paranoid" which means I know at that point that I've just about hit the nail right on the head . . . and then sometime later, data arrives confirming just that.) . . . oh btw, you do know that the www was the old Darpa net declassified so that, just like people discovered after the Berlin Wall fell and people in East Germany could find out WHO had been reporting them to the government (their BFF sister-in-law w whom they used to have coffee every morning, check out The New Yorker article), people would easily give up each other and themselves? FB just amplified it, but it's still based on a military ops creation.
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.
Agreed. Twitter is the only social media I really know anything about, but it wouldn't surprise me if the others worked the same way to various degrees. I am much more fragmented than "normal," but people I respect have told me many times that I underestimate how screwed up the "average" person is. If that's true, then it's no wonder our societal mental health metrics continue to grow more and more horrifying.
Have to concur with what people you respect have told you many times (and thank you and them for putting terse words to an amazing subterranean pool of horror in the human psyche, below the surface). . . . I'm just catching up with your writings today, and was thinking as screwed-up as you experience yourself to be (makes sense), what floors me is that still, this person is saying things that make a lot more sense, fundamentally, than vast numbers of people who think they're "normal". Thanks for providing more "Sane" amidst a flood of Messed-Up-And-Not-Doing-Anything-With-It-But-Propagate-It.
Thinking some more about what you said here -- I've now met roughly half a dozen people in person who I first met on Twitter, and talked on the phone or Zoom to several others. In every case, their Twitter "persona" and their direct human-to-human self differs, but not a lot. It really is like a caricature of sorts -- the twitter self is strongly suggestive of the real self, but distorted in some respects.
I've been told that my Twitter persona is quite like me in real life, but that my Twitter has even more cats. (I'm not a crazy cat lady, I only have one cat.) But Twitter likes cats, so people get more of Chilli than would otherwise be the case.
I have a strong suspicion that your strong suspicion is true.
Until Holly started talking to me about the specific mechanisms going on with Twitter that lead to what we see, I didn't understand it. But this makes it obvious, at least to me, what's going on.
Everything she says of her experience on Twitter is true for me with regard to the whiplash effect. And the illusion of the whole thing.
The lesson I needed to learn about Twitter that I didn't want to was a form of "know your limits. You have them, and they're hard walls you can't get over." A bit like what I had to figure out about alcohol.
(writing this immediately without *even* reading the other comments which we're about to) Well, I'd say the pandemic-isolation (or any other kind of long-term isolation) took a sledgehammer-blow or two to even the strongest among us. #Grateful we're still standing, some way, somehow.
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.
That bit about social media and prosocial filters is why I ended up leaving Facebook; It was costing me real life friendships. Because something about social media makes everyone interpret everything everyone says in the worst and most malicious sense possible. And I don't have that many friends to start with, so losing some is extra bad.
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.
Thank you. From what I'm reading, you're doing right to keep the "likes" and "replies" -- to me, they indicate that you're being HEARD and that, from here, seems to be the crux of things: That so many people go UNHEARD. (Cf.: The scene "Emily's Birthday" in Thornton Wilder's play, "Our Town.")
Thank you and Holly Math Nerd for pointing me towards Dr. James Lindsay. How might I access that channel, please? I want to hear him. Found some of him on YouTube, but scattered via Search Engine; interested in experiencing the cohesive progression. If possible. Please.
> "[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.
Oy. I'm sorry. Yes, I read all that. Thank you for sharing. . . . I was Assistant Professor at an HBCU and hear you about institutionalized racism. I could say more but know to shut up about now.
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.
The thing about him on Twitter is that he was extremely effective at what he was trying to do. Other people used Twitter in other ways, but he started “ok groomer” and is responsible for that being a national conversation. Because of his Twitter strategy. That’s damn effective.
When did he start that, may I ask? I'm only just recently hearing of him, though (thanks to you!) had heard about the "Libs of TikTok" kerfuffle and been following *that*.
Oh never mind. Actually "OK, Groomer" seems to go back at least as far as 2019, according to Urban Dictionary. (I'll keep reading.) Looks like James' kerfuffle was mid-2022. (Thanks for the info. This is interesting.)
Me too. And I hadn't heard of Dr. James Lindsay until exceedingly recently, plus thank you for pointing out that most people wouldn't even try to read through his "million-jillion" tweets or Whatever (I would, for a couple of reasons -- one, that care to not condemn anyone or judge them negatively unless I am absolutely certain, and certainly to not "forward" slander, is pretty core for me).
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…
Absolutely. That was how I was introduced to, and used, Twitter, so am reading with interest this whole other kind of horror (sounds more like what FB can become if, again, not engaged with in a very focused way . . . like, come to think of it, a good many Dysfunctional Families can if gone into and out of on the Holidays with a very tightly-wrapped agenda and self). What I learnt of Twitter and its use: Deb Dib and these two others, my Careers Industry (i.e. targeted resume-writing) mentors/teachers: https://www.amazon.com/Twitter-Job-Search-Guide-Advance/dp/1593577915 I cannot imagine having gone onto such a medium randomly and behaved as though I were in my own living-room.
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.
Thank you so much! I know how good it feels when someone gives me language for something -- my friend Josh does it on his podcast more than anyone else -- and knowing I give you that sometimes makes my day.
And unlike on Twitter, where I would say this and, by the necessity of the medium, forget a few seconds later, despite my best intentions--I really will think of you and your daughter. I have no idea if it helps anything or not but sometimes in metta practice, one picks another to send lovingkindness to. I will send metta to you and your daughter soon. <3
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.
Wow. Now that you mention it -- I had that happen once, notably with a Careers Industry mentor. She made a pronouncement waaaay far to the left, I guess at that point "woke" ("trial close," it'd be in Sales); I not only didn't "bite" but said I didn't believe that. Then someone else, all the way from Chicago, was circling and about to strike. I got out and "unfriended" her online and then the whole thing, given her massive, very public disclosures about things people who had considered her a friend had told her privately, PLUS including experiences shared by supposedly EVERYONE she knew including people to whom that did not apply . . . I was out o' there. I think you may be right about the medium itself's being dicey. Oh, and she'd been a really good mentor, an excellent one, someone I'd valued. It's funny what people will expose to the UN and Everyone, that in some places would be considered private. It's like all sense of internality first got shattered as it was devalued, and then . . . I can't even find word for it, but I know I don't want to be part of it. Thanks to everyone for writing in on this apparently very hotly charged topic (see, I typed "ch" and it gave me ~3 wrong suggestions and then where I'd been headed -- freaky little thing, the algorithm).
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?
People are robots.
Man, I don't understand what's going on in my **own** head well enough to claim with absolute certainty I know what's what with **me**, so anyone who claims they can tell all about another person from reading a couple of their tweets is clearly blatantly delusional.
Also, you should check out another substack (if you haven't already) called "handwaving freakoutery" (hwfo.substack.com) and his articles on Egregores because I think you may find it very interesting stuff based on your second paragraph here.
Can confirm that HWFO is a great read. Also Chris Bray (chrisbray.substack.com).
Thank you. Zombies, I'd say. My friend, an artist, Garrett Stewart, who helped me get out of the single-wide behind the mortuary just outside Window Rock, the capital of the Navajo Nation, had a whole line on why Zombies suddenly figured hugely towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century: They were about people moving around but nobody's in there. & thx for the Kipling quote -- in this house, that tension figures hugely. (Also, the oblique W.B. Yeats allusion.)
> "I've no patience for podcasts; I prefer reading stuff instead."
Oh good, I'm not the only one. I can't stand audiobooks, either.
There's that too, but for me it's more a matter of how I read. I might take my eyes away from the page for a moment and digest something, and if I realize I wasn't quite paying attention I can skip back easily. Audiobook controls are way too clunky for something I can automatically do myself instantly. Also, I read way faster than anyone can talk.
Me too. Much faster. & absorb better. Thx
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!)
You are wise to stay as far away as possible. I've only been off Twitter for four months and the difference in what feels "normal" to me is quite noticeable. If I had a child, I would keep them off social media as long as possible, even if I had to bribe them. I am convinced we will eventually find it to be the mental health equivalent of heroin and it will, if we ever become a sane society again, become illegal to let kids be on it.
I'm trying to make friends in real life too -- it's hard, especially given my existing commitments, which take up so much of my time and energy, plus the fact that I'm fairly introverted and love solitude.
Holly, I agree totally about social media and kids. My children are currently completely screen-free, and I intend to deprive them of social media altogether as they get older. I talk about this sometimes and I get the sense that people think I'm being melodramatic about the risks/dangers, but I believe it is RUINING kids nowadays. Actually ruining their lives and their personalities.
You are being a very, very good mom, in ways your kids may not understand for decades. I know how confusing it was for me to experience the emotional whiplash of social media and try to still retain some integral sense of self, and I at least had some understanding that I was fragmented in an abnormal way. For kids, who are still *building* an integral sense of self? I am not sure that a cabal of evil scientists who got together to TRY to make it impossible for kids to build a stable sense of themselves could do much better than social media.
Yes. Thank you. I've tried to talk about this on Twitter and elsewhere and it's just... crickets. It drives me a little crazy because I think it's very obvious what's happening, and I agree completely with how your characterized it here. It's the same thing when I tell people that maybe they shouldn't post photos of their kids on the internet -- blank stares. How can people be so disconnected from what's happening here, and why it matters? It's a point of great frustration and discouragement for me.
Yeah, NO KIDDING, don't tell the world when you'll be away and what your kids look like and where they are! (What kind of people imagine it's safe to do so?)
Probably not post-Holocaust or post-Cold-War or post-any-other-traumas, like me; OR, they process these things by denying the knowledge to be gained from them in order to deny the enormity of what has happened, and what will likely continue for the foreseeable future. Thanks for posting, Nua.
Well, maybe that (people's being molded to have no stable sense of self, much as possible) was the point. Puts *somebody* "in the driver's seat," now doesn't it? (I don't think I'm being excessive here -- this is the kind of thing that at first I and others accuse me of being "paranoid" which means I know at that point that I've just about hit the nail right on the head . . . and then sometime later, data arrives confirming just that.) . . . oh btw, you do know that the www was the old Darpa net declassified so that, just like people discovered after the Berlin Wall fell and people in East Germany could find out WHO had been reporting them to the government (their BFF sister-in-law w whom they used to have coffee every morning, check out The New Yorker article), people would easily give up each other and themselves? FB just amplified it, but it's still based on a military ops creation.
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.
Agreed. Twitter is the only social media I really know anything about, but it wouldn't surprise me if the others worked the same way to various degrees. I am much more fragmented than "normal," but people I respect have told me many times that I underestimate how screwed up the "average" person is. If that's true, then it's no wonder our societal mental health metrics continue to grow more and more horrifying.
Have to concur with what people you respect have told you many times (and thank you and them for putting terse words to an amazing subterranean pool of horror in the human psyche, below the surface). . . . I'm just catching up with your writings today, and was thinking as screwed-up as you experience yourself to be (makes sense), what floors me is that still, this person is saying things that make a lot more sense, fundamentally, than vast numbers of people who think they're "normal". Thanks for providing more "Sane" amidst a flood of Messed-Up-And-Not-Doing-Anything-With-It-But-Propagate-It.
Thinking some more about what you said here -- I've now met roughly half a dozen people in person who I first met on Twitter, and talked on the phone or Zoom to several others. In every case, their Twitter "persona" and their direct human-to-human self differs, but not a lot. It really is like a caricature of sorts -- the twitter self is strongly suggestive of the real self, but distorted in some respects.
I've been told that my Twitter persona is quite like me in real life, but that my Twitter has even more cats. (I'm not a crazy cat lady, I only have one cat.) But Twitter likes cats, so people get more of Chilli than would otherwise be the case.
funny. thanks
I have a strong suspicion that your strong suspicion is true.
Until Holly started talking to me about the specific mechanisms going on with Twitter that lead to what we see, I didn't understand it. But this makes it obvious, at least to me, what's going on.
Everything she says of her experience on Twitter is true for me with regard to the whiplash effect. And the illusion of the whole thing.
The lesson I needed to learn about Twitter that I didn't want to was a form of "know your limits. You have them, and they're hard walls you can't get over." A bit like what I had to figure out about alcohol.
(writing this immediately without *even* reading the other comments which we're about to) Well, I'd say the pandemic-isolation (or any other kind of long-term isolation) took a sledgehammer-blow or two to even the strongest among us. #Grateful we're still standing, some way, somehow.
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 is very astute -- thank you! If you have any posts about this, please email me a link. I'd like to read more of your thoughts on this.
I don’t…but I shall! I’ll send you a link when I do :)
That bit about social media and prosocial filters is why I ended up leaving Facebook; It was costing me real life friendships. Because something about social media makes everyone interpret everything everyone says in the worst and most malicious sense possible. And I don't have that many friends to start with, so losing some is extra bad.
Thank you. I'm going to ponder this, as well. May I ask during what time-period you were on/off?
WOW. That first sentence/paragraph. Am going to ruminate on THAT for a while. Thanks
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.
Thank you. From what I'm reading, you're doing right to keep the "likes" and "replies" -- to me, they indicate that you're being HEARD and that, from here, seems to be the crux of things: That so many people go UNHEARD. (Cf.: The scene "Emily's Birthday" in Thornton Wilder's play, "Our Town.")
Thank you and Holly Math Nerd for pointing me towards Dr. James Lindsay. How might I access that channel, please? I want to hear him. Found some of him on YouTube, but scattered via Search Engine; interested in experiencing the cohesive progression. If possible. Please.
> "[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.
Oy. I'm sorry. Yes, I read all that. Thank you for sharing. . . . I was Assistant Professor at an HBCU and hear you about institutionalized racism. I could say more but know to shut up about now.
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.
The thing about him on Twitter is that he was extremely effective at what he was trying to do. Other people used Twitter in other ways, but he started “ok groomer” and is responsible for that being a national conversation. Because of his Twitter strategy. That’s damn effective.
When did he start that, may I ask? I'm only just recently hearing of him, though (thanks to you!) had heard about the "Libs of TikTok" kerfuffle and been following *that*.
Oh never mind. Actually "OK, Groomer" seems to go back at least as far as 2019, according to Urban Dictionary. (I'll keep reading.) Looks like James' kerfuffle was mid-2022. (Thanks for the info. This is interesting.)
Me too. And I hadn't heard of Dr. James Lindsay until exceedingly recently, plus thank you for pointing out that most people wouldn't even try to read through his "million-jillion" tweets or Whatever (I would, for a couple of reasons -- one, that care to not condemn anyone or judge them negatively unless I am absolutely certain, and certainly to not "forward" slander, is pretty core for me).
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.
Absolutely. That was how I was introduced to, and used, Twitter, so am reading with interest this whole other kind of horror (sounds more like what FB can become if, again, not engaged with in a very focused way . . . like, come to think of it, a good many Dysfunctional Families can if gone into and out of on the Holidays with a very tightly-wrapped agenda and self). What I learnt of Twitter and its use: Deb Dib and these two others, my Careers Industry (i.e. targeted resume-writing) mentors/teachers: https://www.amazon.com/Twitter-Job-Search-Guide-Advance/dp/1593577915 I cannot imagine having gone onto such a medium randomly and behaved as though I were in my own living-room.
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.
Thank you so much! I know how good it feels when someone gives me language for something -- my friend Josh does it on his podcast more than anyone else -- and knowing I give you that sometimes makes my day.
And unlike on Twitter, where I would say this and, by the necessity of the medium, forget a few seconds later, despite my best intentions--I really will think of you and your daughter. I have no idea if it helps anything or not but sometimes in metta practice, one picks another to send lovingkindness to. I will send metta to you and your daughter soon. <3
😭❤️
Thank you.
That is wonderful. I will look this up as well, "metta."
Thank you, Peggy.
You have the wrong caption for the photo, it should just read "BASED".
I’m texting this to him. 😂
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.
Wow. Now that you mention it -- I had that happen once, notably with a Careers Industry mentor. She made a pronouncement waaaay far to the left, I guess at that point "woke" ("trial close," it'd be in Sales); I not only didn't "bite" but said I didn't believe that. Then someone else, all the way from Chicago, was circling and about to strike. I got out and "unfriended" her online and then the whole thing, given her massive, very public disclosures about things people who had considered her a friend had told her privately, PLUS including experiences shared by supposedly EVERYONE she knew including people to whom that did not apply . . . I was out o' there. I think you may be right about the medium itself's being dicey. Oh, and she'd been a really good mentor, an excellent one, someone I'd valued. It's funny what people will expose to the UN and Everyone, that in some places would be considered private. It's like all sense of internality first got shattered as it was devalued, and then . . . I can't even find word for it, but I know I don't want to be part of it. Thanks to everyone for writing in on this apparently very hotly charged topic (see, I typed "ch" and it gave me ~3 wrong suggestions and then where I'd been headed -- freaky little thing, the algorithm).
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.
That is SO interesting . . . thank you.
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.