![]() It hasn’t rid me of all my anxieties, but giving up Twitter has made me think about things in a healthier way. ![]() I realise now that was the result of being in an echo chamber – I mostly followed people with similar views to my own, and without realising it, I’d lost the ability to think critically, to examine something from all angles and decide what I thought about it.īut eight months later, I don’t think I can ever go back. ![]() I felt as though I couldn’t process news or events properly until I knew what the general consensus was on Twitter. The first few days after leaving were strange. I log in occasionally to post things related to my job, but I haven’t looked at my timeline in months. “Putting this here so it’ll be embarrassing for me if I come back.” And that was that. “Gonna stop using Twitter for a bit,” I tweeted on that October afternoon. It had taken me a while to realise that my brighter mood at the weekends was because that was the only time I wasn’t chained to my laptop for work, intermittently pausing to read the most intimate thoughts of thousands of strangers. Every few days, my laptop would overheat and make a loud whirring noise, as though it were a plane about to take off, and I’d have to turn it off and on again. And the opinions of other people who didn’t agree with them, and their back-and-forth arguments in Twitter threads the length of short stories. And people’s opinions about the bad news. But that meant being relentlessly bombarded with bad news. Two of my close family members at home in Ireland were waiting on results of COVID tests, and I was becoming increasingly worried that the borders would close and separate me from most of the people I loved.īack then, I looked at Twitter multiple times each day – as a freelancer, I relied on it to come across work opportunities. The UK’s second wave of COVID-19 was beginning to look like a certainty, and rumours of another lockdown were rumbling across social media.
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