Time for a #tweetox: why you should give up Twitter like Jaden Smith
There’s a ringing in your ears but you can’t locate its source. Reality has fallen away: for you’ve spent the past few weeks on Twitter, thrilling in the frenzied badinage that crescendoed in the early hours of Friday morning, as the exit polls started to ring true.
Your opinions are your own, retweets do not equal endorsements, what’s the official hashtag?, you chatter, on repeat, as your small child tries to interest you in a picture they drew at school. In the image, Mummy has a phone for a head. A few days ago, your other half went out to get milk; they’re yet to return, but you haven’t actually noticed because you’ve been furiously subtweeting your nemesis.
You didn’t predict this. You hadn’t been interested in years — barely remembered your password, in fact — until one evening you thought you’d see what the wires were saying. Now, you’ve felt vaguely panicked for about three weeks, though when you log out, the world feels like it’s moving at a crawl that bores you to tears.
You’re sleeping terribly — which you will, if you continue to spend the hours before bedtime bathed in a phone screen. Your eyeballs are mired in a rheumy paste; your fingers are twitchy. Nothing matters any more unless it’s #trending.
You need a tweetox. Buffy creator and rumoured Star Wars director Joss Whedon is doing one. Whedon said that living on the social network is “like taking the bar exam at Coachella”. Will Smith’s esoteric sprog Jaden has deleted his account too. We’ll miss gems such as, “Most trees are blue”, but Smith will be laughing all the way to better mental health.
“Our brains evolved to problem-solve and do things — which is why we respond to Twitter,” says Dr Michael Sinclair, author of Mindfulness for Busy People. “But constantly doing things increases our sense of distractability, which affects our productivity and wellbeing. We need to live in the moment.”
Tips for switching off include deleting the app, reading hard copies of newspapers and having conversations with people you actually know and like in real life. Send out a search party for your other half; reclaim your other child from school (balls, you have TWO, don’t you?), where they must have been since Thursday.
If a tweet drops and you’re not around to hear it, do you still care? Let’s see.
