Eleven days without Twitter, and counting. At the start of the holidays I uninstalled the app from my phone, and have been staying away from the computer. And still, the pull of addiction. I realize that Twitter has become my go-to for downtime. It’s entertainment, news, gossip, art fed to me in bite-sized, constantly renewed increments. Without it, I feel a little isolated.

It feels like the chorus that fed my inner discourse is gone. Suddenly, it’s quieter in my head. Lonelier, perhaps. The only people I hear from are my actual friends, acquaintances and family.

I’m back to a pull relationship with the internet. I occasionally look something up because I’m curious. News, trivia, scientific background. But I’m not constantly clicking links other people tweet. Maybe less diversity there? But also less rabbit holes, where after twenty minutes I suddenly wonder how I got to the page I am. Less frustration too, when I’ve spent ten minutes reading some blog post on medium to find that the opinion posted lacks nuance and was a waste of time.

But I may miss the flavour of the day, the scandal of the hour, and if a meme comes up in conversation I may be completely oblivious.

Why stop Twitter? I guess I realized I’d reached a degree of combined dependency and annoyance I wasn’t comfortable with.

One thing that bothers me is the constant froth of indignation and despair. There’s always something to be angry about. But the problem is there’s very little I can do about most of it. I give money to worthy causes, I speak up when I can, but really I have a very small radius of influence in this world. Most anger fed to me by Twitter is a waste of my time and adrenaline. There’s some strange confort in being desperate together, but really I’d rather not be desperate at all.

I’m also annoyed at Twitter’s increasingly diffuse nature. Instead of seeing what the people I follow are saying, I see what a subset of the people I follow that I’ve interacted with most recently like and interact with themselves. It’s still a bubble - I was taken by surprise by the recent election results - but it’s a bubble I have very little control over. Ever changing algorithms decide what I’m probably interested in, without taking into account my explicitly stated preferences. And inject (largely irrelevant) ads.

I finally got fed up when Twitter asked me about topics I’d be interested in, to presumably feed me even more random content. I realized that whatever Twitter started out as, it had now moved to something that wasn’t working for me. Rather, I was working for it, feeding my actions, clicks, tweets, into its endlessly hungry maw. I could try and tweak my preferences to get ‘old Twitter’ back, maybe. But in the meantime I thought it’d be a good idea to take a step back and detox.

At some point I’ll turn around and do a retrospective. What am I missing? Am I missing it enough to try to tweak Twitter? Is it finally time to tell the little bird goodbye?