Dealing with Twitter Addiction
Twitter is a strange place. You get addicted to reading updates from lives of people who you don’t know, haven’t met and most probably will never meet! You start to keep track of strangers’ love affairs, their breakups, their jobs and so on. You find a need to correct and counter people’s opinions. Kind of stuff you would just let go in real life.
On the other hand, you have a place to express your thoughts, even if they are really stupid. You know that feeling when you have to let out a thought at that very moment and have nobody to text or call? Well, twitter it is! Put it out there! And twitter is a wonderful place to go to when you are alone. Eating alone or waiting alone in a queue or travelling alone. All those situations when you don’t have anything to do. Log on to twitter and you are no more alone!
But the problems come when you are really addicted to it. You start to prefer reading your timeline to conversing with people you are with. At work, you feel an urge to keep checking twitter every half an hour. And that’s when you know that it’s time to cut back. Reclaim your life. Try to go back to the times when there was no twitter.
I had decided to go cold turkey, not access twitter at all. But it’s very hard to do and not even necessary. Twitter is a great place when used correctly. So, I am still active on twitter but have reduced my usage drastically. I have also decided to implement some rules which will make twitter a more pleasant place for me.
1. Stop following journos.
2. Stop following people who are explicitly pro-congress or pro-BJP or pro-any political party.
3. Do not start a twitter fight. Do not argue with people on twitter. If I find somebody’s opinion disagreeable, I am not going to react henceforth. I am just going to let it be.
4. Do not sly tweet. It’s very kiddish and serves no purpose.
I hope that does it :)
