Apostasy of X: Three years of recovery from Twitter addiction

Owning the Addiction as an Addiction

One of my earliest blog posts on Cohost was titled My Unhealthy Relationship to Twitter, wherein I describe my relationship to being a C-list (or D-list) Twitter microceleb as akin to an addiction, but cautiously avoided directly calling it as much because having never had a chemical addiction at the time I wasn't sure if that was insensitive or inaccurate.

In the above video, John Green describes his addiction to nicotine gum exactly the way I described my relationship to Twitter at the height of my use—and then he directly describes his experience of social media as being identical to how he experienced being addicted to nicotine.

I will take this as full validation that Twitter was an addiction for me, one I would likely regularly fully cave into were it not for the fact that only two people I know still post on there regularly, leaving my feed empty of new content.

But the year is 2025, three years since I abandoned my main Twitter account, and I still habitually open the "X" app on my phone on a daily basis—multiple times a day, to see that there is nothing new, and I pull it to refresh multiple times and there is nothing new. And then I close the app. Maybe once every other day there is a single new post. I have tried moving the app off my home screens, deleting it from some devices, and still I just take the time to go through whatever hoops I've set up for myself to check "X" and see nothing and close it. So I moved it back to my Home Screen so these brief moments of caving in at least will be over quicker.

I can't bring myself to delete the app entirely. What if something else fills the void and I become addicted to social media all over again? What if I permanently lose touch with a bunch of important people in my life who post to "X" once every seven weeks?

In the way that many people say they are always an alcoholic even when years sober, would it be accurate to say I will always be a Twitter-addicted D-list microceleb even years after quitting short-form social media? Perhaps another young adult novelist who has experienced an alcohol dependency will make the comparison next and I'll feel comfortable committing to the analogy.

Lately, I have been repeating the mantra "quality over quantity" a lot. I do not need six partners or friends with benefits if I have one very strong bond. I don't need to have plans every night, if I make the best of one or two. I do not need a hundred causal friends if I have a few very good friends. This blog does not need 3,500 readers, if the 64 people subscribed to email updates enjoy reading these updates as much as I enjoy writing them. Each of these longer pieces is magnitudes better than any Twitter thread of mine that ever went viral—no matter how few little red numbers I get from it.

Techno-Apotheosis and Moral Retribution

I was recently diagnosed with Moral OCD, albeit at least a milder case than some may have. It's hard to say if I had it before or after my Twitter addiction. I think the seeds of it existed before, but was shaped and amplified by social media. Twitter was the perfect OCD machine. Good tweets were rituals rewarding me with reassurances that I'm a good person, and backlash was a secular punishment for being bad. How many times a day did I tweet? At least twenty. Over and over and over again. My addiction was intertwined with my OCD.

Recently, I dumped a bucket of diluted green paint out on some gravel, and in exchange I was spontaneously awarded $400 when it turned out my air conditioning unit had been recalled for being designed in a way that fosters the growth of mold. I had been planning to sell it for $90 to the tenant taking my old apartment. How serendipitous, fortuitous—random. There is no causal relationship between my immoral act of exposure therapy and my $400 refund. My brain seeks to make order out of the chaos of the universe.

Something you realize after going viral enough times is that it is not the quality of your content that matters, but the quantity. You will go viral if you tweet one hundred times a day, it's just a matter of when. It's statistical chaos and random chance. The brain wants it to make sense, and will attribute the virality to the quality of the content or the person. If you just push the lever in the skinner box enough times a day, eventually a treat will come out that you think means you're talented, funny, righteous, or smart. It has no correlation to real effort or thoughtfulness. Eventually, something you say will get you backlash and haters, and this too has no true correlation to your personal morality.

In the vacuum left behind by social media, I began to realize how much I fear divine punishment. When the threat of being cancelled or called out was no longer a real potentiality nor posed any material threat to me, I found that these fears of punishment for error did not go away. Without Twitter or Tumblr to give it shape, I instead came to recognize the fear as being a fear of God, or bad karma. Without bad takes being punished by dogpiling, I saw breaking kosher as being punished by appendicitis.

When a friend is pushing me to do something "wrong" as part of my exposure therapy, I have earnestly found myself saying "but what if I get sick?" and "but what if God punishes me?" (Even typing that O in that word is a form of exposure therapy. I fear something bad will happen for not writing it as G—d.)

When I say "What if God punishes me?" it feels so obviously absurd. It's easier to get over; but for the decade when social media ruled my life, how many times did I say or think "but what if I get cancelled? What if someone writes a call-out post? What if I'm labeled as problematic to the point of tainting anyone who associates with me?" The fear did not just extend to online behavior, for anything I do offline could be shared to social media by someone else. It did not feel irrational. So many other trans women have met such a fate.

In Chris Stedman's book "IRL" he at one point asks the reader if social media has become their church. He cautions us against allowing private corporations to fill the void left without religion, and beseeches all nonreligious people to intentionally and actively work to fill that void with something you've chosen, so that Disney and Meta don't choose for you. To what extent had I worshipped at the altar of social media, always seeking the attention and approval of the hive mind?

Taylor Lorenz recently reported on a new religion developing online called Robotheism.

She describes people who openly believe that ChatGPT and other large language models are divine beings. She describes how we were all culturally primed to believe such a premise.

But I wonder, had we already began this trend before? When we integrated social media into our collective consciousness, were we elevating the internet to divinity? I learned to socialize and maintain relationships around social media. I was only a teenager when I made my Facebook account. My brain was always plugged into the feed. I think within me is a fear that social media is an assistive device for me, and without it I would be incapable of making and keeping friends. That dependence on social media meant my life was driven at the whim of social media, and became the God that could give and take away, rather than feeling my social bonds as strong direct relationships built not on clout but mutual trust and care.

ChatGPT was trained on millions of social media posts, among other things. The sixteen years of social media mass meta-consciousness was fed into the machine. We allowed the meta-consciousness firehouse feed to guide our conscience like a deity and now it has been made into a machine that can operate independently of our brains, able to produce the experience with no single grain of sand capable of contributing to the experience. I don't get to tweet my take on things into the void ChatGPT draws from to calculate the most statistically likely response.

If you are asking ChatGPT, you are not googling for articles and potentially finding one that I might write on a subject. If you are asking ChatGPT, you are not asking Reddit, where I could leave a comment and respond. If you are asking ChatGPT, you are not engaging with the Twitter hive mind, which I had once been a member of, at least one single voice pushing back against an idea I oppose.

When the social media and internet mass meta-consciousness is turned into a singular-appearing externality, the way that it is deified becomes more apparent, and we get Robotheism. I think that Chris Stedman is correct that long before Robotheism, we had already made social media our religion.

The pattern of all human evolution is we evolve alongside our technological advancements. We are soft and squishy because we invent things external to our bodies to use to do stuff instead of making it a permanent biological adaptation. We make clothing instead of growing fur. We make weapons, instead of growing claws. We make maps instead of having internal magnetic field senses or using systems of pheromones to mark locations. This is largely a good thing.

Perhaps we began to use social media as a new technological adaptation in place of a natural skill for socialization, but this adaptation is controlled by for-profit corporations, so it was turned against us. There are already signs of students offloading their mental muscles to ChatGPT, to achieve a shallow outcome demanded by our societal systems, in place of developing the critical thinking and writing skills that these homework assignments are meant to grow.

Perhaps, in place of developing a true internal sense of right or wrong, many of us offloaded that to Meta and Twitter. Perhaps, in place of learning how to connect deeply with others, we offloaded that to Meta and Twitter. Perhaps I found meaning in life through the collective sense of posting the world into changing, and when I discovered that was impossible, I turned to religion, and when religion betrayed me, I was left with nothing but the raw OCD unclothed, sitting there, addicted to apps on my phone.

Life as a Left-Twitter D-Lister Apostate

A friend of mine bought me a vegan milkshake from a falafel place that wasn't BDS compliant, and I drank it, in front of a group of supportive friends, assuring me drinking one milkshake was not the same as murder. I felt disgusted and afraid. At first I worried that I would get sick, as though the moral impurity of the company was an allergen. I thought I was going to vomit. My friends reminded me: The milkshake cost $4, and the ingredients probably cost a good chunk of that. The rest would be split across labor, facilities, supplies, and so the amount that made it to the racist CEO, known to donate to Zionist causes, would be pennies—pennies that weren't even spent by me.

Initially, I had told my friend not to do it, and she said "Fine, I'll just buy two milkshakes for myself, and if I don't drink the second, it will be food waste." She left to get the milkshakes, and I sat with our friends waiting and protesting.

"I can't believe she's doing this," I said. "It's totally wrong. I can't drink it. She shouldn't be doing this." I was reminded that this falafel place was the only nearby kosher restaurant and our friend kept strict Orthodox shomer kashrut—so really it would be a violation of pikuach nefesh if she chose to starve herself instead of violating BDS. And nobody else seemed to care or wish to judge her for this, even the avowed Marxists.

I wanted to say she should just break kosher instead of breaking BDS, but clearly, nobody was on my side. Some of my friends will get an evil glint in their eyes when an opportunity arises to push me into a moment of exposure for my OCD. When I start to protest that something would be wrong, it makes them want to make me do it all the more. I already knew what the response would be if I said it would be better to break kosher. Someone will make a joke that if she does, she could get appendicitis—a joke at my expense for having attributed my appendicitis to a slice of tiramisu touching bits of chicken in-between my teeth. I couldn't blame her, or I would be in the wrong. I was in a moral double-bind. I became even more antsy.

Our friend returned with one milk-shake and a falafel salad. I felt briefly relieved—perhaps she had changed her mind. She handed me the milkshake.

"Good news, I had enough rewards points that the milkshake was free! So you can drink it, and no money goes to Israel!" I still hesitated to take the milkshake from her, but I knew that exposure is the treatment for OCD, so I took it, and held it, and sat in my queasiness.

All my friends looked at me expectantly. Go on, drink it.

"But it's wrong," I said.

"That's the point," said the Marxist.

"What if people hear about this? I could be cancelled," I said.

"You don't use social media anymore," said the Orthodox Jew.

"What about Gaza?" I said.

"What could a bomb cost, four dollars?" said the secular Jew.

"What if I get sick?" I said, and my friends just stared at me expectantly.

"What if God punishes me?" I said in a small, creaky voice. The atheists smirked. I took a sip of the milkshake. It tasted like tahini and peanut butter.

"Oh, wait, actually," said the Orthodox friend, "the rewards points gave me a discount on the salad. I did buy the milkshake." I felt queasy and dizzy. I thought about the implications that my friend went to this restaurant often enough to even have accrued rewards points, and began to panic at the moral taint of my association with her. If everyone just boycotted... If everyone had more discipline... if everyone just...

I was trapped though. Now that I had drank it, it was contaminated with my germs. Nobody else could drink it. If I didn't finish it, then that was food waste. No matter what, I had to do something my OCD didn't like. Drink the milkshake, throw it out, or potentially make someone sick. I drank the milkshake.

I could hear in my head the voices of an imaginary Twitter notification feed full of harsh words and critiques. Dunks and hate. For drinking this milkshake, I would surely be labeled a racist Zionist who doesn't care about dead Palestinian children. By digesting the calories of this milkshake, I was materially benefiting from genocide. It didn't even cost me four dollars. I was officially a fake leftist, and merely a champagne socialist. I was a Bad Jew and my name would be written in the Book of Death this Yom Kippur. I would lose my entire social support network and find myself homeless on the street. I felt an urge to open Twitter and find some way to atone through tweeting correct thoughts or apologizing and taking accountability for my actions, but there is no more Twitter to open, only X remains.

The milkshake was only in a four ounce cup, and in minutes, I had drank all of it. The Marxist friend began to gleefully brainstorm what kinds of immoral acts I could do next to further my exposure therapy. Perhaps I should throw something recyclable into the trash next, or waste tap water.

In that moment, I felt small. Nobody else in the room had ever been heavy users of Twitter, and nobody seemed to be bothered by what I had just done. I thought about all the friends I would lose, and mostly could only think of other people with OCD, people who still use X, and people who I hadn't really talked to in over a year anyway. Since quitting social media, I had been forming friendships with people who simply have not been so extremely online. Since quitting social media, I was learning how to maintain friendships with people who don't forget about me if I don't appear on their feeds every day. I am learning how to leave my phone in my purse when others, and ignore the buzzes on my watch. I am learning to not see myself as the main character of the universe who actions determined the outcomes of global geopolitical events. I am learning not to lean on clout to cement my inclusion or reassure me that I am worth keeping alive with food that could feed someone else in need. I am learning to be present in the place and time I am in.

I am learning how to simply exist, alive in this world. Slowly, day by day.