Finish the thread or unfollow
I’m not the first person to say this - social media is destroying our attention spans and our dopamine cycles. I want to discuss one small (but compounding) way to break that cycle. And in the process, reverse that trajectory and become a more engaged and patient person.
I never really used social media. Not until recently. For years, I looked at it and saw a net-negative. I saw dopamine cycles, opportunity cost, and pointless self-torture. People go on Facebook and they come out angry and politically radicalized. People go on Twitter and they come out more cynical, charged up, and bitter. People go on Instagram and they come out feeling ugly and worthless. They leave the app feeling worse, and they get nothing for their time. It’s not invested time, it’s wasted time. Time thrown away.
But this year I made a decision. I see enough of what my friends are sharing to know that I’m missing out on some big things. Twitter is a brilliant mechanism for sharing media if it’s used properly. And financial Twitter (FinTwit) is really an outstanding place to be (I’m an investor and day trader, hence my interest in FinTwit).
Financial Twitter, and Twitter in general, sees engagement from some of the most brilliant minds on the planet. The amount of wisdom and useful media passed back and forth among people every day is just staggering. I have gone from a hard no to a hard yes. I have gone from “I’ll never have a Twitter account” to “one of my daily mandates to myself is to find and read one interesting thing on Twitter.”
Yes, I really mean that. I have several daily goals/demands for myself. One of them is to keep up with my Twitter feed. And to find and read a bare minimum of one article, thread, or newsletter per day. And to take the time to focus on it and digest it. This goal, just over the course of a couple of months, has led me to learn a pretty ridiculous amount of useful information. And to hear some very compelling stories and some very practical wisdom. Not to mention the fact that it allows me to network - to have small conversations and interactions with people whom I respect and enjoy hearing from. This is part of my routine now, and I won’t give it up. Not as long as the payoff is so large.
What I will do, though, is continue to monitor and adjust this routine. This is an essential piece of the puzzle in using social media. We must monitor and adjust our own usage, and its effect on us. Because no one is going to do that for us. We must have the discipline to make it a useful endeavor or walk away.
So the promise I’ve made to myself is this: I will never allow my follow list to become more than 50. Ever, for any reason. Because that will turn my feed into a nightmare. A river of information that will drown me. And as time goes on, I find it more and more likely that that number could even become 40, or maybe even 30. I want my social media use to be hyper-focused, and loaded with utility. I am deliberately preventing myself from falling into the scroll trap - because I refuse to waste my time like that. I have too many other things I’d rather be doing.
You ever look at the Like count below a thread?
On FinTwit, as in many environments on Twitter, people share long threads full of thoughtful information and discussions. These are great - some of my favorite discussions happen here. But do you ever read one of these threads from top to bottom, and keep an eye on the Like count? The like count decreases as you scroll down. Almost always. My guess is that this isn’t because people stop clicking the Like button. I think it’s because people get bored of the thread and click the back button - either because they found the content lame, or because they want to jump back on the dopamine treadmill.
My instinct is this: if you’re following an account, that means what that account is posting is worth your time. It means that the account is posting material that is worth trading your time for. Otherwise you shouldn’t be following the account. Now obviously, there will always be posts and discussions from any account that just won’t tickle your fancy. And that’s perfectly fine. Nobody can capture your interest 100% of the time. But an overwhelming majority of the time, they should be making you want to engage. To read all the way through.
So I figure one of two things needs to happen. If you keep finding yourself prematurely leaving these threads, you either need to train yourself to be more patient and present, or you need to hit the unfollow button. The problem is either your attention span, or your follow list. Both of these problems can be solved.
We must train ourselves to be more patient and more engaged with what we read. Otherwise we become part of the sighing majority, and we walk away from everything bored and no smarter. And social media controls us. We must instead control our social media. It must either be supremely useful, or it must not be on our screens at all.
I know that last bit was an overgeneralization - there’s nothing wrong with keeping an eye on your friends’ accounts or scrolling for a few laughs. Those are perfectly reasonable uses. But you get my point. If we’re not engaged in a way that’s good for us, we’re zombie-scrolling in a way that’s bad for us. There really is no in between.
Having a super-focused Twitter feed has been one of the best gifts I ever gave myself. If you’d have told me that a year ago, I’d have told you to take a long walk off a short pier. “Haha… you must not know me.” But it’s true. Having a group of ridiculously intelligent and open people to keep up with every day has improved my life. I spend just a little bit of my day, every day, taking something from some of the best minds on the planet. Because they are out here openly sharing it. It’s really the best humanity has to offer. A giant campus of intellectual commerce - an enormous circle of people just trying to give each other interesting things to read. And to nudge each other’s minds into learning and deliberate thought.
I get to exercise my mind in two ways. I get to take in top-shelf stories, wisdom, and information every day, from brilliant people; and I also get to exercise my self-control muscles. I get the chance to monitor and adjust my own routines by looking carefully at my engagement with the material on my screen. It’s a win-win-compounding-win situation. Knowledge compounds, and it’s given away on Twitter at an unbelievable rate. But only if you follow the right accounts. And only if you actually read the whole thread.