I don't wanna

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I have had a decent time on Twitter, generally speaking.

I reluctantly joined (I reluctantly join almost everything) back in the mid-aughts because I was told I had to by everyone I met at my first writing workshop, which I had gotten into via a lyrical essay on postpartum depression.

“Twitter’s where all the writers are,” I was told. So I signed up and spent most of my early days lurking, retweeting, and agonizing over tweets like “Cutting my little toe while shaving it really makes me hate the patriarchy.” It was a chore at first, an exercise in out-clevering myself in public.

But eventually, I chilled out, stopped overthinking everything, and found the other Twitter mom writers, whose content I found genuinely funny, endearing, and relatable. Twitter is how I found editors to pitch, it was a place for me to try out seedling ideas before growing them into fully fleshed out essay ideas. Twitter is where I crowdsourced for perfect white tees. I lost hours to silly Lit Twitter gossip (and to be perfectly clear, I fucking loved every one of those hours). Twitter is where I polled people on motherhood stuff. I made friends on Twitter! I even sent one of them a Ballerina Farm mug (we had initially bonded over our shared fascination with all things BF) as a gag gift to thank her for providing feedback on a sample chapter of my book proposal. For those who are curious, the mug promptly cracked in half the moment hot coffee was poured into it, which I find poetic. Twitter was at its best (for me) in moments like these: moments of genuine internet connection.

However, once Elon took over, I mostly just looked forward to Twitter dying so I’d be released from the labor of keeping my Twitter Sara persona afloat. When people started buzzing about Bluesky invites and Mastodon TOOTS, both the bad logos and the connotations of this dude made me feel pretty certain I could safely miss out on both of them.

Substack’s own Notes feels innocuous enough. I repost stuff occasionally, and it’s nice when people share my stuff, but it’s not something I check every day, which means it doesn’t have any significant power over my mental health.

While I theoretically miss the potential for both personal and professional networking Twitter once offered, I’ve loved mostly checking out of Twitter for the past month or so, loved renting out the brain space previously occupied by Quippy and Pithy to books, podcasts, gardening, and, best of all, nothingness. I am a big fan of seeing two dappled fawns kicking up their heels in the morning dew and not having to come up with anything to say about it despite the fact that I could have come up with something on brand for Twitter Sara to say about how the mama deer seemed annoyed every time the twins tried to get her to play with them. She was not a Fun Mom. And it takes one to know one!

Half-assing my Instagram for the past month has also felt pretty great! Turns out, sorta kinda maintaining one social media account rather than aggressively maintaining two has done wonders for my wellbeing. Who would’ve guessed?! (literally anyone and everyone).

But of course, something had to come along and ruin everything, and that something is Threads.

As soon as I opened the app for the first time, I had a sinking feeling that Threads is, like, real, in a way that prior would-be Twitter replacements simply weren’t.

So I joined and halfheartedly added my voice to The Discourse by posting my inaugural thread, which you can admire here:

I am a tastemaker and a conversation starter.

If it’s possible to feel passionately lukewarm about something, that is how I feel about Threads, joining Threads, and creating yet another internet presence.

I also wholeheartedly agree with

Anne Helen Petersen

that the vibes on Threads are off.

While automatically following everyone I followed on Instagram is nice in that it’s convenient, it also means that I’m seeing Threads written by people I primarily follow for research purposes (your standard beachy-waved momfluencers), aesthetic purposes (your home decor gurus), food purposes (your pasta porn creators), and people I know because their kids are friends with my kids. I’m not particularly interested in (for example) a celebrity hair stylist’s one line musings. I follow her on Instagram because I will want the perfect blunt bob—despite knowing it will never work on me the way I want it to work on me—probably until the day I die. I am not inspired by her comment about her morning acai bowl or her peace sign emoji.

kate lindsay

was initially excited about Threads, as she wrote here for

Embedded

, but soon determined that most folks were jumping onto Threads to gobble up new followers and potential social media capital by using gimmicky, cliched, time-tested methods of engagement.

“I want a social media to have fun with FRIENDS again,” I said, imagining a utopia of benign shitposts and earnest updates that would harken back to the days of MySpace surveys and Facebook statuses. Instead what I got was some kind of multi-level-marketing-themed waiting room filled with Millennial cringe and other witticisms you’d find cataloged in an Urban Outfitters coffee table book in 2014.

And like, YES. I’m seeing so many pictures of skyscapes with captions like “is today an ending or a beginning?” or open-ended questions like “What’s something that lights you up?” and post after post of people trying to write something definitive about Threads itself. I’m bored and tired, and am struggling to bring myself to care because I know my involvement (or not) with Threads will impact exactly one person and one person only: me.

Also! This morning, I toddled over to Twitter, and people are 100% still there. And probably will be until it is officially deceased? Am I supposed to keep checking Twitter WHILE ALSO checking fucking Threads? This feels like too much checking of shit I don’t want to check!

I texted

Virginia Sole-Smith

to inquire and I think her assessment of the situation is spot-on.

Having experienced a classic case of first-time author disillusionment after publishing Momfluenced, detaching from social media and the endless striving that’s been part of my life as a writer since I started calling myself a writer has brought me so much peace, room for joy, and experimentation with a little thing I like to call surrender.

I think it’s my deliberate detachment from social media, for instance, that’s allowed me to view my identity as a writer with far more healthy distance than I typically do. For so long, I’ve hustled and hustled and hustled because I thought I’d feel real to myself if I achieved this writing milestone or that writing milestone, and reposting and sharing and hyping myself up online tricked me into thinking that any of it matters more than it actually does.

So I dunno guys. I’m on Threads because it’s arguably relevant to my work as a public-facing person who wants to keep reasonably abreast of cultural conversations. But I’d be lying if I said I was psyched about it. Maybe that will change! Who knows! But when you release your grip on social media relevancy even the slightest bit, you quickly see that social media platform maintenance is of great importance to folks who directly rely on those platforms for income, but when your income is wholly unrelated to it, or even if your income (like mine) is only indirectly related to it, it becomes abruptly clear that most of us could quit it all and be just fine. Maybe even better than fine?

“Go out and sit on the lawn
And do nothing
'Cause it's just what you must do and
Nobody does it anymore

No I don't believe in the wasting of time
But I don't believe that I'm wasting mine.”

- Fiona Apple