Active brain in a devil's workshop

I must congratulate myself for having known instinctively and instantly how good and addictive Twitter was because I am hooked

As long-suffering readers will know, I retired from work at the end of November last year. This was the second time I retired. The first was 10 years before that, when I turned 40. I had worked full time for more than two decades at that point and threw in the towel on the safe assumption that I was most unlikely to make a billion or get the Nobel or whatever it is that one aims for in a professional career. And so there was no point in running the race. 

Having arrived at that Socratic wisdom, that first time, I spent five years at home, a delightful time spent going through the books I had always wanted to read (Greek and Roman). The most difficult decision of the day was around 7 am: to shave or not. After the yoga class was over at 9, the entire day lay ahead, filled with possibilities.

This idyll was interrupted by a job that I must confess I greatly enjoyed doing, and it was easily the best working period of my life. It was also the most difficult thing I have ever done, facing unremitting hostility from the state (regular raid by friends in Central agencies) and media and great difficulty in raising money and keeping operations going. But it was satisfying and pleasurable for those reasons alone, leave out others.

Anyway, for that decade and more, I was off social media. I got a Facebook account around 2006 or so. I had the account for a few months and then deleted it. I knew by then (actually I knew the week I had opened the account) that this stuff was like crack cocaine and I couldn’t keep away from it voluntarily. The only way to abstain was to forcibly keep out of it and not have an account. And so, that is what I did and I must say that on the evidence of the time spent in that relative vacuum, it was a good decision.

I read my way through all the things that I wanted to read (and felt greatly smug and accomplished for little or no reason for a while afterwards). And, I was able to fully concentrate on the problems at work in the years that I was again employed. But now, again retired and this time for good, it made no sense to keep oneself away from the narcotic. And so I have turned to social media, specifically to Twitter. 

I must congratulate myself for having known instinctively and instantly how good and addictive it was because I am absolutely hooked. 

Twitter is truly the creation of the devil’s workshop. It is an outstanding invention, which incorporates our desire to share and to learn with the wisdom and knowledge that we don’t actually have much to share or learn (and so limits us to 280 characters). The very notion and fact of being connected in real time to the world — or to the few people following you and whom you follow — is astonishing. You can output your thoughts, or such thoughts that fit into 280 characters, which most of mine do, and have people respond, like and also broadcast into the ether.

Being on Twitter the whole day is like being 16 or 17, and in love. The endless waiting for someone to respond to your brilliant but unrecognised masterpiece of 280 characters or less, the ache and pine of anticipation while your follower count turns another digit or so, the pain of loneliness spent in tweeting without a “heart” or reply next to it. It is profound enough material for Keats and Shelley, had they been around and armed with an account (am pretty sure no poetry would have been written had these worthies been around in our time). I am quite certain that the data showing flatlining productivity around the world can in large measure be attributed to time spent on a social media platform.

But who am I to say that it is wrong or bad in any way? Given my retirement and the availability of endless hours with which to entertain myself (and hopefully at least one other), I am fully in love with this toy. I wish I could integrate it with another I have acquired (a wireless virtual reality headset, which is, literally, mind-blowing) but that will no doubt follow later.

The last thing that I should say here is that while reading full time the classical texts for a straight 60 months was rewarding, it was not always pleasurable. One had to go through Xenophon in full between Thucydides and Polybius. But with social media that is not the case at all. One can look down into one’s screen and then look up after a while and 90 minutes have gone by. 

If one is working, like you presumably are, it can be considered a waste of time. If one is both retired and lazy, as I am, it is the finest thing imaginable.