Why I Deleted* Twitter and Subscribed to the Chicago Tribune

The age of life expectancy in the United States has declined for the third straight year. This is out of the ordinary. So out of the ordinary that the last time it happened was during World War I. They had an excuse when it happened that time (WWI and a flu pandemic) but experts are confused as they look at our relatively peaceful circumstances in 2018. Two of the largest factors in this decline are suicide and opioid addiction. Even if these are the main causes of this decline, we're still left to ask: why?

Ben Sasse argues strongly in his book Them: Why We Hate Each Other and How to Heal that the main contributor to our increasing despair and even why so many are turning to opioid abuse stemming from a single issue: chronic loneliness. As most people can recognize, loneliness is not just the lack of people around to whom you are connecting; it is a lack of connection to people even when there are people around you. Loneliness has been a problem since the Fall of Man but it seems to be getting worse at an increasing speed.

Why do Sasse and others believe that this loneliness is expanding so rapidly? It stems from our increasing lack of "rootedness" in our communities and the disappearance of  tribes that have traditionally given us our place of connection. This blog post could go in a thousand different directions from here: churches that are so large that people come in and leave without connecting with the people around them, a lack of connection to neighbors out of increasing fear of strangers and bad intentions, etc. The biggest impact that this idea had on my own life is the place I have allowed my iPhone to shape my news consumption and keep me from living in the present with the people around me.

Twitter can be an extremely impressive tool and one of the great things that it does is allow news to travel at speeds never seen before. While many once saw the advent of cable news as bringing the news to the world at instant speeds, we now can have "reporters" giving us accounts with handheld cameras and word processors in their back pockets in the form of their phones. I have prided myself in knowing more about the news than most other people, knowing more facts about an issue or debate and knowing it fast.

Unbeknownst to me, I was doing more than increasing my knowledge on the issues; I was overloading my brain with the need for instant facts, regardless of whether or not I understood their context. Before we started getting all of our Amazon packages within two days, we started to believe that actions needed to occur instantaneously.  If someone replies to a text 30 minutes later rather than 2 minutes later, were they trying to send a message of being upset? If an investigation into a sitting President's administration goes on for two years, does that mean that the investigator is being unfair rather than thorough? We expect instant results, and when we don't get them we are unsatisfied.

Constantly checking Twitter for the latest news was shaping the level of importance that an individual story deserved, and it was keeping me from placing my focus on the real people around me. Should we become hermits who stay away from news and just trust that the world will work itself out in our ignorance? I would say no. While there is a danger of being "overinformed" or rather "fast food informed" through overindulging in internet or cable news, being informed about the major issues in our country, state and local communities is a vital part of actually being connected to each other. I care about what's happening in my local community not because of whether it benefits or hurts "my team" but how it benefits or hurts my neighbor. I can't know what will benefit or hurt my neighbor unless I know what is going on, and unless I know my neighbor.

So how did I decide to be informed without constantly overindulging in internet/cable news? I'd like to reintroduce you to the local newspaper. I know the newspaper as an industry is going out of business. I know that people tend to trust sources of news that they agree with rather than the traditional news media. Yet, there is still value in hearing from people with whom you disagree and in keeping the structure of being in control of when the news comes to you. My news comes sometime before I wake up at 5am since the Chicago Tribune has not yet been missing from our front porch when I go check on it. Sometimes I have time to read the paper before heading to work while other times I don't get a chance to read it until I get home. The truth that the internet/cable news industry doesn't want you know: almost all news does not need to be known immediately and most news is clearer if you wait a little after it happens.

I don't imagine that everyone has the problem with Twitter that I do. Whether its Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Candy Crush, Fortnight or old-fashioned "web surfing," the temptation to get lost in our digital world is a constant one for almost everyone. Every day and increasingly, every minute is a choice of whether to be present and find our community with people or to settle for the false sense of community that we receive from our digital devices. I'm not advocating for chucking our phones and computers out the window but we must realize that they will either be a tool that we control for specific purposes or an oppressive master to which we subject ourselves.

Case in point: I still have a Twitter account. I like following Ben Sasse (although he tries to limit his Twitter usage as well), Lin-Manuel Miranda (we don't agree on politics but I almost always appreciate his perspective and attitude on life), Haley Byrd (the best/funniest congressional reporter on Twitter) as well as actual real-life friends. What I found while clearing out the number of people I follow on Twitter is that most of my actual real-life friends haven't tweeted in years or don't tweet very often. I deleted the Twitter app off my phone but still allow myself to check it occasionally (it's hard to go from 40-50 times a day to zero) but I'm hoping that by keeping myself from the draw of the constant news cycle that I can be more rooted in my community while keeping informed.

What to do now? Maybe I'll go see if I can find those real-life friends who haven't been tweeting...

(Right after I tweet about this blog post)




*Full disclosure: I deleted the app off my phone, but I still have a Twitter account.