Short Attention Span Theater

I joined Twitter because a PR client wanted me to.

This was spring 2007, Twitter was barely a year old, and I did not see the point of it. It felt self-referential to the point of narcissism. It reaches only the people who have chosen to join, I said, and not that many people had chosen to join, so why spend the time?

Everyone in publishing is on Twitter, they said.

That turned out to be true. It's still true—which is the official reason I don't quit it—but over the past 13 years it's become essential to my work and social life in ways I could not have imagined, and am not always sure are healthy. 

For people who work from home, as I mostly did even before the lockdown, Twitter is an online break room. Since the lockdown, it's become even more important. Although I subscribe to at least half a dozen newspapers and magazines online, Twitter is my primary news feed. It's my main outlet for social interaction. It's my major source of new friends since I moved back to DC. I don't think I've gotten any new clients through Twitter, but I might have. 

The PR client who originally wanted me to join is no longer on Twitter personally at all, although someone runs an account for their brand. Too time-consuming, they said, and too much of a distraction. 

I can't argue with that. It's a massive distraction, and worse than ever now because the pandemic has destroyed my attention span.

That's an almost universal experience, right? We've all lost our attention spans, haven't we? (Please reassure me by saying yes.) A Twitter pal—yes, I get the irony—starts every day online with a box-breath meditation, and sometimes I try to follow his example, but I can't seem to allow myself to stop that long. If I stop long enough to breathe and focus, I am paralyzed by fear, I dissolve in tears, or both.

And I am the luckiest person I know in this situation. I have much less reason to be fearful or sad than the vast majority of other people living through this. And I could be doing more to help those people. 

I need to be back around people because I'm afraid I don't know how to be around people anymore. I need to be away from screens from some sustained period of time, and I need to just listen to somebody else talk for a while without interruption or distraction. These aren't things that come naturally, I suspect. They're learned skills, and I'm forgetting how to do those things.  

The District of Columbia and northern Virginia are reopening tomorrow. I am not even sure what that means, except that next week I'll go back to my office, even if I have to walk.

Anyway, the original point of this post was that the President is probably not the only person who needs to step away from Twitter—but I seem to have made my point about short attention spans and the challenge of holding a sustained thought these days. Show, don't tell, the writing books say . . .