How I Fought My Twitter Addiction, Once Again
This story is a part of a series, and ought to be read after the first Twitter story, which in turn is better (but not necessarily) be read after the icq story.
Pre-text #
I overcame my Twitter addiction relatively easily, because I hadn’t actually did something. I just switched my attention to another gig (a challenging full-time job), and had no resources for time-wasters. Being very fortunate to quickly move to a state of having meaningful relationships1 and a very challenging job, I naturally had absolutely no time and energy for anything else.
My settled life was heavily shaken (for ever), I moved out of the place I deeply hated, been changing places of living and work, cities and countries, becoming a digital nomad, travelled the Earth, and found myself settled again, but in a completely different society, having a family, kids, and whatnot. But all that developed over the course of a decade. In the middle of that long journey, I found myself heavily scrolling Twitter again. Now, from my iPhone.
iPhone #
I had my theory, which I voiced to different people in real life, that the iPhone is so good, that it’s the primary issue with it. It motivates you to interact with it, hold it in your hands, play with it2, time and again.
Android, on the other hand, is so low-quality3, that you don’t want to interact with the system just for the sake of it. It does the job, it does it well, and sometimes even better than iPhone does. It’s just you the user who don’t enjoy using it, as much as you enjoy using your iPhone4.
Having the theory, I’ve bought the Android phone (later), which helped me jump-off my dependence. But before that, I found myself peeking into my iPhone each time I have a free minute.
Meditation #
We’re having this conversation with Sebastian, where I tell him ‘here I am, waiting in line, opening my Twitter to check my feed, you know.’ The ‘you know’ part was the catch. He reacted as ‘well, no, actually.’
I remember me failing to explain this moment, why was I reaching to my iPhone each spare minute, to delve into my Twitter feed, for no real reason.
Sebastian just came from his three-weeks meditation retreat in the one of the Chiang Mai temples. By that moment, I’ve been meditating daily too. But I was too afraid to enroll even into a week meditation retreat, not to say three. He kept telling me I shall. I promised I will5.
I will, Seb6.
Meditation practice helped me with many issues in my life, to become more aware and more present. I’ve learned to understand how powerful my inner feelings are. Learned how to listen to my intuition. That feeling may be of a more value than thoughts. Many things. But the primary one is to be present, focused and to pay attention.
By the time of that conversation of ours, I had no issues with Twitter, again. I’ve been telling him a story of me learning how to stop doing that. This awareness would help me with every other addiction in my life, and I would strongly recommend it to everyone. It won’t help to solve any problem, but it will help you learn to see more persepctives, leading you to finding much more solutions to choose from.
With the marry-me girl from Twitter, by the way. Which is ironic, in a way. I extracted some pretty good value from hanging out in some shiny-and-new social network, you know! ↩︎
I mean not games here, but rather the playful interaction with the device. ↩︎
Meaning almost everything about the Android OS, especially at its early stages, before the, I don’t know, Android version 12? ↩︎
Also, I meant not only the software part of the Android phones, but their hardware. Upon reviewing this post in the late 2024, almost a decade later, I can only confirm this thesis. And add more data. From my personal and highly subjective point of view, till this day there are very little Android phones that can compete with iPhones, hardware-wise. There are these expensive brands, but they’re just not many. Google Pixel, Samsung Galaxy, OnePlus and possibly some high-end Xiaomi devices. It’s not nothing, but there are mass of other brands that are just sub-par. ↩︎
Life got into way, and unfortunately, I didn’t enroll back then. I’ll do that at some point. It’s just that I know the catch here, more or so. I was extensively meditating for prolonged periods of my life. So, I’ve lowered my priority for that. ↩︎
It’s the year 2024 now, it’s almost three years of full-scale war with ruzzia (see my other blog at war.basil) and over ten years of war ongoing in Ukraine. And so the meditation retreat is not a priority any more. As of now. If I’ll survive the war, I’m definitely going to have some me-moutine-time and would recommend it to my friends and family. ↩︎
