This Is Goodbye

This is the One Where I Explain My Absence From Twitter

It was 6:42 P.M on Christmas Eve when the phone rang.

I knew someone was dead.

Does that sound melodramatic? When there’s an addict in the family it’s a call you don’t just dread—it’s one you come to expect. Maybe for some families a call out of the blue from a parent might be a common occurrence. We don’t do that in my family. We text several times a week and visit once or twice a year. But a phone call? From my mom? I knew it was bad.

Bad enough that my little sister was rushed to the ICU after falling and hitting her head following a seizure.

Bad enough that two neurosurgeons declined to operate.

Bad enough that they were asking whether she was an organ donor.

Bad enough that when her ex-wife found her she was surrounded by wrapping paper and the presents she was supposed to deliver to her three young boys that night.

Merry Christmas.

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I’ve thought a lot about this in the last two weeks as we prayed for a miracle that didn’t come. I wrote a much longer, personal essay about my feelings and what it all means, then deleted it in a rare bout of good sense.

I didn’t need to share details of my life, to make posts vaguely hinting at the hurricane that had hit our family, hoping for a DM that would allow me to unburden myself and pass on the psychic pain to someone else.

“Keep your loved ones close” I could have tweeted, collecting likes as hollow as anything else on social media. But there’s nothing genuine about that interaction—or much of anything that happens on the world’s new town square. Some things are bigger than social media, too important to mine for temporary sympathy from people I don’t really know.

So I just walked away.

Twitter is a place where people use aliases and pictures of anime characters in lieu of their own visage, where they lie about their lives and look for a stranger to bring low. Bullies travel in packs, often identifying as good guys, hoping beyond hope to find someone with an opinion they can disagree with, destroying lives if they can with the casual click of the mouse. Dueling echo chambers endure side-by-side, each screaming about the other while living firmly in their own fantasies, two worlds that don’t exist anywhere but their collective hive-minds.

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While this was happening in our real lives, I tried to lose myself in the minutiae of my hobbies. But Twitter isn’t really a good place for that either. As we waited for word on my sister, someone was sending me vile DMs, threatening to kill me, discussing in some detail how they hoped my family would suffer from my death. It was a little on the nose, but it did make me wonder—why am I here, exposing myself to people like this? This has happened dozens of times over the years. The number of times I’ve been told to kill myself numbers in the hundreds. Threats are commonplace, occasionally accompanied by a picture of my kid’s school to show they meant business. Mostly different opinions about sports have been the root cause of these outbursts, though I found Nicki Minaj and anime supporters are even more sensitive to perceived slights than wrestling fans.

Don’t ask.

While true psychopaths might be rare, the mean-spirited nature of the place is hard to deny. It’s built right into Twitter’s bones, the need for a dopamine bump, the desperate yearning to fit in and be part of the group, the human desire to draw up sides and go to war, even if it’s a low stakes one on a virtual battlefield. Believe it or not, people I like and admire also spend huge portions of their days quote tweeting poor saps to argue with and demean. I’ve seen people I know personally intentionally misinterpret what I’ve written to score points with the mob when I must have appeared vulnerable. We are all lesser for being associated with any of this.

I’m not claiming purity here either—I’ve written awful things, sometimes with a gleeful malice that’s shocking. I’ve piled on. I’ve watched internet friends face the virtual firing squad and said nothing, fearful of catching a stray. This is the truly dark part of a very dark place. It turns you into someone you don’t want to be if you let it.

Worse, even the good actors often offer nothing of interest. This week I saw a “thread” with over a million views comparing similar fighters across “eras.”

In the business we call this “content.”

One of the pairings was Tony Ferguson and Charles Oliveira. While Ferguson reached title contention before Charles, both fighters both turned pro in 2008. They joined UFC within a year of each other. They don’t exist in different eras. They are contemporaries. Most of the fighters being compared competed in the same era—the most recent one, somehow carved into chunks of just a handful of months to provide a historical gravitas the poster and his readers don’t otherwise possess.

Is this a big deal? No.

Original Photo by Marcos Joel Reis

But this kind of stuff is what drives the discourse, lists of the “greatest ever” fights, submissions or wrestling matches created by the young, deifying “historical” athletic exploits that all just happened to have occurred in the few years since they’ve been a fan. The obsession with eras and incremental history isn’t even ironic—none of these people lived through the single fight Machida Era. Intentionality would at least be funny.

It’s fine if you want to enjoy something without identifying as an expert. I’m watching Reacher on Amazon Prime right now. I’ve read two of the novels and seen one of the dreadful Tom Cruise movies. I don’t know the back story of any character. I don’t know or care if the adaptation is true to the source material. I’m perfectly okay as a casual Reacher fan.

What I don’t do is go online and present myself as an expert in all things Lee Child, making lists of Reacher’s greatest one-liners that all just coincidentally come from this season’s show. But that’s exactly the paradigm that exists in the combat sports world, where know-nothing blue checks and influencers dominate the discussions and are accepted as experts, stealing each other’s content and taking advantage of an audience that simply doesn’t know any better.

There’s no reason for me to see any of this, certainly no reason to spend my day ensuring inaccurate information never finds its way onto the internet. Life is short and I have already served my time in the web wars.

Except the entire system is built on me doing just that. I am supposed to engage them. They are counting on it. Twitter is counting on it. I’m intended to create an army of dunkers if I can, spreading the original garbage post to my own followers, forming a platoon of angry olds mad about the erasure of the fighters and wrestlers from our youths. If that fails, I can become the main character in that particular Twitter space, belittled as out-of-touch if my yelling at clouds doesn’t convince people who are somehow nostalgic for something that happened only a couple of years ago that history might just extend out further than half a decade.

It doesn’t matter to the original poster if they are right. All that matters is the click, the view, the retweet, the heart, all proxies for the desperate hope that a billionaire website owner might deign to send them $50 for the millions of eyeballs they attract to their attention bait. The characters are all the same person with a different face, the loud mouthed podcaster from Kentucky or New York morphing into the used car dealer from Arizona, all just charlatans trying to push the same buttons for the same Pavlovian response from the same brain-addled audience. And make no mistake—these are quite often performances, as the poster is incentivized to play up whatever aspect of their personality brought them that first hit of attention. And they’re competing with a host of others doing the same, so nuance is never rewarded.

Using Twitter is like stepping out onto your front porch and screaming your thoughts out into the world. Occasionally you’ll hear the echo of someone yelling back. Other times it can be you and close friends discussing something you love—only to have a complete stranger wander over and scream at you.

“I DON’T LIKE THE THING YOU LIKE. YOU ARE WRONG.”

It can be exhausting.

All that would be bad enough, the creeping idiocy of the worst and dumbest people on the planet making your hobbies more chore than joy. But Twitter doesn’t allow you to stick to the topics that interest you. It wants to control the very way you look at the world, attempting to decide for the user what matters and what does not.

Here’s an example, if you need one. If you ask the AI there, the most important thing in the world as the new year dawned was the fate of a college administrator at a private school for elitist assholes. Nothing could be less relevant to me or anyone I know. But the machine wants it to be, so it’s ground up and used to feed culture warriors on both sides. People who have never known anyone who went to Harvard talked about it endlessly, forming arguments for and against plagiarism depending on their political camp, caught in that social media spiral that makes everything feel like it’s worth fighting to the death.

Eventually something else I don’t care about will replace it, like a smirking athlete talking out of turn or a late night comedian who doesn’t understand what defamation is. I will be encouraged, in ways I can see and likely many that are invisible to me, to invest mental and emotional energy into these meaningless diversions that will suddenly feel like the most important issues facing the human race.

It’s why social media addicts exist in a world of their own, why they visit family on the holidays and are shocked when people often have no idea what they’re talking about, how people can live in the most prosperous time in human history and feel uniquely burdened. It wants you angry, depressed and slightly hopeless. Doom sells. Doom clicks. Doom makes you keep pressing that refresh button, staring into the empty gaping maw, wondering where the evening went.

When a tragedy occurs the entire site is abuzz, not with genuine emotion, but with the desperate hope that it can be blamed on the other side. Waiting for actual information is optional. It’s hard to even imagine a more dire and dystopian place. There’s an ugliness that permeates, soaked into the foundation, waiting to rub off on you, a person who originally signed up for Adam Schefter football news and now spends hours each day reading the latest ramblings from “Last Name Lots of Numbers” so you can holler at them across the void.

None of this is mandatory. It only feels like it is. You can go back to the before times. You know, the old days, when you spent your leisure time actually doing the things you enjoyed, not just arguing about them online. Life is short. At some point we all learn this lesson in the worst way possible. What happens next is up to you. You can wallow in the sympathy of strangers, many of whom would cut you to pieces for something as meaningless as a “like” if given a chance. Or, if you choose, you can put the phone down and rejoin the human race.

I did. Maybe I will continue to post old wrestling videos. Maybe not. The days of scrolling the random ramblings of strangers, however, are in the past.

Is it permanent? Probably not. I’m not that strong. I’ll eventually tell myself that this time will be different, that I can control it, that I can tame the beast to promote a book, to share a laugh, to connect with friends. That you just can’t operate in the modern world without it.

That will be a lie. I’ll dive into the darkness anyway. But for now? For now I see the light.

Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.