Thoughts on Twitter and my creative behaviour | #61

Why I want to spend less time on Twitter, and more time on platforms like Substack and YouTube that encourage deeper thought, research and refinement.

Saturday 8 April 2023 // Spring is arriving in London, bringing with it sun, birdsong and long-awaited warmth. Happy Easter everyone!

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The bird is stuck in a bit of a swamp right now.

In case you aren’t on Twitter, or haven’t been there in the last couple of days, there has been some Drama. In a nutshell, Twitter suddenly and without notice decided to limit how people can interact with tweets that link to Substack (this platform). It’s currently not possible to:

• like, retweet or reply to any tweet that links to Substack

• like, retweet or reply to any tweet that quotes a tweet that links to Substack

Amusingly, it is possible to quote tweet the tweets that link to Substack, which means it’s possible to broadcast and discuss the whole fiasco, as long as the discussion happens at least two layers from the tweets with the Forbidden Links.

It looks like all this is in response to, or at least coincidentally immediately after, the announcement of “Substack Notes”, a short form broadcast and discussion feature coming to Substack that looks hilariously similar to Twitter, and which I absolutely will try out.

A preview of Substack Notes

As someone who derives all of my income from people on the Internet giving me some of their time, money and attention (thank you), I care very much about the future of Twitter and similar platforms.

Twitter is the reason I was able to quit my job, it’s the reason I have friends around the world and it’s the reason I figured out how to teach Alexander Technique, a traditionally hands-on, in-person thing, asynchronously online. I would be sad to see Twitter fail.

That said, I want to note the ways in which moving my focus away from Twitter might be really good for me, as someone who makes things on the Internet. What would be the silver lining if Elon does run Twitter into the ground?

For one, Twitter demands a lot of time, fragmented attention and a certain mode of my personality. To be perfectly blunt, this has had an extremely non-trivial effect on my life. I can tell that my attention span is not what it was. I default to scrolling and instant gratification far more than I would like. And I have found myself thinking and talking about more and more superficial, fast-moving things. Sustaining my attention on reading books has become difficult.

Although I do not particularly like any of this, I would still say that, for me, the trade off in terms of life impact has been worth it, and I would do it again. But now I am where I am, and Twitter is where it is, I have to wonder: is this a path I want to continue to walk? And if so, assuming Twitter survives such that I still want to use it, do I want to use it the same way?

As long as there’s reason to use Twitter, I will probably be on Twitter, but I find myself increasingly drawn to other platforms, like Substack and YouTube, that would encourage me to dive into and express different traits that I now want to see more of in myself.

Back in 2021, I wrote a note called “getting my business to nudge me towards behaviours I want”, which was about why I switched from a launch-based, scarcity model to an evergreen, always available model for my course. In short, I realised that the launch dynamic felt bad for my long-term mental health, so I changed the rules of the game I was playing to make that problem go away.

I can see the same dynamic showing up in my choice of which publishing platform I decide to spend most of my creative energies on. I can feel a shift inside me towards a slower, more thoughtful kind of creativity that invites me to make things that take time to research, refine and craft. Where Twitter encourages rapid quantity, I feel myself drawn to moderately-paced quality. I want to shift the balance of creative playfulness in my life more towards curious exploration and less from low stakes banter.

As I draft this in Substack, in what is essentially a minimalist text editor with no noise or chatter, I feel a sense of calm that I don’t get on Twitter. The same is true for YouTube, where although the outputs are in an entirely different format, I can work more slowly and mostly offline if I want to. I can put out a decent video once a week instead of having to feed the Twitter algorithm multiple times every day.

Put another way, I suspect that if I continue to shape myself around the demands of Twitter, one day I’ll have to grieve the loss of the more thoughtful, more deeply thinking person I could have become had I merely chosen a different way to share my creative work.

This is not to say that Twitter and deep thinking are incompatible. There are many thoughtful people on Twitter who I respect deeply. And I don’t even plan to leave Twitter unless I have to.

All this is more illustrative of a wider identity shift I’m experiencing as an ‘online creator’, away from the Twitter-centric approach I’ve taken so far and towards what feels like a more rounded way of being and creating online. I suspect this will be better for me in the long term, and it’ll significantly improve the quality of the stuff you get from me.

So, I am excited to spend a lot more time with you here on Substack. I’ll turn on the Substack chat feature for this newsletter and hang out in there. And I’ll be dusting off my YouTube channel. Longer-form, more nerdy stuff, here we come.

New course: “Let The Others Find You”

I’m working on a new course called Let The Others Find You. It’s going to be a guided introspective journey based on the core idea in this thing I wrote, with the same name, back in 2019. I recently did a 90 minute workshop just on this topic for Foster, which was well received, and I realised I have a lot to say.

The course will essentially be an encapsulation of the journey I’ve been on since 2019, where I went from corporate employee to ‘feral, free agent’. There are a lot of points I’ve been exploring and refining for years that I know have helped people on a similar journey, and I want to coalesce all of my experience and lessons learned into one place.

I also plan to develop regular live experiences using the pre-recorded material as a base. Think of it as a few-week container where people can explore how to let the others find them in a context where lots of ‘the others’ might be hanging out nearby at the same time.

I hope to release the self-paced materials before the end of April and then work on the ‘cohorts’ after that. I’m excited for this and I really hope it will be helpful to many of you.

Podcast chat with Spencer Kier

I was recently on Spencer’s podcast Audience of One where we discussed a whole range of topics.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Here are the show notes to give you a sense of what’s there:

• (00:33) Michael's background

• (02:25) Why he was drawn to Alexander Technique

• (04:36) What is Alexander Technique?

• (07:05) The challenges of repurposing the technique for broader use & teaching it online

• (09:01) Metaphors for getting people "there"

• (11:57) Why we aren’t normally in a state of expanded awareness

• (14:58) Can awareness be permanent?

• (19:20) Common blockers to cultivating awareness

• (21:27) Non-doing & effortless effort

• (24:12) (un)consciousness & (un)naturalness

• (27:34) Can we pre-empt the need for “unlearning”?

• (30:40) Do we lose anything by being over-aware?

• (37:31) The relationship between awareness and flow

• (41:29) What Alexander Technique isn't & what it could be

• (45:13) Where Alexander Technique fits with traditions like Buddhism and Taoism?

• (48:43) Being emotional vs. rational

• (52:58) Going from consultant to teacher-solopreneur

• (58:09) Archeologists vs. architects

• (01:04:38) Michael's final question