Goodbye to All That

Millennials Grew into Adulthood on Social Media. Now We’re (Sort of) Leaving it Behind

Pen15 Season 1, episode 7 “AIM”

Sometimes I’m still struck by an urge to tweet.

I’ll be brainstorming ideas or grading essays or working on my novel when I realize I have a tweet sized idea in the center of my mind. I even know the perfect image to share alongside the words. It floats in my mind like a phantom limb. This used to be a tangible part of my process as a culture writer.

But that’s not how I use Twitter anymore. It’s not how I use any social media. When I was a younger writer, social media felt like it was filled with exciting possibilities. Now it feels like work. I try to pinpoint when this feeling started but I’m not sure. Was it the shift from “friending” to “following” that made it feel less genuine? Or the fact that the digital space where many people feel most comfortable posting now is LinkedIn, a site that is explicitly about self-promotion rather than forging friendships? What was Twitter good for before it became X? Why do so many culture writers like me miss it even when we (supposedly) hated it for years?

Mad Men Season 7, episode 4, “The Monolith”

I’d like to think that what I’m experiencing is part of a more general cultural shift, but the truth is also that I’m getting older and having different needs and goals at this stage of my writing career than when I was younger. I’d rather have real life conversations about ideas than tweet them to the void. I’d rather work on my novel than share bits and pieces of my work on social media. When I do share my work, I tend to do so with people I genuinely trust. I sometimes find the work of self-promotion to be at odds with what I want as a writer and as a person.

And, of course, when you write on the Internet, you always have to consider the sheer deluge of hateful and cruel comments you may receive. I remember my first few articles that went viral being a magnet for sexist, antisemitic, or just plain mean comments. At the time, we were advised to “just not read them.” My best editors worked hard to moderate content as much as they could, but young writers learned that flagrantly abusive feedback was just a storm you had to prepare for. I learned to guard myself, but it still broke my heart.

I used to hate it when older people warned me about the ways that social media was problematic. I’d hear their long speeches on how privacy was preferable to “being in public” all the time and feel that they were just genuinely out of touch. “You just don’t get it,” I’d tell my parents and teachers and anyone else who thought that social media was silly or a mere time suck.

Now, I’m the one who feels resistant to the currents and where they may be taking us. My husband and I were at a café with a few friends the other day and were discussing how none of us were on TikTok and I noticed a young woman and her friend glance over at our conversation. I was struck by a sudden urge to ask them: what about you? Do you enjoy all this online performance? Does it feel fun or like a slog to you?

I haven’t left, not completely. I hover around, scrolling through other people’s posts. I’ll even leave comments sometimes, though I’ve found myself more and more reluctant to write posts for myself. Sometimes I compose them in my head—long musings on this cultural moment that I delete and delete and delete until all that’s left is a single heart emoji.

When I think about my relationship to social media, I think of Goodbye to All That, Joan Didion’s famous essay on arriving in New York and then leaving years later. She reflects,“All I mean is that I was very young in New York and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore.”

When I say I miss those early days of being online what I mean is that I feel tenderly towards myself when I was a younger writer. I see that version of myself in my earliest Facebook posts when I shared what I ate for lunch or what I watched on TV. I loved being online, which is why I don’t anticipate ever fully leaving it. But I also feel my exhaustion and dissatisfaction with the digital world more acutely than I did in the past.

I think Millennials all recognize that the earlier Internet era that we helped create is over. We’ve shifted to group chats, newsletters, smaller digital spaces where we feel can build real community. The reason that writers who flee Twitter for Bluesky feel like it’s not the same is because it isn’t. The old social media world we grew up with doesn’t exist any longer. The future may well be offline.