I use Twitter* mostly in pursuit of love

(*and Twitterlikes [Mastodon, BlueSky, Substack Notes], and also a Discord that I'm in...)

1. For fun/entertainment. To get news on e.g. DELTARUNE via Toby Fox's BlueSky, and on what Jon Simms is up to lately. To see random cat videos and similar things. Selected book and video game recommendations. Occasional random music exposure.
2. Trace amounts of national and international news. I live for a low-news bubble. Whenever something happens to make the bubble it's usually worth knowing about, and the commentary can sometimes be interesting.
3. For social. Glancing exposure to the lives of people I have some kind of personal relationship to and who I care about somewhat. I don't tend to write back (why? question for another post), but I appreciate seeing what they share.
4. Food for thought. Prompts and questions. Observations about nature of life, of mind (or nature of Mind), of confidence and relaxation, of people, of selves, of love or connection. Stories, anecdotes. Dispatches from other experiential universes (aka lives). Different perspectives presented in a way I can understand. Notes and reflections and book reviews produced as part of trying to live better. Challenges that make sense.

I.

(4) is the major reason I use Twitter* as much as I do. I often spend an hour or two in a day looking at it, and some days more. I use YouTube much more sporadically and more often for short entertainment, but when I do use it for long periods it's usually for this same purpose.

These hours of Internet use seem wildly excessive. Do I really need so much food for thought? Especially because I rarely spend much time thinking about or engaging with what I find. I'm really bad about this with Twitter*, much more so than YouTube.

What is it, after all, that I do when I spend hours on Twitter*? I scroll my Following feed, see stuff that looks interesting, copy tweet links and paste them into a Logseq journal (often with an author page link/tag, and sometimes adding link text so I can find the tweet again by text search). I almost never go back through these links I copied and pasted or add additional commentary.

If I rarely reflect on the tweets I collect as "food for thought," why do I collect them? One thing it's doing is building up many tiny pieces of reinforcement for a new way of thinking. That's a useful purpose.

But that's not the main reason for the tweet forests. No, oh no, it isn't. The main reason is to reassure myself I haven't missed anything vital in my pursuit of love.

II.

It's all for love. Isn't it always? All those anecdotes and prompts and challenges — if I Develop Myself enough in the right way then maybe I'll finally find love.

I'm always working on that. What if I'm going the wrong way or missing something obvious? I've got to follow what everybody else is doing and how it's working for them, people I trust enough to be honest about what's working and what isn't. I've got to know whether I'm wasting my time or if I might be on to something. And if I'm on to something, what it is exactly that I'm on to. Because if I'm on to something, I'm not quite sure what it is.

And there must be something else important that I'm not onto, because I haven't found love yet. If I win the Twitter lottery today then maybe someone else will have had the same problem or misunderstanding and they'll figure it out and they'll say it where I can see it and save me a lot of pain. And I don't know what that looks like yet, the misunderstanding could be anything so I've got to look out everywhere all the time and stay up to date so I don't miss my big breakthrough. My big breakthrough that will lead to love.

I spend 95% of my free time in pursuit of love. Seems like a shockingly high number when I put it that way. I feel like I ought to be embarrassed. I don't think I am embarrassed of the pursuit, though, as much as how poorly it has worked out so far. I would have given up before I spent even half so many hours on a programming hobby project.

I spend hours a week dancing hoping to meet a lady I like. I spend a surprisingly comparable number of hours a week seeking out and occasionally reading, watching, etc. "food for thought" as described above. A lot of the time I spend on Twitter is on breaks from work or in between household tasks — but not all of it. A lot of it happens when I have a lot of time on my hands and no particular plan for how to use the time. I might as well use it on fuckability, right?

Because that's 60% of the 95%, trying to be worthy of love rather than actually direct action going out and look for it. If I saw a great way to use that 60% of my 90% on the direct pursuit of love, man, sounds scary but a lot more satisfying. I've thought about ways to increase the percentage of time I spend on direct action. Maybe I could go out to bars — I'm not a drinker. Maybe I could go out to coffee shops — I worry I'd be on thin ice trying to meet ladies there when half the people are there for coffee, studying, or they're there for a date. Maybe I could go to dating events — but that seems like a terrible idea, just about the worst context in which to meet someone — and anyway where does one find them? Maybe I could go to the library — but libraries are for reading, not hitting on ladies. I've got a whole lot of time and nervous energy bound up in that 60% of the 95% of my free time, and it has nowhere to go.

So instead, all that nervous energy flows to keeping up to date on Twitter, and growing my forest of Food For Thought tweets.

III.

Having noticed I'm spending my time this way, it seems logical to make an adjustment. It's unclear how much value I'm getting out of this time I'm spending on Twitter, so maybe I should spend less If I were a rational optimizer, maybe I could get stochastically good-enough exposure to prompting by spending much less time on Twitter and much more time reflecting on what I've been exposed to. I could also just spend much less time on Twitter and accept the lower flow rate of "food for thought" tweets that might crack my love life wide open. I could spend that time on other things — either on more effective ways of pursuing love, or on things that have nothing to do with love.

I don't know if that's actually an option, though. I think all roads worth pursuing tie back to love somehow. I don't think I can do anything without being motivated in part by the thought that maybe this will be the thing that attracts a wonderful woman into my life. I'm just too horny, or too lonely, or whatever. I accept that I am powerless to make myself independent of what a woman I'd like might want.

I could take on projects that are less obviously tied to love, sure. Although I'm not sure what they'd be. Politics? Volunteering? Both sound like classic weird love-finding venues to me. I feel no particular need for money. I don't want to do programming. Art, maybe? Writing? Dance performances? I have never had anything to write about, or so I feel — nothing that would constitute a long-term project, like a novel or a short story collection or even an essay collection. And even if I did, simply writing is not meaningful if it's not part of a quest — say a quest to get published or become a successful author or whatever the fuck. And I don't see how I could make my writing part of a quest.

Dance performances are another story. Those could be part of a story of Joe becoming a good dancer. That's a story I would like.

Couldn't writing be part of a similar story of Joe becoming a good writer? I guess it could be. It's scarier in various ways.

I don't know. Neither of these seems like a radical departure from what I'm doing now. I'm not excited about writing more fiction or poetry and then having to figure out what to do with it, how to distribute it. (I have always hated the distribution part since I have been writing outside fandom; I've never known a good way to distribute my writing so it might find people that appreciate it.) I make no comment on performance. But — at best these feel like distractions or cope, like I'm doing this so I can pretend I don't care about love a whole lot more, so that maybe I can get love. That seems deranged.

The more I think about it, the more I think I can't escape that desire for love by pursuing something else. I think I'm stuck with it and have to accept it — it's part of the cosmic background radiation of who I am right now.

Can I use my time better, though? Can I spend less time scrolling and more time in pursuit of hoes ladies?

I am once again asking myself to consider what that would look like.

I considered several options above (libraries, cafes, bars, dating events).

It seems like an impossible trap. I can't escape my desire for love; wherever I should go, there too it must follow.

So what if I don't try? What if I just accept that as an important one of my motivations? I already have re: dancing. What if I took it as a delightful haha-and-serious joke rather than a character flaw? I'm sure I've got lots of company in acting from that motivation.

I might as well pursue love in ways I enjoy and find interesting/useful.

Maybe that's the key idea, actually, rather than to be "pure of heart" and free from interest in love. Feels like I might be on to something there.