I’m horribly addicted to Twitter. Will Elon Musk save me from myself this year? | Joel Snape

If only Musk would sacrifice his fortune and reputation and close down the site, people like me could get back to doing something useful with our time

Where are we all going when Twitter dies? Mastodon? Hive? Back to sitting in saggy armchairs reading chunky books? Personally, I'm hoping it's the latter, but I'm not optimistic. Twitter, of course, has been designed by a lot of very clever people to be extremely addictive, and if everyone switches to something else, it will probably be because it's more addictive again, prodding all our dopamine-spiking buttons in some as-yet-undiscovered sequence with which battered airport paperbacks will be even less able to compete. Which, come to think of it, means it definitely won't be Mastodon.

Obviously, I'm hopelessly addicted to Twitter, like so many journalists who pretend we are using it for our jobs. I've tried to tie myself to the mast like Odysseus, installing apps that block it at certain hours or force me to take a cooling off period before I refresh the page, but I always find a way around them. Even if you delete your account entirely, there's a 30-day cooling-off period, during which I inevitably re-up, like Odysseus with a pocketknife inside his tunic.

Joel Snape is a writer and fitness expert

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