I have two twitter accounts and the experience has been really interesting. The two accounts were created for entirely different purposes and are incredibly different from one another. I’ll first explain what both of them are and then maybe dive deeper into how it makes me feel. If I’m tired I’ll probably just skip that part but here we go.
The first twitter account if just like almost all other twitter accounts. I don’t do much tweeting myself but I follow everyone in the Competitive Super Smash community so I can keep up with the news, the rivalries, and announcements. I follow 42 other people and Twitter helps me to never miss the moments of expression those 42 people put out. I check it about twice a day and my profile picture is a joke. The picture doesn’t even represent something, it’s a joke I thought was funny. The account name is an old gamer tag. I have 4 followers but I don’t know who they are or why they follow me when I almost never post. It’s mostly a news source for my chosen community.
My second account is much different. I have zero followers and I follow zero people which means that nobody at all sees these tweets and twitter tells me this for a fact. On this blog, my mom and dad read it, they’re the only readers really, and I have no problems with that. I enjoy writing here and wish I did it more. Maybe I will do it more. But, there is an obvious difference when one avenue of self expression is 100% invisible while the other avenue is seen by two of the most important people in your life. Two is not a big number unless it’s your parents. When it is your parents… well… how “important” are your parents?
So, this second account is way more personal. I tweet many times a day and they’re all just these personal thoughts I have about life as I experience. The majority of these tweets end with question marks. I have to figure out a way to express my thought into one very short paragraph and then when I’m done that part of my soul just floats off into the incomprehensibly huge void that is The Internet. It’s out there in the world with no real goal and, at least for right now, it enjoys being separated. Honestly, I think these thoughts are interesting and I think my tweets are fire but at the same time I’m afraid it will get hurt. I don’t know if I want my account to get popular or not because I don’t even know if either will make me happier.
This twitter account is basically an exact digital version of myself and it’s really odd. I feel like J. Alfred Prufrock looking back on his life and there is this overwhelming fear that me and J. Alfred are the same. That poem is a tragedy right? Isn’t the lesson that coffee spoons are tiny and that if that tiny spoon is your unit of measurement then you should be at least conflicted about it? I haven’t even considered the possibility that the poem is trying to display that kind of life in a positive light. Honestly though, it coincides with what might be my biggest fear. I think that fear is at the core of most people in the world, especially people from my generation. As kids, we kept being asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and for the first time in human history we, as children, actually had a say it what we could become. Maybe that question should be reexamined. Maybe more trivial and commonplace things should be reexamined. Actually, I don’t know why I said ‘Maybe’ at the start of that last sentence.
So I have this fear of not being something right? At the same time though, I know for a fact that it is a manufactured fear. It’s a fear manufactured out of the intense heat and pressure of society. There’s no reason to be afraid of being a side character or to be afraid of not having things to be proud of. It can really hurt sometimes but I think that pain is mostly a product of the derision the world gives you for not being able to brag very well. I don’t think kids are born afraid that they won’t be popular or successful. They’re born confused and the popular kids seem to be happy so I guess they aren’t as confused as I am. They must know more than me about how things actually work because I feel like I have no fucking clue how things work.
If I had to boil society down to one single thing that matters to it I would say that every single person in this world seems to be obsessed with competitive Bragging. Obviously, if you accomplish something then your bragging levels are gonna go why up and everyone else will be beneath you. That is, until you look back up and see all the people above you still, and gollie those people sure look happy don’t they? I mean what problems could they possibly have?
Anyway, that’s basically the difference between my two twitter accounts. One is a news source, like any other news source, and the other is a recreation of my soul into an entirely new form.
We live in interesting times, to be sure.
I think there’s a saying about that. Maybe “saying” isn’t the right word. Apparently it’s a curse and honestly, no time in history has been this interesting. I’m pretty sure the ancient Chinese were wrong about the negativity of it but I’m very afraid of them being right. That’s a topic for another day I think.
The Mind of Joshypoo 