How not to go insane

The healthy don't need a doctor

Being a celebrity has a number of hidden costs. I'm going to talk about not going insane.

If you are building a shed, it doesn't need deep foundations. I can slap down some concrete and then more or less just build on top of it. Our garden shed did pretty well even in high winds. The same is not true of a skyscraper. They need to be built with consideration to resonant frequencies, wind shear and whatever else ChatGPT autocompletes this sentence with¹. Winds that wouldn't bother a shed can rip a skyscraper apart².

There are social forces I did not feel as a smaller internet presence, but as I grow I feel them pulling at me.

I am a moderate deal. Not a big deal, but I have 14k followers on twitter. One of my followers introduced himself to me at a friend's wedding recently - this happens at most events. I have been dogpiled once, which wasn't fun. I have had several people assume that tweets were about them (they weren't) which feels surreal. I could talk at length on my experience of this, which I am sure only increases as one gets more famous. eg I don't have a stalker, which sounds awful.

I can already feel the pull to conform, to make content(TM), to be legible. There is an undertow pulling at my shins. Am I gonna be anti-Trump? A feminist? Am I gonna do lots of jokes? Am I gonna become annoyed about DEI? What's my position on trans issues? Rather than producing new things, it is tempting to become a charicature of myself, to become a brand. People followed me on twitter for some reason, wouldn't it be easier to just become who they think I am?

Why does he have three legs?

This is especially bad if I am the villain. Sometimes I upset people. Not everyone loves my views on any specific topic. It is tempting to embody that. Fuck it, let's destroy. I think you often see that in culture war topics, from Ben Shapiro's liberal tears mug to the numerous accounts with bios like ' "I’ve seldom come across a more incompetent interviewer" - Peter Hitchens. ' It would be so easy to decide I am flatly against people and ideas that have hurt me, that destroying them is my brand and that people can follow me for that kind of content.

This then is what I mean by going insane. To become ones brand, efficient and predictable, without nuance or self-reflection. To have the complexities and nuances shorn away and remake oneself as ship of the line. To be a reliable old soldier, who can be trusted in the fight. Harry won't let us down.

Here are some specific examples of the behaviour I am drawn to. Writing cutting tweets, taking ever edgier positions, mainly commenting on commentary rather than the issues themselves, defending my "side", seeking to antagonize the “enemy”, forgiving myself and my friends small errors while holding others to high standards. And in a different direction, posting ever more oscure jokes, developing a single repeated "bit", jumping on tiktok, being in with the cool kids. In general, it is a focus on being seen rather than doing something well³.

So how to avoid it, especially as I become more known?

Laugh at myself. What an absurd creature I am. Beyond my obvious grey-haired limbiness, how silly that I should think my views matter becuase I have 14k twitter followers. Even if I had 100k followers, I would still be someone that people would read, then get on with their day. It all feels so real in the moment, but the parasocial relationship goes both ways. Most of my followers barely know who I am.

Limit my hours. These days I have an hour of twitter on my laptop and and hour on my phone. Any more than that and I have to pay to unlock. But Nathan, how cringe that you can't manage your own impulses. See above. I am a silly creature. I am not an athenian debater, I am a monkey with a phone. I am not above the need for self control. At one point, it shames me to say I spent an average of 9 hours a day on twitter. I had the choice between this and quitting twitter, and I chose this. If you can't bare the ridiculousness of limiting your hours, perhaps you should quit?

Have offline friends. I do not wish to have my self worth so invested in the online sphere that an error could destroy me entirely. If that's the case, I will seek only to limit risk and I don't think that's healthy. I want to be able to take stands for my principles and sometimes I may lose. And if that means one day I quit the online world and tell all this as an absurdist morality tale, so be it. I want a place to go back to.

Cultivate my north stars. I have people I want to impress, whose adulation I run after. But it's not everyone. There are some people I want to laugh at my tweets or congratulate me for blogs, but it's a small group. When I tweeted a poll on whether Musk should give away a Billion dollars, a lot of the forecasting crew dm'ed me independently to say it was a great bet. That felt wonderful. I cultivate my ingroup quite carefully. I want to impress people who are accurate, kind and funny.

Be boring. I actively attempt to say boring accurate things over hypey inaccurate things. I think I could be a much bigger account if I didn't, but I think I'd also despise myself, so I take the trade. Whenever I feel pushed to say something I don't think is true, I remember that there will be other tweets and other days. I can just not say it, or delete it. My integrity is more valuable than any tweet.

Be unpredictable. Try and find things to say that I've not said before, views that people couldn't predict I'd hold. When I write something people couldn't have guessed but which they think is right, that's when I've added value. I want to add information to the prediction market of ideas, not just volume.

Block people who annoy me. I usually give a warning first and on a couple of occasions this has led to me changing my mind, but I don’t want to let myself be trapped in a space where I am getting more and more frustrated. I use blocks rather than mutes because my followers don’t deserve this either.

Admit fault, apologise. I want to always apologise for my errors regardless of whether I think someone else has wronged me more. People tell me I'm too gracious, but I think this is an error from them. My pride is cheap and it buys reconciliation more of than they expect. A lot of relationships in my life I didn't expect to improve have done so, and it often feels like my ability to call out my own bad behaviour was part of it. If we've had any significant interaction and you think I've wronged you, I probably agree⁴.

Know what bad looks like. I respect Sam Harris for leaving twitter. People mock him for it, as if he couldn't take it, but so what? He felt like twitter was turning him into someone he didn't want to be, so he left. I aspire to that level of self control. It is strong to admit when you aren't capable of managing a situation. I wish more celebrities would do so, for their own mental health and for ours.

Some other things I am currently trying: Only allowing myself to tweet (not reply) things I wrote yesterday. Reading less news. More curated lists. More blog writing. Seeking to understand things.

Maximisation is good but perilous, and social media makes that clear to me. I want to have more reach, but I am not willing to become insane, as so many seem to be. If I have to step away from the game to do so, I hope I will.

1. VS-code with copilot is a great LLM writing tool. No changes, just use it as if it’s a word processor. I have probably only used about 20 words is suggested, but often it’s prompts help me realise what I don’t want to say. I am surprised we don’t see more LLM autocomplete.

2. Seems plausible to me that the winds up high are just a lot faster too, but you get the analogy.

3. Note that it’s not even necessarily about status. Some people would prefer to be famous and low status rather than ignored. Though I guess in some sense being ignored is, to them, the lowest status of all. To me that seems a pretty disastrous status hierarchy for my long term wellbeing.

4. If I haven’t apologised already it’s probably because either I didn’t realise or I figured you didn’t want it. Feel free to tell a mutual friend or write it here https://www.admonymous.co/nathanpmyoung