How our social media procrastination became just another type of work

Worldwide in 2019, we spent an average of 144 minutes on social media sites per day. Twitter has 100m daily active users posting 140m tweets a day. For many of us, it’s now part of the daily routine: you wake up, open your phone, scroll for a while and reply to funny/important/interesting tweets before your head leaves the pillow. Drop a pithy one-liner during your breakfast. A cheeky retweet while you’re on the loo. Lose yourself in the GIF library searching for the perfect response on your lunch break. Enjoy ignoring the housework, that important work email you don’t want to deal with yet, the fact you still haven’t started dinner. There’s a sense of satisfaction: you’re taking time for yourself to relax in the hustle and bustle of 2020, and the shitshow that comes with it.

Except you’re not giving yourself a rest.

Your Twitter procrastination isn’t procrastination—it’s just more work. What you think is escaping your To-Do list is actually creating more labour for yourself. There’s a common misconception that social media is somehow frivolity, digitised. It’s not real life. We purport it doesn’t mean anything, while we simultaneously reach out to our pixelated friends for support, laughter, or social commentary. And in doing so, we’re still working, just in a different way.

The invisible labour is layered. There’s the emotional labour we expend both in managing our emotions while reading people's stories and in sharing our own feelings, and the unseen skill of working out how best to phrase something.

Composer and Twitter sweetheart Lin-Manuel Miranda shared at the end of 2019 that he would no longer be starting and ending each day with the “Good Morning” and “Good Night” messages he had been posting on the platform. While trying to inspire and soothe his followers, he wound up spending more time on 280 characters twice a day than on his next greatest hit (and we’re all chomping at the bit to see what comes after Hamilton).

Online existence is a performance. It may not be Shakespeare on a stage, but it’s a curation not of all our best bits, or worst bits, but only the bits we’re comfortable sharing with our audience of followers. There’s nothing wrong with that—it’s healthy to create and maintain boundaries with the rest of the world. Your business is your own and what you decide to share is exactly that: your decision. But to say that our throwaway tweets are a respite from the real world is inaccurate and does us all a disservice.

Twitter forces us to behave in ways that will be amenable to others. There are terms of service for that. And community regulation. Have you truly used Twitter if you’ve never witnessed a pile-on? Then there’s the social expectation. The insight, the outrage, the moral high ground. Social media is a prime location for online activism too. Engaging in political conversations and campaigning for change has never been more accessible for those with an internet connection and a snappy hashtag, but it's not exactly the relaxing downtime your brain needs to unwind.

Even if you’re a “lurker” and never engage with content, you’re performing. You created an account and chose a handle (or let Twitter choose one for you because you’re that uninterested—but still interested enough to create an account?) You filled out your profile—or left it blank, as a statement of its own. All of these decisions were made, in part, by considering what you want people to know about you if they come across your profile. You built a digital persona. It houses part of your personality, whether it’s your unwavering need for anonymity, your interests, employment or bold political statements. Your small corner of the Twittersphere is curated in some way. And far from “getting away” from the real world, on social media, the real world is often algorithmically amplified.

We need to build healthy boundaries with our timelines. Twitter is much more work than we often realise or give ourselves credit for. We are overexerting ourselves and run the risk of digital burnout. For some of us, the idea of opening Twitter causes anxiety, and the pressure to keep up the pithy one-liners—or reflecting on the latest human rights atrocities around the world—just becomes too much.

We need to stop taking breaks from other kinds of labour by scrolling through Twitter. It’s not a reprieve, it’s just more time switched on and analysing our every move—whether unconsciously or not.