X, aka Twitter, is an urgency bait
I have been noticing that any time I use Twitter or X, I get this sense that I am missing out, or that I am behind people, or that I am unable to catch up to the latest trend. Someone is doing something more cool than me in the professional sense, and someone has found out this secret or the answer to a long-standing problem. Everyone is a professor, everyone is a master-class expert, and everyone is finding out the shortcut to every goal.
After 10-15 minutes of scrolling through X, you feel like you've been left behind. The other angle is that you are completely dissatisfied with the government of the day. You come off with a feeling as if you're being cheated of good governance. The whole app is built on making you feel like you're worse off.
It's funny because Elon Musk said that that's how Instagram made him feel: that it was more vain and vanity-prone. Now, with his left-handedness in Twitter, pushing the reinforcement cycles, you like one post and you are facing a barrage of posts that have the same sentiment. There are no exploration vectors, there are no discovery vectors, nothing.
They say that you cannot make money if you are not entertaining the people in your region, but they are happy to spend money on ads or ask advertisers to spend money on them to show ads to everyone. It's a very hypocritical place. At least Instagram, for all of its folly, has a lot of joy in it. You have cute things and people doing adorable things all the time, so there is still a balance there.
On Twitter, they just added a feed wall called Pets, and they expect people to find balance there, but something is deeply wrong with all the social media platforms. It behoves us to find calmness, stillness, and peace offline.