My Nice Social Media Experiment

A few months ago, I decided to unblock everyone on my Twitter block list to train myself into absorbing as much hatred against me as possible. I’ve done this a few times to give everyone an amnesty. However, this time I had no intention of blocking anyone ever again. But today I had enough seeing the same idiots, liars, shills, and morons repeat their same talking points.

Although it is great to teach yourself to sit and watch someone completely hate on you and not even flinch, there is only so much information you can absorb throughout the day. And if these negative people take up your feed, they actually take your attention away from those who are not spewing nonsense or trash-talking.

Tolerating someone who hates on you once in a while or for the first time is completely different than allowing someone who repeatedly attacks you with the same lies over and over again. Someone who’s misinformed, someone who’s upset, someone who is misguided—perhaps they deserve your kindness when you are up for it. You can interact with them to try to disarm them, bringing them back down to earth. But this takes more than one interaction and is very time consuming.

However, someone who you have identified as a person that is simply there to attack you deserves no kindness at all. If you don’t punish their behavior, you are actually enabling it. You also become an accomplice of these psychic vampires who are there to drain your mental energy. This adds unnecessary negativity to your life. Not only that, but you also allow these poisonous parasites to affect others who are engaging with you—others who may not be as strong as you, thus allowing them to get dragged into your enemy's net.

In the last few months of this experiment, literally only one person out of the hundreds upon hundreds of people that I interacted with that started off negatively changed their behavior on the spot. But it took several posts back and forth to get to that point; it was a lot of patience on my end, having to endure their disrespect from the start. But I wanted to see if I could do it, and I did. However, this person was anonymous, so I didn’t even make a new friend; they just happened to agree with me at the end of our conversation and went on with their life.

Was that worth my time? Absolutely not.

Take how time-consuming it is along with most people on the Internet being unserious and utterly stupid, and the mathematical odds are not in your favor. You must be ruthless when it comes to protecting your time and your attention, especially on social media where you can be easily distracted from doing other things.

Sometimes, you may give someone a chance to change their attitude by setting the frame of the conversation to try to deescalate—that is, if the conversation is about something you enjoy and want to continue it. But if they don’t respond instantly to your kindness, then they don’t deserve it.

Do you really have time to try this with everyone?

No, you don’t.

Your haters will try to gaslight you by saying blocking is weak. Indeed, it can be weak if you’re doing it out of weakness: to run away from a question or to save face from a critique. But it is not weak to eliminate bad actors from your life; that is why these parasites try to gaslight you into letting them stay. Never let them stay. Instead, take out the trash. Doing so teaches you to instantly drop negative people so you always have room for those who are positive.

Some of you are afraid to block people because you don’t want to give them the satisfaction. I know there are weirdos online who screenshot blocks and post them to their followers as if they are collecting scalps. But consider how childish this is: how pathetic is it for someone to think getting blocked is a win? Clearly, these insecure weirdos do. What normal person does this? No one.

So let these idiots have their “scalps” and show them to their loser friends. Why do you care what a group of losers think? They aren’t on your team, so none of them should matter, anyway.

Strength comes with boundaries. Boundaries are a sign of self-respect. No one alive should be allowed to violate your boundaries. To let some moron disrespect you because you think that is being “the bigger person” is utterly preposterous. A bigger person wouldn’t waste their time arguing with someone who acts like a child, nor would they tolerate negative behavior from anyone.

Only invest your time in people who are respectful. Get rid of everyone else.

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