Twitter Brain

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I have a rare disease called Twitter Brain. Don't worry, you don't need to socially distance.

Twitter Brain is when your brain starts noticing inner thoughts or outside influences that would make good Twitter content. As you create more content, your brain becomes more finely tuned to your thoughts and influences that can inspire tweets and threads.  

You might be reading the news and eating cereal and think of a witty joke about “cereal entrepreneurs". Someone who doesn’t use Twitter would just find that to be a funny thought, but a sufferer of Twitter Brain would tweet it out.

Maybe you’re reading a book and are taking notes.  Most people just keep their notes in some old notebooks and forget about them.  A sufferer of Twitter Brain will tweet out quotes and remix an author's ideas with their own ideas.  At first tweeting out ideas from a book is unnatural, but it becomes second nature.

As you make more content, it becomes easier to find ideas.  

I was chatting with my friend Kevin Esherick about this.  He's a writer and performance artist who recent sold an NFT of a pair of his pants for $2,500.  Kevin's a heavy Twitter  user now, but he said he originally hated tweeting.

"It took a lot for tweeting to be a natural mode of operating for me. Like to see a thought and be like 'Ooh good tweet!'. And to feel comfortable sharing a reasonable extent of the depths of my mind with the public," Kevin told me.

But once you feel comfortable sharing your ideas, there is no going back.  You've passed the magical threshold of comfortability. You are an internet creator.  Ideas will keep coming to you whether you like it or not.  

This is why big creators can just keep creating.  As time goes on and we create more content, our Twitter Brain muscles grow.  It's like new neural pathways are being created just for creating content. We become more comfortable with putting our ideas on the internet.  We see ideas everywhere.

My friend Noah Edelman has been writing WTFCrypto for a few months now. "There’s at least like three times a day where a light bulb goes off in my brain or I think of an idea and I’m like damn I gotta write about that," he told me. "Whether it’s in the newsletter or tweeting about it." 

At the end of the day, Twitter Brain is really just being a creative in the 21st century.  Creatives have had Content Brain forever.  It's in our DNA.  Egyptians wrote stories in hieroglyphics, Michelangelo painted pictures inspired from the Bible, and Kerouac wrote novels inspired from cross-country conversations.

I'll tell you a secret about Twitter Brain as well.

Once you catch Twitter Brain, it's very easy to catch Multi-Platform Brain: a disease in which your brain picks up on content that would be good on multiple platforms.   Never forget that Lil Nas X started out as a sufferer of a Nicki Minaj strain of Twitter Brain.

As I've been making more content on LinkedIn, I'm slowly progressing into a diagnosis of multi-platform brain.  Everywhere I look, there's content!  Working in crypto news has given me ideas for tweets, threads, LinkedIn posts, and TikToks.

The journey towards full-on multi-platform brain is a simple one expressed by this meme. 

While Twitter Brain is a blessing, many would say there's a bit of a dark side. They say that Twitter makes you distracted, takes you out of the present, and puts you on a hedonic treadmill of likes and retweets.

I'm not a Buddhist so I don't really give a fuck about that. I've learned to embrace my Attention Decentralization Disorder.  I shamelessly stop in the middle of crowded NYC sidewalks to type out tweets.  Some tweets are too good to risk forgetting.  I zone out from my girlfriend off mid-conversation to open up my notes because I think of a joke to write down. I have no shame.  She respects the hustle.

Many would say I'm a distracted person. I think I would've been the same guy if it was the 1940s.  Instead of a phone, I would've just carried around a notebook.

"The best part of becoming a reporter is you can hide behind your notebook.  Everything is always research," Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk writes.  If I'm using my phone in the middle of our conversation or during a funeral, just know I'm doing research.

Twitter is a laboratory where the rats are incentivized by retweets and followers.  We get our dopamine hits by making good content.  If I need to look like a dick during dinner to write down an idea, I'm gonna do what I need to do to survive.  I need my dopamine drip.