I feel like I've been quieter than normal on Twitter since self-isolation began, which is the opposite of what I would have expected--and it seems to have multiple causes that have me thinking about my general social media habits.

It is partially because I'm trying to limit my rage and gloom intake. People are talking about important stuff, and folks' feelings about this important stuff are valid! But we've all got to look after how much of it we can take in.

I don't think that's the main factor, though.

Like a lot of folks, my routine is disrupted. I am not bored, but I am more boring--the parts of my life that are more active right now are the parts that I don't talk about in public.

But I think isolation has mucked up the process by which I form and share opinions.

I'm an introverted person. We were talking about documentation culture vs. meeting culture a couple weeks back and I would think of myself as a heavily docs-culture person. But I'm not. Maybe it's Quakerism, but my decision matrix is innately collaborative.

Isolation has fucked that up. Twitter is many things, but it's not a good venue for that kind of collaborative thinking-through of things ranging from "what did I think of this movie" to "who am I planning to vote for in the primary?"

And it's not indecisiveness or an inability to form my own opinions. It's a method of knowing my views but also building on viewpoints I trust and being open to the idea that I haven't fully considered a thing. And the opening steps in that process are all conversations.

Basically my brother is not at my place roughly once a week talking about everything and nothing for hours on end, and it has unbalanced a well-developed thought process that has in turn messed up my pipeline of twitter jokes and insightful threads.

But if anyone's wondering if I can still rattle off a wordy thread to get around to a relatively simple conclusion it just took me eight tweets to say "I miss my brother and this is the pits" so that'd be a no.