Source: The Unexpected Consequences of “Quiet Quitting” Twitter Publisher: Cartoons Hate Her | Author: Cartoons Hate Her Published: March 31, 2026 | Archived: March 31, 2026

After coming to terms with the fact that my Twitter addiction was bad for my mental health, I more or less “quiet quit” Twitter a few months ago. Initially, this meant a couple months of mostly only accessing Twitter on my laptop to post my articles, and then not really checking it otherwise.

But first off, why did I get so addicted in the first place?

I can thank Twitter (or as some might say, X, but I refuse to say that because it feels wrong) in large part for the success of this Substack. Many of my earliest successful posts were based entirely on Twitter discourse. Sometimes, this reliance on Twitter for topics was a detriment—at least once in every comments section, someone asks, “Is this a real thing that’s happening or just imaginary entities on Twitter?”

Exhibit B:

I get yelled at on Twitter all the time, as any Big Account would, and over time I built some resiliency, which eventually developed into a subconscious craving for drama.

The first time I was piled on, I got really upset, actually burst into tears, called my brother and asked him if I should delete the entire CHH presence. I wasn’t even secretly enjoying it—I wanted to dig a hole, crawl into it, and never come out. I messaged all the Big Account Women I knew to get advice on how to handle such egregious harassment and accusations that I had been receiving (to their credit, they were all extremely sweet.) Want to guess what these horrible accusations were?

That I was a Monsanto sockpuppet. Yes, that’s right. Monsanto. The “GMO” boogeyman of 2005.

I had tweeted a joke about the people who insist they lost weight while traveling in Europe because the food “doesn’t have chemicals.” I was inspired by a thread I saw where a bunch of Americans were simping for European food, convinced that Europeans don’t make food “for profit” like evil Americans do. They also insinuated that Europe wasn’t capitalist, and that American Big Food has an agenda to “load up as many chemicals as possible without people noticing,” almost like some game of Chemical Jenga. Anyway, I thought this was incredibly stupid so I made a joke about it. It wasn’t a terribly mean joke, nor was it NSFW or cancellable. And largely, people thought it was funny. I think it was something like, “Did you know that all American food is legally classified as nuclear waste but all European food is made by one tiny man named Guiseppe in his backyard garden?” (I deleted it for reasons that will soon become apparent, but I believe this was the basic idea.)

My joke reached a few “America bad” people who were convinced that actually, American food was dangerous on a molecular level, and that even the freshest vegetables and fruits from America have “secret chemicals that make you fat.” They refused to admit that America’s heavy reliance on sugary jumbo-sized drinks and lack of physical activity could have anything to do with our obesity problem and accused me of “victim blaming,” insisting that they ate 200 calories a day in America, gained weight, and then went to Italy and guzzled carbonara for two weeks straight and came back looking like Bella Hadid. No, idiot, it’s not the daily jumbo milkshake-coffee, it’s the secret lard-ass spinach. I even got into a heated argument with one guy, specifically about San Marzano tomatoes after I made the spurious claim that American produce wasn’t “molecularly different.” (I meant that it didn’t secretly make you fat, but I chose the wrong words.) This triggered some apparent gardening expert who started lecturing me about the differences between soil conditions in different countries (complete with diagrams) and things just spun off the rails.

Honestly, the “harassment” wasn’t even that bad, and the people calling me a Monsanto sockpuppet weren’t “important people” or anyone about whom I needed to worry. Nobody threatened me or really said anything that personal or mean-spirited. It was absolutely ridiculous that I got upset enough to cry over it. But the rapid-fire degree of nasty comments just made me really upset, and I felt incapable of just logging off and walking away.

But time after time, I got into these skirmishes until they just didn’t matter as much to me. Eventually, I began leaning into it and mocking myself, even when the insults were extremely personal, such as this response to a man who decided it was his job to appraise my appearance (NOT up to snuff, in his opinion!)

I maintain this wasn’t even that bad

By then, I had much thicker skin (and, one might say, extra skin!) compared to the Monsanto incident, so I was only mildly offended. I wrote an article about it mostly because I found it funny. Despite being hailed as “brave” for showing what a “real body looks like” (kill me now) I really never thought about this flaw until Twitter made fun of me for it. I had finally become fairly impervious to Twitter assholes, which is really quite something when you consider that in first grade, I won an award for going a “whole day” without crying.

Of course, most of the weird comments I got during my time as a Twitter power user weren’t related to my appearance, and I eventually avoided the appearance comments by posting significantly fewer outfit photos. But back when I had notifications turned on, if I ever wrote about anything related to sex or relationships, I could reliably expect to log in and see a bunch of men to hurl insults at me that frankly weren’t warranted over what I was writing—and often, they weren’t even about what I was writing, but about imaginary articles that these men assumed I had written, based on the apparitions living in their minds. I am still maligned as “hating men” for writing, frankly, uncontroversial things like the fact that most high-earning men marry women with college degrees, or that there’s no need to “destigmatize” the sexualization of minors.

I got some of it from women, too, who might read an excerpt from an article where I criticized a particular brand of feminism for being off-putting, or emphasized certain things that went against a particularly dogmatic feminist narrative. To them, this is enough to earn me the title of “MAGA tradwife” despite the fact that all my actual political beliefs fall into the category of “boring Democrat” and I consider myself a feminist. And then there are the people who called me “racist” for saying violent people terrorizing random subway riders should be institutionalized, despite the fact that I never mentioned race, only mental illness and violence. (Makes you wonder why their minds made the connection.)

Now, I know you’re probably like, “Who the fuck cares?” and yeah, stupidly, I eventually let it get to me a bit after years of unrelenting notifications, which prompted my decision to quiet quit Twitter. And, I will add, most people would eventually experience some degree of distress from hearing an endless stream of hate in their direction, multiple times a day for years. It put me into a really horrible mindset where ridiculing or deriding people became my default too. I would have real-life conversations and instinctively think, “Oh, this person would be so owned by my invisible friends on my phone right now.” It got to a point where I’d scroll, see a cute selfie from a woman, and my first assumption was either that someone had killed her and was politicizing her death, or that someone was making fun of her. It would never occur to me that someone would just be posting a nice photo of themselves. That’s what Twitter did to my brain. But I can’t really blame Twitter as a boogeyman here, because it was my own stupid fault for being so addicted to dopamine and attention that I couldn’t just walk away.

Nasty comments directed at me aside, another broader issue with Twitter was that my feed (including stuff I posted) was all angry. Literally everything was just expressing anger at other people. Some of this was righteous anger, but it was still anger. There’s something extremely delicious about being mad at people when you’re confident you’re in the right. It’s a great feeling. I think we all love it, because otherwise we’d block everyone we find annoying. Every day, all I saw was “Can you believe this fucking dumb shit person” and then I’d click into that person’s tweet and it’s them calling another person a “70 IQ moron.” It’s just ridicule and anger all the way down. Even when politics wasn’t part of it, everyone was just mad at each other.

This was the main reason I became a little more active on Twitter—not as active as I was before, but more active than during peak “quiet quitting” era. Nothing personal, just business.

I kept some restrictions in place—only on my laptop (never on my phone), notifications turned off except for mutuals, and very rarely checking DMs. But I definitely did more intentional scrolling, trying to find funny content for Many Such Takes and inspiration for article ideas. And as far as business went, it worked! My revenue and growth went back up!