Save this story Save Save this story Save I woke up one day, at age 38, and realized I was the worst kind of bored housewife. My kids were old enough to no longer need me, my amusing(ish) satirical novels were largely being unread, and my life had become a dull hum of paint colors and upholstery. I live on New York’s Upper East Side, where everyone shares the same small, incredibly specific concerns—private schools, vacations, and getting our husbands to notice us. I was drowning in provincialism. And so, like any well-adjusted person, I took to the internet. I went to Twitter originally to express my displeasure at the way the president of the United States was running things. I was devastated by the election and looking for a fight, of a genteel sort. My ranting was largely futile—like yelling at the guy who works in the Verizon store about bad cell phone coverage—but suddenly I wasn’t alone and I wasn’t talking about upholstery. I came for the hostility but was slowly seduced by the community of a sacred (and sometimes profane) space. June 2019. Subscribe to WIRED .
Illustration: Stefan Dinse/EyeEm/Getty Images (clouds) Sure, the climate apocalypse was coming, and democratic norms were being destroyed, but I was making friends. I followed people who shared a similar sensibility, but there were others. There was the NBC reporter I became friends with by trolling him for going on Fox News. I followed an anonymous parody account who turned out to be an adorable single father with a kid the same age as mine. I became friends with hackers, charlatans, and members of the deep state. People in my real life were worried about study skills and selling school-branded sportswear. People on Twitter were worried about immigrant children being pulled from their parents. I came from a family that wrote about everything all the time. When I was growing up, my mother, Erica Jong, constantly wrote about me. So I didn’t have the same kind of relationship with privacy that normal people did. A few weeks ago, my eldest son (whom I call “woke teenage son” on Twitter) had a flare-up of his Crohn’s disease. It was a Sunday; I took him to the hospital and watched him be wheeled into surgery to be treated for a disease he had inherited from me, from my bad genes. It was a soul-destroying moment. SIGN UP TODAY Sign up for the Daily newsletter and never miss the best of WIRED. “Can I tweet about this?” I asked him. “Absolutely unequivocally not,” he said sharply, right before the anesthesia began to take hold. So, I didn’t. I sat in the hospital waiting room unmoored. I had embraced Twitter and a life of extreme online living. And by doing so I had found the connectedness that I desperately needed. I called some people, but it didn’t feel the same as being in my community. I knew it wasn’t my trauma to share, it was his. So I tweeted about politics, but felt like a fake. I didn’t want to talk about politics. I wanted to be consoled. And I realized that is what I’d been coming to Twitter for. My son came out of surgery, and a few hours later he was complaining about the cellular service in the hospital. I, too, survived, but it was a stark reminder of how emotionally dependent I was on this odd bit of technology and the world it contained. Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) is the author of three books . This article appears in the June issue. Subscribe now . Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com . Why We Love Tech In Defense of a Difficult Industry I Tweeted My Number— and Rediscovered Humanity Tech That Makes Us Better Humans
How Twitter Became My Sacred Space
How Twitter Became My Sacred Space
Save this story Save Save this story Save I woke up one day, at age 38, and realized I was the worst kind of bored housewife. My kids were old enough to no longer need me, my amusing(ish) satirical novels were largely being unread, and my life had become a dull hum of paint colors and upholstery. I live on New York’s Upper East Side, where everyone shares the same small, incredibly specific concerns—private schools, vacations, and getting our husbands to notice us. I was drowning in provincialism. And so, like any well-adjusted person, I took to the internet. I went to Twitter originally to express my displeasure at the way the president of the United States was running things. I was devastated by the election and looking for a fight, of a genteel sort. My ranting was largely futile—like yelling at the guy who works in the Verizon store about bad cell phone coverage—but suddenly I wasn’t alone and I wasn’t talking about upholstery. I came for the hostility but was slowly seduced by the community of a sacred (and sometimes profane) space. June 2019. Subscribe to WIRED .
Illustration: Stefan Dinse/EyeEm/Getty Images (clouds) Sure, the climate apocalypse was coming, and democratic norms were being destroyed, but I was making friends. I followed people who shared a similar sensibility, but there were others. There was the NBC reporter I became friends with by trolling him for going on Fox News. I followed an anonymous parody account who turned out to be an adorable single father with a kid the same age as mine. I became friends with hackers, charlatans, and members of the deep state. People in my real life were worried about study skills and selling school-branded sportswear. People on Twitter were worried about immigrant children being pulled from their parents. I came from a family that wrote about everything all the time. When I was growing up, my mother, Erica Jong, constantly wrote about me. So I didn’t have the same kind of relationship with privacy that normal people did. A few weeks ago, my eldest son (whom I call “woke teenage son” on Twitter) had a flare-up of his Crohn’s disease. It was a Sunday; I took him to the hospital and watched him be wheeled into surgery to be treated for a disease he had inherited from me, from my bad genes. It was a soul-destroying moment. SIGN UP TODAY Sign up for the Daily newsletter and never miss the best of WIRED. “Can I tweet about this?” I asked him. “Absolutely unequivocally not,” he said sharply, right before the anesthesia began to take hold. So, I didn’t. I sat in the hospital waiting room unmoored. I had embraced Twitter and a life of extreme online living. And by doing so I had found the connectedness that I desperately needed. I called some people, but it didn’t feel the same as being in my community. I knew it wasn’t my trauma to share, it was his. So I tweeted about politics, but felt like a fake. I didn’t want to talk about politics. I wanted to be consoled. And I realized that is what I’d been coming to Twitter for. My son came out of surgery, and a few hours later he was complaining about the cellular service in the hospital. I, too, survived, but it was a stark reminder of how emotionally dependent I was on this odd bit of technology and the world it contained. Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) is the author of three books . This article appears in the June issue. Subscribe now . Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com . Why We Love Tech In Defense of a Difficult Industry I Tweeted My Number— and Rediscovered Humanity Tech That Makes Us Better Humans
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