Twitter's rise and fall, slow productivity, and the deep life

Executive overview

Twitter evolved from a status-update tool into a journalist hub, then a gladiatorial arena where dunking on ideological opponents became the primary activity. The platform's importance became self-reinforcing: once all journalists were there, everyone had to be there — until Musk's takeover gave the mainstream press an exit.

Once a critical mass of journalists treated a platform as the town square, it inevitably became a coliseum.

Twitter's evolution in four phases

• Started as a personal status tool; shifted to event reporting after the Miracle on the Hudson
• Journalists flooded in around 2009 — Twitter became the bar where all top editors drank
• Activists and ideologues followed, using the journalist presence to shape public discourse
• Became a pile-on machine: low-effort dunks travel along "high energy vectors" and feel oppressive only to the recipient
• Musk's takeover gave mainstream journalists the excuse to leave; the party thinned out

Passion vs. calling

• "Follow your passion" assumes pre-existing interest produces daily excitement — it doesn't
• Callings in the religious sense can be burdens; meaning and hardship coexist
• Meaning from social contribution or theological purpose is real but distinct from excitement
• The critique of follow-your-passion doesn't apply to callings

Fixed-schedule productivity and flexibility

• Fix your work hours in advance; work backwards to make everything fit within them
• The constraint forces real changes: cutting workload, time-block planning, eliminating waste
• A weeks and B weeks with different schedules is a valid extension of the approach
• The goal is the constraint itself; how you hit it is up to you

Slow productivity and parenting

• Measuring productivity by hours worked or activity level breaks down when kids arrive
• Slow productivity: do fewer things, work at a natural pace, obsess over quality not speed
• A book that takes three years instead of two is remembered the same way decades later
• Newton spent 25 years on the Principia; posterity notices the work, not the timeline
• Seasons of low output are legitimate; life is long, days are short

The "crazy optimization" myth

• Rob Drydek's widely shared productivity system turns out to be: sleep, exercise, eat well, don't drink, track hours loosely, notice when things feel off
• The hustle-culture framing misrepresents what successful people actually do
• Tracking metrics isn't optimization — it's qualitative feedback to notice imbalance and correct it
• Very successful people often work normal hours using common-sense habits, not elaborate systems