Yes, Someone's Talking Poop On You. No, You Don't Have to Know About It.
On pleasing all the people all the time, blinders, and knowing when to self-reflect.
You can’t please all the people all the time. The phrase is true for famous people. For every ten fans a celebrity has, they will have at least one hater, and that ratio can be skewed further in the direction of derision and vitriol depending on who you are. I’d say someone like Elon Musk is at a one-to-one ratio of defenders-to-haters. Donald Trump might have a fractional number. It’s a fact of life one must live with if they are to be famous. No matter how much famous people want to have their haters silenced or at least have them “see their side of the story,” it’s just not going to happen.
What about normal people? Do normal people have haters? Of course they do. People generate opinions about everyone they meet, and not all of them are positive, obviously. Everyone has their own enemies or people who rub them the wrong way. It’s just not nearly as interesting to total strangers because, well, strangers without notoriety are just not nearly as fascinating to the average person as a celebrity is. But just because everyone’s not involved in the drama doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Every other month, someone on Twitter posts about how someone out there is talking shit about you specifically in a group DM:
I don’t even think the number is 200 followers. There are some virulent motherfuckers out there with like 40 followers that get play in group DMs. I know, because I’m in a bunch of them, and every once in awhile, there are shittalking sessions. Sometimes they’re about famous nerds like Chuck Wendig. Others, they’re just about randos. The spectrum of people spoken about in these DMs runs an entire-ass gamut.
I don’t worry about people talking shit about me in DMs because people already post screenshots of my tweets and have people remark about how deranged I supposedly am on main. People I’ve blocked loved to post these screenshots, thanks to Twitter’s laughably and pathetically ineffectual block function1, and then someone who follows me will undoubtedly let me know that they’re talking shit on me. Your ego takes a hit when you find out someone is that dedicated to making sure that they let everyone know how much of a degenerate you are, no matter how little you care to see their tweets about anything, let alone yourself. But there’s no way to stop them. Everyone is going to have their opinions of you, earned or unearned. Whether it’s in public like supposed watchdogs of tweet activity garrison themselves to report or in the privacy of a group DM, these verbs about you will fly like the Family Stone2.
The question then becomes “why is this topic such a hot button that people keep reminding you that someone is talking shit about you in a group DM every month?” If you know it happens enough that someone decides to post that rote, trite observation with regularity, why does it get so much engagement? One theory is that Twitter is slowly becoming Facebook, and its users who congregated to Twitter because they weren’t trying to become their parents are becoming their parents. It’s fine; you can’t slow the inexorable march of time. As you get older, hearing aphorisms disguised as wisdom can be a gossamer blanket. It’s just the aphorisms aren’t Boomer sayings overlaid on Archie Bunker. They’re pithy tweets that may or may not have been cut and pasted from someone else. Looking at you, Rex Chapman.
But that’s not it either. Why does this chestnut keep popping up? The answer, at least to me, is simple. Twitter has allowed people, those who otherwise would not be able to have an outlet for whatever it is goes on through their heads, to have an outlet. Some of those people have organically gained followings that would render them “important” in a scheme of things unavailable to them before such a platform existed. People like to say that Twitter isn’t real life and that it’s a bubble where things happen and are deemed important by a portion of the world’s population that doesn’t even equal that of Liechtenstein. That is true in a macroscopic view of Twitter vs. the rest of the world, but for people inside that bubble, the various happenings can hit as hard as they might if they were happening outside of Jack Dorsey’s Hellish Bird Site.
Not everyone goes on Twitter to get a following, but those who do probably care about that following more than they let on. There are two levels of that sort of care. One is the threshold, where one starts to think they have the start of something good and actively start trying to gain followers. The second level is the saturation point, where people don’t give a shit on the micro-levels of follower ebb and flow. Neither number is set in stone, and people between those two numbers are the demographic for tweets such as the one pictured way above.
The problem is learning to deal with it. You can go about it a few ways. The first way is to go the JK Rowling route and attack everyone who has a problem with your tweets. I don’t recommend that route, because it’ll just lead to a lot of unnecessary agita3 and also will get a whole lot of people harassed if you’re popular enough. The second way is to obsess about everyone talking shit about you. I don’t recommend that either, even though I have been known to do that from time to time. At least with that, the only person you’re hurting is yourself. It can be hard not to care about people who attack you because deep down, perhaps you feel like you deserve it.
The key is that a lot of times, you don’t deserve the shit thrown at you. The key is recognizing which criticisms are valid and which ones are just idiots trying to grind you down in bad faith. It’s not saying everyone who says shit about you is wrong. You need to practice self-reflection from time to time. Arrogance is not becoming, and admission can help smooth rough patches with people with interacting with.
Mellowing out, not worrying too much about what’s said about you behind walls, and knowing where you need to reflect have always been staples of living life. Social media puts all that stuff under a microscope because now, you’re potentially in contact with hundreds, thousands more people than you ever would have been without it. You don’t need reminding that there are people out there who don’t like you or who will never like you again no matter what atoning you try to do for them and just them. When someone says “Hell is other people,” it’s this kind of situation about which they speak. The key is balance and logic. It’s knowing what to dismiss and also knowing the safety of blinders. Let me tell you, it’s not bad that you don’t know what horrible things people say about you behind your back, even if some of those things have constructive elements behind them. You shouldn’t go looking for things you don’t want to see anyway. If it’s a real problem, hopefully your friends will say it to you directly anyway. What I’m trying to say is, don’t look at the people trying to be Facebook Quote Machines on Twitter. Your best life is one you feel happy living. Just make sure you aren’t unnecessarily hurting anyone in the process.
By design, of course. You can’t embed tweets in news articles or blogs if everyone is protected by default. It’s the peril of using a platform that has become a mass public relations hub.
Agita is an Italian-American term for “annoyance.”