I’ve been a pretty heavy Twitter user since about 2009. I’ve had a lot of fun using the service, I’ve forged a number of friendships there, and in several concrete ways, I owe my career to my use of Twitter. For years, I’ve kept TweetDeck open on a dedicated screen throughout my working day – a connection to the world around me, to colleagues and friends around the world. I was a Twitter advocate. I loved Twitter.

Over the past year or so, the things I once liked about being on Twitter have faded pretty rapidly, and the downsides of being connected to this space have come to overwhelm the upsides. Since ditching my smartphone a few months ago, I’ve been using Twitter less and less, until about a week ago I pretty much stopped.

There are dozens of reasons why I just don’t want to participate anymore, some of which are part of the recent zeitgeist and some of which are totally specific to me. It’d be pointless to list them all. At the same time, transitioning away from being an active Twitter user feels like a major life event for me (silly as that may sound), and I can’t help but reflect on two interconnected reasons that stand out from the rest.

One is that I’m tired of having an audience, or at least tired of having the specific audience that I’ve got on Twitter. Interacting earnestly and honestly with others is hard to do when you’re being watched by thousands of strangers. Some people react to this by adopting the voice of a pundit or a “public intellectual”; I’ve chosen to tell jokes. And the truth is that I like to tell jokes, and it’s nice to make a funny and have people laugh. But when your main public outlet is primarily a platform for snarky comments, it starts warping the way you interact with the world. I find myself actively looking for funny ways to be annoyed as part of my everyday life, and I shape a lot of my internal monologue regarding the banalities of existence against the backdrop of the audience I’ve cultivated. One-liner oneupsmanship is fun when you’re at the bar with buddies. But when it pervades your waking hours, it feels so vapid, and I’m tired of it.

Closely related is the sheer exhaustion of being constantly tapped into in the network. Every tweet I read or write elicits some small (or not so small) emotional reaction: anger, mirth, puzzlement, guilt, anxiety, frustration. I’ve tried to prune my following list so that when I do find myself engaging in a genuine way, it’s with a person I genuinely want to engage with. But there’s a limit to how much pruning can be done, when unfollowing a real-life friend is the online equivalent of punting his puppy across the room. So all day long, I’m in and out of the stream, always reacting to whatever’s coming next. Setting aside the question of how distracting this is when I’m trying to get work done, the fact is that I have a limited capacity for emotional engagement, and the code-switching that’s required when the character of my response is supposed to change every 140 characters only increases this overhead. A life spent on Twitter is a death by a thousand emotional microtransactions. I want to be pouring these energies into my family and my friends and my work.

I’ll keep my Twitter account, and I’ll probably open it once or twice a day to see if anything catches my eye. But I no longer want its constant companionship. That this realization feels more liberating than bittersweet shows that it’s probably the right decision for me.