Quitting Twitter in 2018 has gone down a real tweet

I’ll make no big sweeping statements or promises to kick off 2018.

Lofty New Year’s resolutions are a pile of horse dung.

They’re barely remembered within weeks of a boozy and always over-rated New Year’s Eve.

The best things just happen, but certainly for good reason.

Last year I chose to leave the social media platform Twitter, after a handful of heinously mouthed souls got really ugly, awfully nasty and far too personal.

And my personal ban has stuck. I have not returned. For the better.

Yes, I know I have strong opinions and tussle publicly with politicians and opinion leaders, but no matter what goes down, I never wish for people to die as a result.

But that’s what I got for daring to suggest we have failed to plan and build the appropriate infrastructure to meet the demands of tens of thousands of immigrants that pour into New Zealand every year. I was a racist.

I was bombarded with some of the most foul-mouthed abuse you could imagine from faceless idiots and others who you may have heard of, like so-called funny guy Guy Williams, who blurted out a lazy f-word in my direction rather than hit me up in the corridor.

He’s usually lovely to my face – bravely he’s much meaner in his little safe-place, on Twitter.

But I stand by the column. I have a private text from a now very senior Labour Party Minister who said, the morning the column was published, that it was the best he’d seen on the subject in years.

He’s asked me not to name him as it would cause too much controversy. I will respect that.

But his position stands. My column stands. As does the wussy Press Council decision that voted 5-4 that I was a racist. They need to get out more – or at least go to Auckland to see what I’m talking about. But they’re entitled to their views. They won. I lost. Apparently.

But I’ll say it again. We are filling our country (mostly Auckland) without the appropriate planning and it’s a bloody catastrophe.

Criminally priced houses, motorways that are clogged most of the day, and no rail and bus lanes to newly planned subdivisions. Idiotic. Fools in charge.

Our standard of living decreases as a result. No wonder people live in garages and many of our beaches and rivers are dirty. If only the critics of the column saw the bigger picture, but they were too busy being breathless.

Anyway, ditching Twitter and all the shite that comes with it is a relief.

For me, Twitter and many of the gutless gits parading their fiery fingers across their latest iPhone do not represent the real world, nor do they realise the damage they might be doing.

Certainly Twitter in New Zealand seems to attract a shallow pool of certain types, bouncing off the walls in a narrow echo chamber, screaming ‘look at me, look at me.’

Or they’re likely screaming, ‘f@&k you’ for disagreeing with them.

Not everyone is like that on Twitter of course. Good, decent and smart people still exist, but they’re screamed out and shut down by the ‘intolerant intelligentsia.’

Say something they, the ‘Twitter elite’, don’t agree with and you’ll be shouted and bullied out of town.

No one should be told to ‘f$&k off and die’ because some intolerant doesn’t agree with another opinion.

That’s what I got, that’s why I left. It started to affect my mood and ate into my time.

So we need to remember in 2018 that opinion is just that – an opinion. Read it, agree or disagree but the nuclear reactor button doesn’t have to be hit.

I wonder if some of these Twitternazis don’t have enough going on in their lives. Perhaps their lives are empty and unfulfilled. I wonder.

In 2017 too many intolerants took it too far. 2017 was the year of the over-reaction. Not everything has to be the end of the world. We forgot to be kind last year.

Leaving Twitter was the best decision I made. I had stupidly spent hours of my time on it each week, thinking it mattered. It doesn’t.

I have seen colleagues and friends regularly checking it for feedback directly after doing something or saying something publicly, stupidly thinking Twitter reaction or reinforcement mattered. It doesn’t. So few Kiwis are actually on it.

I have spent my newly found time learning to build things. I built a gate at my house. It took time but it was rewarding. I also read more. Real books.

I also prefer real people and real conversations.

Real people matter. Like Apii. I met Apii in the Hokianga this year. We spoke for ages. He’d spent decades in prison – a cycle of crime met by prison term after prison term.

Now he’s out, he has a young child and wife, and he told me that, at age 50, he has his first ever job.

He’s part of an acceptable gang now – a road gang. He works on the roads. Hard yakka. We spoke for more than an hour. Apii gets it, he knows work pays and I walked away from that hour feeling bloody proud of a man I only just met. You don’t get that on Twitter.

Just like you don’t always get the views of hundreds of thousands of middle class workers, mums and dads and their kids who go off to work and school each day.

They’re the silent majority; they have views, but rarely are they screaming them across social media.

So try it. Try ditching the phone and your social platforms for just one day this year and do something with your hands or do nothing at all. Try being kind or try talking face to face with a real person.

Let’s never forget the oldfashioned stuff.