#2014TweetDelete 

Why I’m deleting every tweet I’ve written over the last five years.

On New Years Eve, I’ll be drinking champagne by the gallon and wiping my twitter clean of each and every one of my insightful, courageous tweets.

Over the years I’ve racked up more than 4500 tweets—which equates to hundreds of thousands of characters. I’ve followed as many as 600 people at once. I’ve curated cat gifs even though I hate cats, I’ve explored the weirdest of weird twitter, I’ve retweeted coffee_dad as much as possible, and recklessly handed out favs to tweets that weren’t technically my favorites. I’ve had dozens of conversations with people I’d never expect to talk to, laughed a ton, and gladly wasted millions of precious hours.

In that time I don’t think I’ve said anything staggeringly stupid or mean-spirited, or even especially insightful (though I guess that’s all up to you—as of this posting the tweets are still up). But with the new year, I think it’s a nice reminder that this stuff is ephemeral, and that you don’t have to be encumbered by ideas you posted and people you followed years ago.

It’s not starting over. Not really. I’ll rebuild, this time using lists, attempting to avoid the negativity and condescension that occasionally poisons my feed. If this is a good reminder that I haven’t tweeted anything that interests you in a while, I encourage you to unfollow me. I suspect 2014 will be a whole lot of posts about writing, photography, coffee, dads, and links to gifs (though I will attempt to transition into dog gifs).

If all this sounds cool or completely stupid, you can feel free to reach out. But only if you use the intriguing and everlasting hashtag: #2014TweetDelete.

WATCH MY BRAVE DECISION ON Twitter.