Thick skin

If you want to participate online, especially on social media like Twitter, you need to have thick skin.

In an ideal world, we would have proper discourse, where we could agree to disagree without saying mean and hurtful things just because we don’t like someone’s opinion. But we don’t live in an ideal world. Far from it. So you see a lot of hatred online.

In some ways, it’s actually worse than bashing someone in person. When someone insults you in person, the moment eventually passes, and after a little while, most people forget about it. But when someone says something bad about you on Twitter, the post stays there. It can have a lasting effect on you, hurting you over and over again.

So if you want to be on social media, you really do need to develop thick skin. Because if some idiot’s harsh words can ruin your whole day, or worse, your whole week, then you’re not cut out to be there yet.

That’s not to say you should abandon social media completely. But you should deliberately work toward developing emotional resilience. Realize that, no matter what someone says about you, it’s probably just the opinion of someone who isn’t necessarily any smarter than you. And you really shouldn’t care about it for more than five seconds.