Every morning, before my son is up, before the kettle is on, before the day has announced itself - I reach for my phone and open Twitter. Not Instagram. Not LinkedIn. Not the news. Twitter. The timeline. The place where, for better and worse, the world tells you what happened while you were sleeping.
I know this isn't fashionable to admit. The correct thing to say is that you start each morning with a mindful routine - meditation, journaling, a walk without your phone. The aspirational morning is device-free, intention-setting, grounded. The reality, for me and for most people who are honest about it, is that the first thing you do is check. What happened? What's everyone talking about? What did I miss? There's a hunger for context that no breathing exercise can satisfy.
This is a defence of that hunger. A love letter to the morning scroll. Because I think being Very Online isn't the vice people make it out to be. It is a skill. And like any skill, it can be practised well or practised badly.
The timeline as newspaper
People talk about Twitter as if it's a single thing - a platform, a product, a problem. It isn't. It's an environment, and like all environments, what you experience depends on where you stand. My Twitter isn't your Twitter. My timeline is curated over fifteen years of following, unfollowing, muting, and refining. It's a bespoke newspaper written by a few hundred people I've chosen because they're interesting, informed, opinionated, or funny. Usually several of those at once.
The morning scroll through this timeline gives me something no other source provides: the texture of what is happening. Not just the headline - I can get that from any news app. The texture. Who's responding to what and how. What the smart people are worried about. What the funny people are joking about. What the contrarians are pushing back on. The mainstream narrative and the counter-narrative, side by side, in real time. That's worth thirty minutes of my morning.
In advertising, we used to call this "cultural temperature." Knowing the temperature of a conversation before you walk into a meeting. Knowing what people care about today, not what they cared about last week when the brief was written. The morning scroll is how I take the temperature. Every single day.
The case for being Very Online
There's a snobbery about being Very Online that has never sat well with me. The implication is that spending time on social media is inherently unproductive, that it's a distraction from "real" work, that the people who know what's happening on the internet are somehow less serious than the people who don't. This is wrong. It's a prejudice dressed up as productivity advice.
The most interesting people I know are Very Online. Not addicted - there is a difference. They're fluent. They understand how information moves, how narratives form, how culture happens in real time. They can trace a meme from its origin to its mainstream moment. They know which writer just published something important before the newsletter lands. They sense when the discourse is about to shift before it shifts. This isn't a waste of time. This is pattern recognition at scale.
My entire career in strategy was built on pattern recognition. Seeing what's happening across culture and connecting it to what a brand should do or say. The morning scroll is how I feed that pattern recognition engine. Every thread, every link, every quote-tweet, every ratio - it is all data. Messy, human, unstructured data that no analytics dashboard can replicate.
What the timeline gives you
Let me describe a typical morning. I wake up. I open Twitter. Within five minutes I know: a major brand has done something interesting or stupid. There's a design discourse happening that I should pay attention to. Someone I respect has recommended a book or article I've not seen. A piece of tech news is about to become a culture story. A football transfer is moving forward. A restaurant has just opened or closed. Someone has made a joke so good I wish I had made it.
That density of information, across that range of topics, delivered by voices I trust, in under thirty minutes - no other medium achieves that. Not newsletters, which are too slow. Not podcasts, which are too long. Not news apps, which are too narrow. Not group chats, which are too specific. The timeline is the only medium that gives you breadth and speed and personality simultaneously.
This is why I built CultureTerminal - to capture some of that energy in a more structured format. CultureTerminal pulls interesting culture from across the internet into one clean feed. But even CultureTerminal can't replicate the thing that makes Twitter special: the human layer. The commentary. The reaction. The jokes. The threads that take a piece of news and turn it into a conversation. The information is half of what the timeline gives you. The interpretation is the other half.
The ritual matters
I've tried to change this habit and it never sticks. I've tried morning pages. I've tried no-phone-for-the-first-hour. I've tried starting with a podcast or a news briefing. None of it satisfies the same need. Because the morning scroll isn't just about information - it is about ritual. It's the cognitive equivalent of a morning walk. Your brain wakes up, stretches, looks around, orients itself in the world. What's out there? What has changed? What do I need to know?
The ritual also sets the creative tone for the day. Something in the morning scroll almost always sparks something else. A link leads to a thought which leads to an idea which leads to a project. Curio exists because of a morning scroll - I was frustrated that the links my network was sharing were scattered across platforms, and I wanted them in one place. That frustration became a product. The scroll isn't passive consumption. It's the beginning of an active creative process.
A defence, not an endorsement
I'm not saying everyone should start their day on Twitter. I'm saying I do, and it works, and I'm tired of pretending otherwise. The productivity culture that tells you to avoid screens and journals your intentions and start with deep work - it works for some people. It doesn't work for me. I'm a person who thinks by scanning, who creates by connecting, who understands the world by watching how other people talk about it. The morning scroll isn't a vice I need to fix. It's a tool I've learned to use well.
The key word is "well." The morning scroll can absolutely become doom-scrolling. It can become anxious, compulsive, bottomless. The difference is intent. I scroll with a purpose: what's happening, what's interesting, what sparks something. When I've found enough, I stop. I close the app. I make breakfast. I start building. The scroll is the warm-up, not the workout.
And on the days when I skip it - the rare mornings when I'm too busy or too tired or my son gets up first - I feel slightly off all day. Not anxious. Just unoriented. Like I missed the morning weather report and now I don't know what to wear. The scroll orients me. It tells me where the world is today so I can figure out where I want to be in it.
So yes. I wake up and I check Twitter. Every morning. And I'm not sorry about it.
