A Conversation With CNN’s Chris Cuomo About The One Very Hard Thing He Gave Up For Lent

Lent: A period of 40 days before Easter during which many Christians do not eat certain foods or do certain pleasurable activities as a way of remembering the suffering of Jesus Christ.

– Merriam-Webster Dictionary

For many Christians like me, lent has always been a hit-or-miss proposition. Given my utter lack of will power, I’ve insulted the process by giving up chocolate one year, saying no to beer in another and ceasing to swear just last year. Problem with all of those so-called sacrifices is that I rarely eat chocolate, drink bourbon instead of beer (unless I’m on the Acela, at a summertime ballgame or a BBQ), and don’t drop very many expletives, particularly with young children now occupying Chez Conch. So… if I end up in the dental office waiting room that is purgatory (or worse) for a few weeks or decades, chalk up these relinquishments as some (of many) reasons why.

So when I read that CNN’s Chris Cuomo was giving up Twitter for lent, color me impressed. Now that’s a true sacrifice. Here’s why: This study here concludes its harder to give up Twitter than cigarettes or alcohol. The addiction to our phones in general — which primarily consists of checking and participating in social media for many — is very real. According to the National Institutes of Health website, “Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) ruins lives by causing neurological complications, psychological disturbances, and social problems.”

As Psychiatrist and neuroscience researcher Sean Luo of Columbia University explained to CBS News on this topic last year, an addiction is “an ever increasing need to engage with the object of the addiction, and a bad feeling when not getting enough of it.” If that describes how you feel after your phone dies without a charge nearby or is lost for a few hours, you may meet that criteria. Overall, 84 percent of Americans say they couldn’t go a day without their cell phones (Time Magazine).

Now, nobody is saying Cuomo is addicted to Twitter, of course, but it’s fair to call him a very active user: Since joining seven years ago (March 2009), Cuomo has Tweeted over 49,500 times (Context: MSNBC rival Joe Scarborough joined Twitter one month before Cuomo and has Tweeted more than 31,500 times, while CNN New Day co-anchor/host Alisyn Camerota joined one month after Cuomo and has just 4,117 Tweets to her credit). All of that said, Siri informs me that equates to an average of 19.37 Tweets per day for Cuomo over the past seven years. Note: As someone who has followed him for years (I follow pretty much everyone in news) almost all of those Tweets and Retweets are news/hot topic based and rarely the personal stuff, which oftentimes leads to some interesting interaction and debate between Cuomo and those who engage him.

So how’s it going so far for the 45-year-old Yale grad? His Twitter feed shows he has, indeed, stopped Tweeting since Lent began on February 10th (any periodic Tweets that are on his account are managed and signed by “Team Cuomo”). I spoke to him at length last week to get an update on his progress.

ME: You’ve gone without giving in for a couple of weeks now. So what will change when Lent is over? Do you think you’ll Tweet less? What have you learned, if anything?

CUOMO: “I don’t know yet. I’ll tell you what: it has not been hard for me not to respond. There’s a couple of days where I almost lost the bet with myself and with my assistant. My assistant believes there was zero chance, my producer, believes there’s zero chance I’ll be able stay off the whole time. At some point I’ll slip, and I’ll wind up responding to something, favoriting something, retweeting something (laughs).”

But with only 10 days remaining and Lent almost over, like a marathon runner who hits Mile 20, it’s hard to imagine Cuomo giving into temptation at this point. From a personal perspective, I’m almost certain I couldn’t go for that long. But recently, I’ve been trying to make some permanent changes to avoid my phone from dominating my life.

For example, I try (sometimes without success) to leave the phone off when taking my dog for our daily hike around a nearby nature preserve. Doing so allows time to either reflect or mindlessly take in the sights and sounds around me. Certain city friends of mine and I also have a rule when grabbing a meal: All phones go into the middle of the table when we sit down. First one to reach for their phone — unless it’s a call, which never happens because people don’t actually call each other unless it’s an emergency anymore — pays for everyone’s dinner. Result? The conversation is infinitely better as a result, particularly when looking around the restaurant and seeing practically everyone buried in their phones and participating in anything resembling, you know… actually speaking to each other. These are small steps, but can’t recommend either enough.

Chase Concha, 6, at the Franklin Lakes Nature Preserve last year.

Back to Cuomo, it occurred to me that while he may not be Tweeting, he still can’t be avoiding the offering altogether.

ME: “So are you reading the feeds, just not Tweeting?”

CUOMO: “It would have been much easier to not look at all. You don’t look at all, you can’t a feeling about something you don’t know,” later adding, “I see Twitter as much more part of the job than as a guilty pleasure. I am rarely Tweeting exclusively. I don’t talk about, say, what I’m about to eat… I won’t take my kid to lunch and Tweet while I’m at it. Now that I have a teenager, we have a no devices policy when we’re spending time together.”

ME: “Do you feel less stressed by not being on there? Because oftentimes I’ll respond to being called out on something that is complete BS or if somebody calls me something that couldn’t be any more distant from the truth. And then when I’m done going back and forth with this person, I feel stressed. I actually feel somewhat angry, and then I look down and realize my kid has being playing alone in front of me for 20 minutes. So has your stress level gone down in any capacity?”

CUOMO: “Are you kidding? With this job, in this race, and three kids? Um, no. The stress level never goes down. But I’ll tell you this: You happen to be right, Joe. Very few times that you decide to try to correct someone’s negativity, does it wind up being worthwhile…”

“But just because it’s negative, it doesn’t mean it’s not useful,” he continues. “It’s good to know. I understood the Trump thing very early on because of what was happening on Twitter. I understood it wasn’t as easy to dismiss people being angry as if somehow that was going to disqualify their rational or support. It wound up being an engine for it. Not the only engine, but certainly a powerful motivation, and I understood that from what was resonating on Twitter. It’s a powerful tool, no question about it.”

The old saying used to be, “You are what you eat.” In 2016, especially as members of the media can attest, “You are what you Tweet.” Chris Cuomo has given it up for 29 days. Many folks can’t even go 29 minutes.

Twitter. Writing in a comments section. Reading and posting on Facebook. Doesn’t matter… a good chunk of us are hooked for good now. It may not kill us like smoking or alcohol, but social media is definitely making us less social, less human while ironically connecting and informing more of us in the process.

Maybe Cuomo will go back to that 19+ Tweets-per-day average. Or… maybe he likes how he’s felt lately by simply observing everything from the social media sidelines.

Either way, as easy as it sounds on the surface, it’s hard to image a more difficult goal to achieve — especially for those who work in media — than staying away from the addiction that is Twitter.

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Follow Joe Concha on Twitter @JoeConchaTV

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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