So I’ve been 30 days off Twitter, which was never an issue really, and 50 days off Facebook.
The desire to write FB posts has been converted into writing blog posts, which are much less addictive… I think because I get 1-10 reads a day on the blog? Or is it that I don’t have news stories thrust in my face to talk about?
I do get the desire to write political essays, but those essays were always slap dash. I found decent prose in them, in places, and what I thought were professional level insights, combining my worldview, previous knowledge, some light research, with the story at hand.
That effort would need to be focused, and then, sold and marketed in some way, which would be, frankly, impossible. I’m a teenager that plays good pick-up basketball games in the neighborhood but would never go pro most likely. Maybe only because lack of focus; maybe because he’s too short.
There’s this endless, unassuageable ache, as a writer, of wanting to be better than you are, and it’s broken into two halves; one is the stuff you feel you can work on, and one is the stuff you know you cant.
That’s an aside. ADD brain flipping channels every five minutes, which it does.
Maybe I do a 30 day Adderal challenge, where I see if I adjust to the meds while I work on the novel that’s stalled at 30k words.
There’s some folks I feel bad about disappearing from if that makes sense. It’s as if my leaving FB says that they weren’t all that important to me. This has happened in my life, I guess it happens to everyone, of people you thought you were important to who vanish and you don’t exactly know why; maybe it’s only that they weren’t that into you.
Inviting them all into one on one relationships would overload me. I generally want more friends than I have, but I can barely get work done with as many as I have now. I have one friend who I love talking to who, at the end of the conversation, talks about scheduling another talk in two weeks. Which is appropriate.
But I remember fondly these friends, when I was young, who could just show up. When you were pretty much always hanging around a group of friends. I’ve been watching high school anime and TV shows about high-schoolers I think mostly for that reason.
It’s not a grown up thing; in general, grown ups need less and less of that.
Social media simulates that–for grown ups. This endless sea of connection.
I think there’s a place for it, around stuff you are interested in that you can’t find IRL. My friend Ron uses the web to connect with people who share is interests and tastes without being hugely parasitized by the experience. But he steers clear of social media, because that’s not really what that is.
Social media is high school; it’s wanting to be liked, or thought to be cool, by many, often relative strangers. It’s the life you imagine when you start writing, some group of people that are interested in what you write. A group you know exists. That interacts with you. As much as you feel like mostly. It’s a kind of arrested development. A kind of nostalgia. It’s harmless, in a way, and life consuming and evil in another.
It’s something I will be glad to do less of. We’ll see what happens. I have no desire to write a ‘hey I’m back!’ post.
Because many many folks I imagined I was important to probably didn’t notice I was gone, in part because FB is like that–because FB will shift it’s algorithms, and people will come and go.
FB’s ego boo (ego boost, the old school term for writing that you do for free for ego, a term older than social media) and connection emanates from a profit layer.
Even someone like Cal Newport, who generally believes in conventional notions of success and utility, now sees social media as an example of regulatory failure.
Social media isn’t a win win. Its beer and big gulps and scratch tickets and vape pods.
Something that should really come with a warning label.
