So I cut my social media diet by about 95%. TL;DR. It’s weird. Mostly better. Sometimes… I’m not sure how I feel about it.

My mother quit smoking when her mother died. She said, “I knew I was going to feel terrible, so I figured, why not get both things over with at once?”

Of course, her mother’s death, fromCOPD caused by smoking.

Still, it resonated. “I was going to feel terrible anyway.”

So, while I felt terrible about my parents deaths, I cut out social media. A writing friend who is 10x more productive than I had been shaking their head pityingly for years now, lamenting the novels melting into conversational typing funding right-wing billionaires.

So, the problem with my experiment of course is I changed two variables at once. What’s really changed?

Now and then I search my feeds, groping for adrenal rage in the shared comments of ‘friends.’ (Some of my social media friends are actual friends; at over a 1000 in both platforms of course, many are just contacts.) This sickening urge to unfold a comment string to find something stupid, detestable, so I could feel that surge of strong emotion. So I could verbally spar with an asshole. Somewhere to scream my sadness, rage, and misery at the world.

As I do that… now… I stop. Every now and then I compose a reply… and delete it. But I like and share the odd political post.

But liking and sharing is the tinder, I should say kindling, of the feed, the raw material social media uses to generate ‘engagement’, (IE, disunity, anger, polarization, outrage, depression, social humiliation and shaming, and now and then, actual violence).

So I don’t feel good about political liking and sharing either. But… you feel like you need to make yourself known, take a side, and it’s very hard not to imagine that social media is a good place to do that. All evidence to the contrary.

Social media discontent seems pretty good at wrecking things. The Arab spring ousted some miserable governments. Which were gradually replaced by equally miserable governments. Because social media uses algorithms to magnify amorphous discontent… without empowering the creation of organizations that can turn anger into lasting social change. Or rather, the rage comes first. This is the force that causes people to rise up, slaughter the ‘bad’ guys, and then mill about wondering what comes next.

Which is the next monster taking advantage of the chaos.

Move fast, break things, has long been a silicon valley motto.  Unspoken of course, is the idea that the basic fabric of civilization, the infrastructure, that must remain unbroken is Someone Else’s Problem, Primarily the governments that the techno-libertarian right wing majority tries to dismantle, to shrink to bath tub drown-able dimensions.

But I digress.

Broadly of course, this is about my own response to social media, and in that personal-is-political way, thinking about how my abdication might scale. A movement rising up from the twenty people that read this blog to CHANGE THE WORLD! The social media come-on. The viral lottery. Say something clever? God forbid, wise? It blows up? That’s social capital! Platform building! Which can turn into real money! Or Social change! Or something good!

So, we plunk our quarters into the social media slot machine, praying for the jackpot, and now and then that happens. But we know, or should remember, that the real winner is always the house. Run by gangsters for profit, who move fast, break things, and laugh at the grown-ups who scramble in their wake to pick up the pieces.

But I will have to adapt to social media somehow. And hopefully society does too, in my lifetime.

And I know much of my disillusion is simply the collapse of my previous delusion. No golden age. There was never a golden age. Maybe the fights are just out in the open now. Maybe nothing has really changed.

But I feel weird.

Taking a huge step back from social media, coping with the loss of my parents generation, feels like growing up.

Not fun. But necessary.

So, it took a few months of daily effort to step away from Facebook, and the daily news habit that was its co-morbidity. Peeking at it now and again, I see how my feed has adapted to my absence; see the same folks talking about mostly the same stuff.  I miss the life events, large and small, of people who had become friends, facebook friends, people who edged into the real friends who don’t live nearby category. I contact a few in messenger now and then, and they contact me. But it’s sort of like work or school friendship, that can be real, and intense, but still mostly based on proximity. A few of them had strong reactions to my writing, mostly to the FB writing, but one or two to my fiction. Maybe three.

I had a dozen or so strong supporters, to some degree of my writing, but to a larger degree, people who supported me generally, as a person, in my day to day struggles. I miss them. I think about going back for them. I was this person for a few folks, too, I think, but always, there were others. So you don’t worry too much about stepping away.

One of the many FB is different than meat-space. You don’t feel like you leave a vacuum when you vanish.

I am billing more hours on my less creative contracts, maybe walking more.

I’ve added the FB people I miss to my parents, still, a year after the death of one, two years since the death of the other, Maybe this explains the persistent melancholy. The thousand plus a day COVID deaths and Omicron wave, the end of that feeling that we might get on top of this in a serious way, has also contributed. The death of the dream of a new progressive era caused by a handful of traitorous ‘democrats’, DINOs, also contributes to a sense of loss.

The political stuff, without stimulation, becomes less rage, and more acceptance–or is it resignation?

The serenity prayer. Was I guilty of weirdly empathizing with a team where I was 99.9999 percent a spectator?

I have a friend active in local politics who went from hard working volunteer to a player, in a very large sense, making decisions, or rather, steering a process towards decisions, that matter. A dedicated progressive, much of what she is doing now if preventing a radical left fringe from doing poorly thought out stupid shit. Successfully.

It’s too bad the sane stuff needed to save hundreds of millions of lives over the next few decades, and reduce human misery hugely, can’t get past the bottleneck of bigoted, know-nothing racist vampire capitalist theocratic hypocritical opposition, the monster that the GOP has become. (Yes, I know; only 80-90% of them. Sure. Whatever.)

But here’s the thing. I’m one guy. I’m not the voice of a movement.

I’m at best a footsoldier of a national movement. I’m politically inert lodged in a group of comfortable mostly progressives in Cambridge. (Somerville, Cambridge’s somewhat more affordable neighbor without the prestigious universities, is much more progressive now.) I donate a few thousand bucks of family money to causes, do a little phone banking, and vote. That’s it.

I no longer preach to a choir, any more than I just did, above. A few tweets. No FB posting. I go on much too long on FB. Like somebody standing on a balcony, Mussolini like.

I am, well, I was going to say limping along, on my novel, but maybe that’s just my process. I hope to gather steam on it.

Anyway. It’s 2022. I try not to think of it as the year that the democrats lose all ability to do anything but very temporary executive actions that will be hamstrung by SCOTUS and wiped away by the coming red wave. I will try to think of it as the first year without any one year death anniversaries, a year where my family is strong and healthy, and our own personal circumstances good. A year when I could do a lot of creative work, and bill a lot of hours, and interact with a smallish number of closer friends. While missing some people.

But let that go. Accept the things I cannot change. Be here now, in a less diluted, less agitated state.

Enjoy the time I am given. None of us go on forever.

I had a conversation with my father, in his eighties now, about the sixties, the early seventies, I think, and he said, well, that was our our time. And I knew what he meant, because I felt it too, like the 90s was my time, the swelling of that first tech bubble and the way I was sucked into the beating heart, and febrile mind, of late stage capitalism, taking my part in the Zeitgeist that would breed the quartet of IT monopolies that would shape the next few decades. Living breathing a futurism blissfully ignorant of the coming surveillance oligopolies.

The SF I’d loved my whole life coming true. The Asimov and the Gibson, both at once.

Making a hundred dollars an hour, too. The money pushing away my writing without a ton of resistance.

But time marches on and the towers fell and my kids were born in the swirl of ashes and the future went Abu Grahib dark and flared bright again, in the glowing smile of my favorite Kenyan Crypto muslim robot from the future, and now is darker than ever before, approaching the midnight gloom of the Cuban Missile crisis, into which I was born. 

My time seems to have been brief indeed, the flicker of an eyelid, but I guess everyone’s time feels like that. 

So. I fell off the stage and broke my leg but my eyes were open, on the way down, and I watched my kids, and cared for them, and they were creatures of this time, and so I was sucked along in the moment, painfully awake, prickly and weirded out and exhausted and alternately happy and very very sad, which of course is probably just the bipolar. But who knows. 

So, like all parents, I’ve seen life twice through, all my milestones now a double vision. 

I’m at this age where men can drop dead and people go, “oh, really? What was it?” And the answer is generally, “Heart thing,” and the regret thereafter is tinged with a ‘well that’s life’ kind of vibe.

So it’s hard to know what to do next, with one’s time.

I’ve watched men my age rewrite old stories. Stories that no longer adhere to the present in any meaningful way. I’ve watched them retire, give up, become worse than irrelevant. I’ve watched them become despised, for doubling down on statements they failed to understand as despicable.

Could I be a late bloomer? Or am I just fading out, like Hey Jude, repeating myself as the volume drops and the hiss of the needle in the groove swallows up the murmur of my voice. Before the needle rises from my spinning disk forever?

My kids are older and leaving  home and I feel my attachment to this time and place and world stretching thin. Bilbo’s butter over too much bread.

But… Maybe I’ll be better off in another world. Of my own creation, undisturbed by the noisy now.  Or wherever it is we go when we go, if my next pratfall off the stage lands me at an awkward angle. Maybe I had plenty of time. Maybe I did something.

I don’t feel like I did, but then, that’s probably the bipolar.

At any rate, here is to you, dear reader, to you and your time, and what you do with the time you have on your hands right now. Do something that matters to you. Make something. Love someone. Listen to new music.

Enjoy the light. Your time under the sun.

I’ve been off social media for maybe four months now. I’ve also cut back my news consumption by about 90%. This isn’t coincidental. My feed drove my news habit; they were co-morbidities.

I’m reading more, but still not enough. I walk a lot, and when I do, I talk to my mother in my head as I approach the one year anniversary of her death. I talk to Dad too. I am repeating myself now, mostly, and I think the talks will end, or become less frequent.

I posted about the deaths of my parents too much, so twitter thinks I like hearing about family members dying. I am not joking. I check in on Twitter, and Facebook, now and then every few days, to see if anyone is engaging with my content (writing, blogging, etc.)

They aren’t.

I glance at the feeds, until I see something that makes me clench up inside. This anger. This desire to bang out a manifesto. To make a statement!

I remember… doing this for hundreds upon hundreds of hours. I start a reply, now and then… then I delete it, and block whoever pissed me off. I close the window. And it’s over.

The part of me that wrote FB posts is withering, thank God. It’s the same brain module that blogs, here, so these posts seem to be fading away as well.

I fast. I fill my apple watch rings, with an hour and fifteen minutes of walking and jogging. I meditate.

I remember. I am grateful. I am worried about how fast time is going by. I dread the next horror that will arise sooner or later. The next person in the hospital. The next late night phone call. The next emergency surgery. The next person I will watch die. I worry about being that person, in that waiting room, going into the OR, with my family telling me everything will be Ok.

I worry about my cats dying. They should go next. I do the pet deaths, it’s one of my jobs in the family.

I try not to worry, because life is short, and you don’t want to spend a lot of time worrying, but the problem is, really understanding that life is short is fucking terrifying. Contemplating death sucks the life out of me, leaving me listless, directionless. I’m never going to accept it. I know that now. I’m never going to be okay with it. I’m never going to believe there’s life after death. I’m never going to be the person who doesn’t feel this way again.

I had a great run, or he had, that guy that didn’t really believe in his mortality; not down deep. That guy who was going to live forever.

God he enjoyed this sense of infinite possibility. Nothing but time.

God he slept easily. What a fool, he was. What a child.

The problem with creative work, is the way time melts away, in the doing of it; flow is wonderful but it’s also a kind of death. Time goes by even faster.

I walk and try to slow down time. I try to remember and be here now.

Then I watch a great deal of television.

I don’t miss social media.

I miss my immortality.

 

If everything goes as planned, you will get watch your parents die when you’re in middle age.

I’m lucky. I was 57 when I lost my Mom, 55 when I lost my Dad. I had to look after my mom for 13 months. Dad had a bad week at the end; Mom had a bad month, and a few years of dementia that left most of her personality intact.

So it’s been 10 months. Over a hundred days. And I struggle daily now, with their memory, the memory of the indignity and misery of death, and my own and my kid’s mortality.

I’ve got a therapist and two kids and the partner; but one is away at college, my spouses parents both gone for 8 years, and our lives feel emptier in ways that are hard to articulate. You feel like you’re forgetting something. Most of the time.

So, I talk to my Mom and Dad as I walk, everyday, with the earbuds in, and the conversations are not that long; they hit the same notes mostly; they include stuff I never said when they were alive. And stuff I said all the time.

How’s it going? I love you.

Now I add stuff, about how little I saw them the last thirty years. About why that was. I say the things I wish I’d said.

Their voices dim. The conversations seem less and less real, less necessary. The pain recedes, merging now with my terror of my own death, which now feels really real. I meditate, walk, and fast.

Life is less fun. The world still achingly beautiful, but I look at the trees I have watched grow for twenty five years, in and around where I live, remembering how small they were, and think, if all goes as planned, the little trees I see how will get as high, but no higher, and that’s the last time that happens. I watched my kids for 25 years, and if I’m lucky I get to see them start to look like I do now, in 25 years.

And those 25 years?

Fucking flew by. Flew by. That’s the terrifying part.

My life is flying by, and I’m typing this note to a few friends and strangers. The people I love, that I fall in love with, that I used to love, that have written me off and drifted away; to the ones I love that I will never see again but in dreams and memories.

Hey Mom. Hey Dad. How’s it going?

We’re all Okay.

You had great lives. Could hardly ask for more.

But I miss you. I’ll never get to know you any better.

And I’ll admit now, which I  never do, in my conversations, that that was my fault as well as their’s.

A week of installs has made me realize that, yeah, if you hate system troubleshooting buy a Mac. Feels to me, about ten times worse, but I think a lot of that is my knowledge of the Mac and ignorance of Windows. Maybe Windows, underneath that, is twice as bad.

They’re both micro-kernal based OSes that work pretty well, with command line interfaces that can be used to shove the GUI out of the way to fix some stuff. Both platforms make the OSes we used to use look like stone knives and bear skins.

I’m using the same monitor on both systems in terms of size and resolution. The same Wacom tablet.

But now, I want to take a break from the 3D (I didn’t get more than a few hours past the system building and installs and widows troubleshooting.) and write more. I plotted the first day of nano-wrimo, and daydreamed. Now I have to start writing words, and finding the real story on the page.

I look forward to paying my son to troubleshoot this system while I work on my mac upstairs; my version of the sports car that sits in the shop while you drive your boring car. This was not an option ten years ago. For now, it’s a work around. Get me past my disgust for ugly text based error screens and maddening incompatibilities.

Windows 11 was breaking AMD processors, making them run 30% slower than comparable intel chips. Oops. Probably should have bought wintel. In the wonderful freedom of building machines from scratch, with windows, some parts are more equal than others.

Oh, this post was written on the PC. I can’t reach into my iphoto cloud storage and pull a photo in easily. Hm. I’ll have to look into the icloud interface… ugh. Web-based. Only Google can make a web-based application feel as good as a desktop app. (gmail.)

So, the weird thing about leaving social media is that you lose the metrics that let you know if you’re being interesting. Or if Mark Zuckerberg can use your post to elect evil politicians, which of course, is a problem with the platform.

The other problem being the addiction.

In the absence of this feedback, I end up writing what is more or less a diary of my own attempts at bettering myself, being more productive, mixed with memoire and commentary, kinda what I did with FB, but minus the politics. Of course, there was also the stuff I wrote inspired by other people in my feed, and the replies.

I find myself wanting to build this blog into something addictive, with more feedback, rising subscription numbers, greater reach, and more researched articles and pieces, more polished memoire… but again, I got out of FB in large part to write more fiction, or maybe business writing or creative non-fiction that paid more money, and do less conversational typing.

The conversational typing, I think, has slowly impacted my fictional voices, creating something that approximates effortless reading. So maybe it’s worth something.

Anyway, feel free to comment and share, which is of course, far slower clumsier than banging an emoticon. But that’s a good thing. Because it isn’t something. you do reflexively. Some people ‘like’ every comment by a friend, to be friendly. Some people like only what moves them. Your likes is his mixed bag, like halloween candy combining horrific orange and black taffy with delightful chocolate bars. Likes are the mechanism that FB and Twitter uses to create virality, and I think, how they trigger the dangerous levels of stickiness, engagement.

Facebook wants you to spend all your time in Facebook. All of it. It’s creators knew they were exploiting weaknesses in human psychology, and did it anyway, like Big Tobacco peddling their lethal, addictive product without admitting its well-known health risks for decades. Whistle blowers have been saying this about FB for years now, but the latest whistle-blower, post Trump, seems to have finally struck the resonant chord, in the same way #metoo bubbled along below the surfaces before getting big.

The like is the way they do it, the way they tune the feed, the way europeans distilled the coca leaves which were well tolerated by native users as coffee like pick-me-up for centuries, into the white powder and crack which can destroy a life in a matter of months.

Facebook turned social media into crack.

So, don’t like my stuff, heck, you can’t, there’s no button. Don’t comment unless you feel like it, and don’t share if unless you really like the thing you’re sharing.

I see the reads, which are hits, which mean… something, even if you skim a paragraph and go away, because you cared enough about me to actually click a link, and wait a few seconds. Which is a huge barrier. Donald Trump couldn’t turn his blog into any numbers that mattered, not even with a third of the country worshipping him as a God. So this blog will never blow up. Blog’s don’t blow up.

Only crack blows up. And crack, you know, is bad for you.

I was a Mac guy, back when that was something one could be unironically.

It mattered to me, what kind of computer you used. I was righteously infuriated if you dissed my superior platform. Sure, Apple cost more up-front, but, but, but… in studies of small business best practices we see obvious improvements in productivity and the total cost of ownership is actually lower… for fuck’s sake, you fucking philistine.

You don’t have to hire someone from Novel to get your three wintel boxes to fucking share the shitty non postscript fucking laser printer with no fonts in it. You can just plug the goddam macs together and BOOM, fuck, they’re sharing that four thousand dollar, that’s right that four thousand dollar postscript laser printer. It just works!

This is all so, so embarrassing, thinking of this now. God it was dumb.

One imagines hard core communists, the ones that insisted that Stalin wasn’t hurting anybody, that the lamestream media was making up that stuff about gulags and whatnot. And how, decades later, they must have felt, about the USSR, the socialist utopia which wasn’t. (By the way, I might have been one of those dumb leftists, too, and I cringe about that sometimes.)

Mac’s were far better for graphic art production for decades, the only platform for serious video editing and audio production; but, there was never all that much money in these tiny content creator niches, and so Apple systematically wrecked their products and pissed away their own competitive advantage, always shoving shiny slick machines at consumers–not creators.

In retrospect? The strategy worked. They’re filthy rich, and every bit as evil as every filthy rich company at their scale. But if you were a creator, and an Apple person? This metamorphosis sucked hard.

Sure, Apple’s consumer focus made many into a kind of creator, with Garage Band and the decent iphone camera and the halfway decent bundled photo editor, the easy video editor, and such, but at the pro level, eventually, macs started lagging. Again, why would you, Adobe, wanna optimize your product for 8% of the personal computer market?

It pissed PC people off if Photoshop ran better on the Mac, which it did, for a long damn time, to the point where it seemed, Adobe delighted in that moment when windows finally got good enough, and wintel started benchmarking better than Macs in every way imaginable.

So high-end PC workstations would now dominate the professional creator space, and running the Mac was, uh, kinda… quaint. You spent a lot of money, to get something that didn’t work as well, that ran a subset of software, and which you couldn’t game on.

3D content creation was a place where the wintel systems and applications were immediately and always far superior to anything  mac based. The exact same video card in a PC can do much much more, in a PC that the same card plugged into a mac. (Back when mac’s had normal PCI slots. Yes, for a while Macs were boxes you put cards in… I owned a mac clone!)

I did some 3d early on, when the platforms were closer together in performance, with a now elderly package called Strata Studio, and learned basic stuff about modeling, rendering, and animating 3d content. I created content with this package professionally during the first tech boom and made real money doing it. but I was never great at it, really.

But a friend of mine on Facebook started posting these wonderful renderings in Lightwave of spaceships and space scenes and I started using his stuff for book covers, and finally, I decided, Jesus, I have to buy a PC and learn this. The image I used for the Today We Choose Faces book cover that made me realize, I have to create content this way. It was created by my friend Graham Gazzard, who is a wonderful guy, a real artist who insists he’s just goofing around.

So, yesterday I shucked out 3k on PC parts, buying more of an AMD processor than I really wanted as I was impatient, and then had that choice ripple through the build making everything else cost more, and spent five hours with the 20 year old gamer building this thing.

I’m starting out with Blender and DAZ as my friend told me to skip Lightwave, saying, if he had it to do all over again, he would just use Blender. So, I’ll start out there, and save the thousand bucks.

Having invested, or perhaps simply spent, the money on this, uh, workstation, I now have to actually learn the software. Which of course, isn’t really about software. It’s about the skill, the art, of this. Knowing a tool is not the same thing as  having a skill. You can know how to saw and use a router and a drill press and not be able to make furniture. You see people who want to create graphic products say, “oh, I need to learn photoshop, so I don’t have to hire a designer,” and you think, “Buying a paint brush doesn’t make you an interior designer.”

Breathes heavily, angrily staring into the distance. Philistines.

Okay, I’m still an asshole. 

But seriously. 

I have a doctor’s appointment in a week or so and I thought I’d try to cut the sugar that has crept back into my diet out for a week and see how I feel, and what I weigh, though I am less focused on that than I used to be. As evinced by the ten returning pounds. A recent NYT article cited a meta study showing that, as the fat acceptance folks have been telling us for ages, movement, all by itself, lengthens life more than weight loss by itself.

So if you can only manage one thing, not the other, work on exercise first. I did weight loss by itself, with a few miles of walking daily, sure but no weight training, and got skinny arms… But the arms work fine and I feel better, so, that was a win, too, really.

The daily fast has somehow made me feel like I deserve AS MUCH SUGAR AS I WANT, which, you know, is a lot of sugar. More and more, in fact. So. Yeah. Whack-a-mole again. At what point do I get everything right… and start shooting opiods, I wonder. Darkly. Hah.

Maybe sugar isn’t so bad. So it’s just seven days. I’ll talk about this when it’s over.

Oh, and if you’re noticing how fucking boring this blog is, yeah. I’m trying to use social media to make me healthier and happier, this horse and buggy social media, that I have to actually fucking pay for, the domain name and hosting without the third party marketing built in. No ads here, you notice.

You’re welcome. Enjoy my boring first world problems!

So, looking back at the posts and my meditation timer app, it would seem that I have done this for 35 days. I have missed 4 days, so, yeah, 31 days of ass on the pillow, with a two day gap and two one day gaps. Two streaks of ten days or more.

I have attained a perfect state of enlightenment. My life is now all that I wanted it to be. I have lost ten pounds and I am volunteering in soup kitchens, filled with loving compassion for all of humanity, including anti-vaxxers, Trump supporters, and people who honk their horns behind me when I am stopped at a red light.

Not really.

Can’t say I feel any different. The habit of meditation has not been really created, I don’t think, as I was meditating at 11, after a short run in the rain to try to fill my apple rings, both with a midnight deadline so I could keep streaks going.

My friend Ron has suggested a meditation timer, a standalone device, which would be cut off from social media functions, my app’s pitches for paid services, and thumbnails of people meditating near me. I’m considering it. Using it would reduce my cell phone habit by 15 minutes a day. Heh.

I could, gasp, leave the phone somewhere, and just use the timer.

Looking into 12 step on the various forms of tech addiction. My son, the younger kid, is a video game, uh, user; the perfect child for the pandemic. Only online friends. Only gaming friends. Dislikes restaurants and doesn’t care about movies. Who now is in desperate need for some sort of intervention.

Then there’s me, trying to model better behavior.

I think I’ll stick with the app and try to keep this streak going, even if it means sitting in the dark at 11:30 at night. Maybe it will help me get to sleep, right? One thing at a time.

Fast. Exercise. Meditate.

I wrote 1600 words of, uh, stuff, yesterday, and spent 5 hours or so on the SF course I am working on with my friend Mike McComas. And did the three things above. So. Good day, right? Why don’t I think that? Why do I focus on all the stuff I didn’t do?

Coffee almost finished. TIme to sit. Bumped the timer up to 12 minutes, 4 interval bells of 3 minutes each. Three minutes is a pop song. Twelve minutes half a sit-com. A quarter of my green fitness ring.

And an endless abyss of quiet, boredom, and escape.

The one and only thing you can’t do poorly. As long as you actually do it.