#rather than pretending it’s other people’s job to curate my online experience

[squidong]

man. the Discourse has calmed down so much that i forget people who think it’s okay to say vile things still exist. for a moment i lived in a kinder world

[whitebirdmagazine]

I Quit Social Media for a Week

Saturday, May 6, 2017

Life was simpler when I was younger. No job, no bills, no responsibilities except the minute amount of homework that, let’s be honest, I was excited about. I could play all day, pretending to be any number of characters from movies and books, and that’s all I really had to worry about. Even in high school and college, where the homework amounts were staggering and jobs and bills and responsibilities started to become a never-ending nuisance, things were simpler.

So what happened? I graduated college in 2008, right around the time facebook opened its doors to the masses (rather than just the college kids like it was when I signed up) and twitter became a thing. And phones got smarter.

Sure, there was myspace and livejournal and all that when I was in high school, and facebook in college, and we all carefully curated our Top 8 friends and our AIM away messages, but there was still a level of disconnect we don’t have today.

Now, there are 15 different social media apps for each part of your life you want to share, and they’ve taken over our free (and not so free) time.

As a high school teacher, I see the dangers and perils of social media on a daily basis, and realized that while I’m older and no longer subject to much of the same levels of cyberbullying these kids go through, I’m on social media entirely too much.

So I’m going to conduct an experiment: for one entire week, I’m going to stay off social media.

I want to see what happens when I don’t have mindless scrolling at my fingertips when I’m bored. Currently, my phone is a constant distraction whenever I’m trying to be productive in my creative endeavors. At work it’s not really a problem since I’m a teacher and free time is a luxury, but on the evenings and weekends, my phone battery dies faster than you can say YouTube.

For the record, these are the social media networks I regularly use (so will not be using during my experiment): YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and Facebook. The only exception I’ve allowed is to post a video to my YouTube channel, but I’m not allowed to check comments or views until the week is up.

This will be going from Sunday, May 7 - Saturday, May 13 (at midnight, a full 7 days). I will be deleting these apps from my phone for the duration of the experiment.

Let’s see how this goes!

Saturday, May 6 11:37pm

I tweeted a “see you later” and deleted twitter, facebook, instagram, and snapchat apps from my phone so I’m not tempted by the little red numbers (or habit). I wonder if anyone will like/favorite/DM/comment while I’m gone. Will I be sad if they don’t?

Sunday, May 7 9:39am - Day 1

I woke up this morning, grabbed my phone, checked my email, and then felt lost. Normally this is when I catch up on all I missed overnight… but now? So I got out of bed, made breakfast, and checked goodreads ratings on all the books I bought at the library sale yesterday (Goodreads doesn’t count as social media!). Semi-productive already. Now… to read?

4:15pm

I finished one book (The Master and Margarita - FINALLY) and started another (The Upside of Unrequited) and am starting to do that thing at chapter breaks where I pull my phone out looking for a distraction. Which makes no sense because I’m thoroughly enjoying this book. But no distractions await me, and I open the book for a new chapter.

11:22pm

Day one: done. Also, I finished The Upside of Unrequited, but that may have also been because it was a fast read and I had a decent chunk of time to devote to it. Also, no social media distractions… I wonder what else I can accomplish this week. I do sort of feel disconnected, though. Like, I want to share my thoughts about this book and see all the Disney posts on Instagram and check twitter and get rid of the Google Plus (YouTube) notification on my email. But I can’t.

Monday, May 8 9:30am - Day 2

It’s only been a day and already I feel so much freer without being tied down to the various social media feeds. What am I really missing? Drivel. I did feel a bit weird this morning as I drank my coffee - usually the time I scroll through all my feeds - but I just opened my phone and didn’t know what to do with it. So I listened to my audiobook instead. So far, no social media equals more productivity. I want to keep this in mind when I’m back in a week.

9:45pm

I told my students about my experiment and convinced another to try it. Another told me she tagged me in something but I told her I can’t check it until Sunday. That might be the hardest part - the communication barrier. Social media is how we connect now, it’s how businesses and artists get followers, create connections. So much of the world is online. But what if I don’t want to be? (To an extent, at least - I feel like it’s impossible now to avoid the internet totally, especially for creative types because it is such an easy/cheap way to distribute your work.) But do I really need a twitter/insta/facebook/snap? No. Do I enjoy them? Sometimes. Do I feel the effects of not having them? Yes.

Tuesday, May 9 2:48pm - Day 3

It’s starting to get annoying now, mostly because

I’m bored, and

I created a poll for online lit mag titles and I can’t crowdsource, so I have to do it the old-fashioned way, which gets fewer responses.

I’ve restarted my feedly as well, in an effort to curb the planning block boredom. Does that count as social media? It’s articles - mostly from online lit mags - so it’s educational, right?

9:25pm

After work I went to Happy Hour with teacher friends for teacher appreciation week (appreciating ourselves) and at one point, the other three were all on their phones, scrolling through social media (for memes based on AP Exams, because teachers), and so as the only person not on social media (or an AP teacher, for that matter), I definitely experienced the non-social side of social media. I was left out because I wasn’t on my phone, yet we’re all leaving ourselves out by being on our phones rather than interacting with the world around us. Ironic.

On another note, my sister-in-law asked me for a picture of us from Prom, and even though I was pretty sure one existed on facebook, I couldn’t get to it, so I had to physically find all my old photos and dig through them to find one.

On a side note: How weird is it that when we share pictures now we just shove our phones in people’s faces? And then there’s no control - what’s stopping them from scrolling through your other pictures? With physical photos, they only get the stack you give them.** Invasion of privacy is the new normal.** Oh, and I downloaded two new games to my phone just to have something to do to kill small amounts of time. Distractions, distractions. Hard to get rid of them all.

Wed, May 10 9:32pm - Day 4

I almost went on facebook today by accident. I was on my computer, procrastinating writing (as one does) and opened a new tab. I was just about to type the ‘f’ when I realized autopilot had taken over, and I closed the tab.

I’ve been good, but now it’s starting to get annoying. It’s not that I miss it, per say, I just liked having the option to scroll. Though I guess that’s the problem - the option becomes the norm becomes the auto-action and we get sucked in.

I guess I Just wonder if I’ve missed anything. I know - rationally - that I haven’t. That nothing on social media is important. But it’s also how people communicate, and what if someone tried to message me? (Well, I guess if they really needed me, if it were really important, they’d find a way.) And how often do I get messages anyway? Not very. I fear that part of me expects other to have missed my presence, that I’ll come back to all sorts of messages and notifications… when, in reality, I probably won’t have any. And I’m kind of worried how I’ll feel when that happens. It would seem I’m much more in the clutches of social media than I thought.

Thurs, May 11 9:36pm - Day 5

The only time no social media really affected me today was when I wanted to check facebook to see if was my friend’s birthday (it was). I didn’t want to tell her happy birthday if it wasn’t and don’t have that info anywhere else (because that���s what facebook is for), so I had a student look for me. Yep, I sunk that low. I guess that in itself is a lesson: don’t depend on social media for courtesy and manners. That kind of thing should be kept in a safer location - what happens if the account had been deleted, or facebook was hacked and everything gone? No more birthday reminders. Old school might be the best way to go.

Fri, May 12 11:28pm - Day 6

Only one more day. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Part of me says “thank goodness,” while the other part knows how quickly I’ll probably sink back in. But I’ve been so productive this week without it, and the whole thing has been positive and freeing, so I hope I remember that.

Sat, May 13 11:03pm - Day 7

Last day! Last hour! I think today was the day I checked my phone the most, since Sunday, before realizing I had nothing to do on it. Probably because it’s the weekend and my days aren’t filled with school distractions. But, I’m going to preemptively say (because I’m going to watch a movie and go to bed), I MADE IT!

Sun, May 14 - What I missed

Facebook: 20 notifications, 0 directly for me Instagram: 1 comment, 5 followers, 14? Likes Twitter: 4 messages (some with missed threads), 27? Notifications (some of these from a group tag) Youtube: 6 comments (no new video posted) I didn’t reinstall Snapchat.

So did I miss anything super exciting or pressing? No.

I responded to maybe three of the tweets I was went, and that’s it. And honestly, I scrolled through them all for about 15 seconds before I realized I just didn’t care, and closed my phone.

Social media is great for communicating - it’s an easy way to get in contact with people on an informal level (or like, with students - two of my notifications came from them), but mindlessly, endlessly scrolling is a waste of time. There’s nothing important there, and it’s all FOMO, basically. If I quit scrolling, I may miss something important/genius/hilarious/etc, but nine times out of ten, there’s nothing there, or it wasn’t all that profound/important/funny anyway.

I also noticed that as soon as I turned it all back on and started the scroll, I started judging and comparing myself to others. Well, they got a nice note from a student I didn’t get (except I did, last week, and Instagrammed it too); they commented on that post; they’re celebrating 5 years, etc. It’s all there to put our best lives forward, but at what cost to ourselves and others? Numbers don’t matter and yet we all live so anxiously by them. By tiny digital hearts and thumbs up that mean ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

Social media drives the world rather than talent, ambition, intelligence, creativity. It’s all about your following - it’s how Trump got elected.

And it’s terrifying.

So I’m back, but not like before. And I know how easy it is to slide back in, but I’m going to try my hardest not to. I hope this sticks, because this past week felt good, and I don’t want to get lost again.

7:55pm

Honestly, it’s been 12 hours and I’ve barely scrolled. I just don’t care anymore. The conversations are nice - the FOMO I’d felt wasn’t really about the tweets and instas, it was about the missed opportunities for conversation, through notifications and DMs. Five pictures down my Insta and I was done. I deleted most of my twitter notifications because again, I just don’t care.

And I don’t want them clogging my time, my energy, my optimism, my life.

[luminousvision]

profundity

Maybe I'm bored of thought, or maybe I'm just out of thoughts that hold magic. Either way, ideas have simply lost their luster. Ideas are fundamental to purposeful existence, and I still believe that, but no matter how grand the implications, I'm bored by the very fact that these implications never change. Ideas accumulate as schools of thought that may conflict with one another, but ultimately settle together in the mind and eventually fill up the universe of abstract thought. After that point, ideas cease to be innovative. Profound or mundane, ideas eventually crystallize and settle in stasis. So what's the point?

If you stare at them long enough, ideas start to all look the same. The similarities trivialize the differences. It has come to the point where I feel like I spend most of my time going around in circles. Philosophy is just one big loop. And once you've gone full circle about twice, there's no fun in going around again.

I fell in love with ideas initially as a mere consumer of them. I suppose that's how we all start. We take the ideas that the world throws at us, whittle them down to what we hold dear and believe correct, and we act upon them. I had a lot of fun consuming ideas. In fact, I was pretty close to delusional about it, but even in retrospect, I'm okay with that. I grew my thirst for philosophical knowledge by believing in my principles far more than I ought to.

Just imagine: how magnificent do you think it would be if you knew unknowable philosophical truths? Well, just pretend you do for a month. It's a lot of fun.

And then at some point I said, well, I'm done with that. But there was nothing after the delusion that I found interesting. In my boredom I matured into a collector rather than a consumer of ideas. I felt like I accepted the job of museum curator in my constantly expanding exhibition of ideas. I collect, examine, and maintain, but as you might imagine, museum curators are not exactly fascinated by the objects they manage regardless of how amazing and exotic they might have once seemed.

Admittedly, I can't say I'm trying as hard as possible to expand my horizon of ideas, but I'm not entirely secluded from the world either. For example, I'm in the bad habit of reading the news, usually the New York Times. I spend at least half an hour a day reading online, and peruse nearly every substantive article that they publish. I've been doing it for about a year now, and after awhile I realized that they almost never produce ideas. What they call analysis reaches conclusions that anyone with a functional brain would arrive at if they possessed any knowledge of current events and history. Everything else is regurgitating the same ideas over and over again. Well, not everything. I find something worthwhile once every few months at best.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/17/opinion/sunday/arguing-the-truth-with-trump-and-putin.html

This one was good (shame that she isn't a regular contributor to the NYTimes--could use more intelligent people like her there). She made some headway into precisely describing the patterns of journalistic chaos that has engulfed the public and intellectuals alike in recent months. The author should have taken the next step and explained the current behavior as predictable knee-jerk reactions from journalists and thereby justify a stronger and more concrete call to action. Nonetheless, I liked this article because she looked at the bigger picture at a time when I, along with many others were in the weeds moving from one story to the next. Nobody else had done it, precisely because of the reasons she put forth in her article--we were all bogged down with the basics and so engrossed with getting that stuff right that we collectively never made it to the point.

The ideas presented in the article are far too concrete and localized in time to have any philosophical relevance, but I brought it up to illustrate the rarity of truly new and innovative ideas. Ask yourself, what's new in politics? Not much, really. People will be people. Even at an abstracted level, there’s not much new there either. Societies will still be societies. Analyze history and current events all you want, but good luck finding something actually new.

I know I'm just dismissing thousands, perhaps millions, of intellectuals and avid thinkers who find purpose and satisfaction in examining humanity, past, present, and abstracted. I'm sure they have lived, or are living wonderful lives, but I just don't get how they can sustain the profundity in the ideas they find. Profundity is boring, don't they see? The very act of collecting, examining, challenging, and curating the best of human intellect inevitably renders it commonplace. The sad fate seems embedded in human nature, or maybe even fundamental to intelligent consciousness itself.

When I think of people who still truly and intrinsically enjoy the ideas they carry, most of the time I see an immature thinker who hasn't chewed on her ideas long enough to get bored of them. In the rest, I see an intellectual stifled by some creative counter-force like egotism, sentimentality, artistic obsession, among others. It is as though they manage to put their love for ideas in a partial coma to stall the progression of precise and rational thought for as long as possible. They do it simply to preserve the profundity in our ideas so we can savor them. I know why this because that's exactly what I did for myself.

Considering my level of immaturity from just a few years ago, I can't realistically argue that I've completely left it behind. In fact, I'm hoping that, even today, it's my own immaturity that leaves me so cynical, whether that immaturity stems from lack of thought or a paucity of worldly experience. I'm just running off my best reasoning. And rationally, it seems really stupid to stare in amazement at abstract concepts that are big but not so profound that they keep growing. When ideas progress in a straight line, the universe seems infinite, but as we grow up and see ideas bend, curve, and eventually come back full circle, how can we not feel like the world is small?

We are small. And I'm okay with learning to live in our own smallness. But given such a starting point, I feel foolish salivating at the profundity of ideas slightly less small. The entire exercise of intellectual thought serves to try to escape the myopic view of the individual life and generalize it across humanity, but if humanity itself is going around in a small philosophical circle, then how can I learn to love our ideas?