Tuesday, November 14, 2023
The Strange Addiction of Posting Stuff Online
Wednesday, November 1, 2023
So I Deleted My Social Media
I deactivated my Facebook account and deleted the Mastodon and Reddit apps from my phone.
It was on October 5th that I did all of that, and it was ironically, because I talked to someone on Reddit.
A post on the site was talking about cellphone usage. I posted a comment about Stolen Focus and someone said that they read the book too, and suggested that I also read Digital Minimalism. I got a copy from my library and read it.
The book talks a lot about social media addiction. It cited an excellent article from political blogger Andrew Sullivan where he talked about what social media was doing to him in 2016, a full four years before I realized that I had a problem with it.
Digital Minimalism also discussed how to break free from social media addiction. The first step is to go completely without social media for thirty days. I'm three days away from that now.
The only social media I did keep was TikTok and YouTube. For reasons that I'm unsure of, I was always distracted by social media that uses reading, but can't say the same for the social media that uses videos. So far so good on that. It hasn't made me replace videos for the social media that I missed. I watch videos occasionally on my down time, but don't spend nearly the amount of time that I did scrolling Facebook and Reddit.
The good part of this is that I feel a lot less anxious than I used to. The lack of doomscrolling will do that to you. I know there's some stuff going on in Israel and Palestine, and the UAW just ended all their auto strikes, but otherwise I don't see a lot else going on when I read from news sites. And not seeing assholes in the comment sections of the stories I read has been nice as well.
But there is one down side to all of this and it's bothered me worse than I thought it would.
I don't have any friends to talk to.
My biggest regret of my social media addiction is that I let my real life friendships whither and fade away while I stayed inside and let arguing with idiots and trolls become my new social life. I was such a damn fool for doing so.
I should have worked on keeping the friends I had. I should have worked on making new ones. What I shouldn't have done is spend my entire 30s arguing with assholes on the internet.
In the past I would post when I was having a bad day on Facebook or somewhere else and I'd get sympathetic comments from total strangers. Now that I'm done doing that I wish I had some friends to tell about my shit day. I talk to my wife, but something about having a friend to vent to just feels different. I don't know why, but talking to a spouse just isn't enough sometimes. You need a friend.
So I guess that's why I'm here. Until I can make some new friends and/or reconnect with old ones, I gotta put my thoughts somewhere.
Ironically since I won't be sharing this to any social media, there probably won't be anyone that sees this, lol. At least I can write down how I'm doing.
Wednesday, August 23, 2023
So I Went Without My Phone For A Week
The phrase "terminally online" is new, but I've been terminally online for thirty years.
In 1993 my mom bought our first PC. We had a dialup connection and a super old school AOL account. After a while I was reading posts from various USENET groups and posting in chat rooms.
As a bullied kid in middle school, the internet was a great relief from the constant hate that I received in the real world. I made friends. Had a few long distance girlfriends, even. It was nice to have people to talk to that weren't calling me homophobic slurs and reminding me that I'm a piece of shit.
The years passed and I stayed online as much as I could. Even when I was in Iraq I was on the internet as much as possible, using it to escape the hell that George W Bush had decided to send me to.
I got my first smartphone in 2007. Around that time I also got a Facebook account. And before long the phone replaced my PC as my go-to method of being terminally online.
Being online kind of sucks now. Well, not kind of. It sucks. In earlier times it was easy to find people who liked the same things you liked. Chat rooms and internet forums were fun and friendly. Nowadays everyone is mean and wants to argue. It doesn't feel like anyone is having a fun conversation. It's now just endless arguments. And that's made it harder for me to socialize in real life, too. When most of your "social life" is spent arguing with assholes, that really shapes your perception of people.
I've kinda hated social media for a while. A few years back I wrote about how I hated that every time I went on Facebook I just became angry as a stream of negativity was routinely pushed into my brain.
Since then I did my best to minimize my engagement on Facebook as possible. I deleted the app from my phone. I used the DuckDuckGo web browser to check my account on my phone instead (it helps to keep Facebook from snooping on your phone). I deleted nearly every post I ever made and removed myself from just about every photo I was tagged in.
That didn't help.
To make up for my lack of Facebook usage, I got more active on Twitter and Reddit. People complain about Twitter since Elon Musk bought the thing but it was a shit show long before that. I left after "#chiligate", an online spectacle created mostly by trolls and bots in which a woman was dragged for making her new neighbors a pot of chili. It was the most ridiculous thing I had ever seen in my thirty years of being online and that's coming from someone whose seen the "Two Girls, One Cup" video.
Reddit isn't so bad, but that's not the point. I was still terminally online. It didn't matter what I was doing, I couldn't put down my phone for more than a few minutes. It was affecting my ability to focus so much that I began to wonder if I had ADHD. Even when I was on my phone I couldn't focus on any one thing for more than a few minutes. Watching YouTube videos became hard to do if the videos were more than ten minutes long. I'd be five minutes in and want to check Facebook or Reddit.
You might have noticed that your ability to focus isn't what it used to be, either. Apparently this is a widespread problem. I'll write more on that in a minute.
My family likes to take a camping trip every year and we decided this time we'd go to Niagara Falls, Canada. I decided to leave my phone at home. In the past I'd use camping as an excuse to minimize my phone use, but even then I'd find excuses to go on it. I didn't want that this time. I wanted to be completely without my phone. Some folks call it a "tech cleanse". I called it "living my best 1997 life".