In 2023 I started to notice that I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I couldn’t hold a conversation for more than a few seconds before I felt like I had to check my phone. I had trouble reading anything for more than a minute. I couldn’t concentrate on television shows or movies because I kept checking my phone. I wasn’t entirely sure why I couldn’t concentrate, but I knew my addiction to social media was somehow the reason. So I made sure to go without it on my camping trip, which I detailed here.
I eventually got off most social media. All except for YouTube and TikTok, but only because the video platforms don’t draw me in in the same way written posts do.
Going without social media had started to calm me down some.
I stopped judging people’s worth based on their politics, at least. Turns out
when you actually talk to people, even a lot of Trump supporters have some
leftist ideas. I once posted about a coworker I had that loved Trump, but when
it came to labor issues the dude turned into Che Guevara. He loved labor unions
and was pissed that the minimum wage hadn’t been increased in over a decade. If
I could have convinced the rest of my coworkers to organize (God knows I tried),
I know he would have been more successful at getting people to vote for the
union than I. We still debated politics regularly, though. But unlike the
internet where the goal is to beat the other person into submission, we just
did it because we both loved debating politics. We were still friendly at the
end of the day. He never knew how to wrap his brain around me hating on both
political parties though, and I loved using that to my advantage, lol. We
usually didn’t do it in front of other coworkers, but the few times we did,
they were thoroughly entertained.
Another one of my coworkers agreed with just about all of my
politics, yet she wouldn’t hesitate to berate a homeless person that came into
our hospital. She claims to be a Trump hating liberal, but if a homeless person
ever asked her for mercy, she’d show mercy like she was Sensei Kreese. I
remember once that she was about to throw a man out of a hospital like Jazz
from The Fresh Prince, only to turn kind and nurturing when he told me that he
wasn’t homeless, but had just lost his wallet and didn’t know how to get a ride
home. The sudden turn in her behavior startled me. I’ve argued with her
constantly that her treatment of the homeless and it’s always fallen on deaf
ears.
I learned from talking to them that while the social media cults demand that we see all politics in black and white terms, in reality, we’re complex human beings. There’s always shades of gray. Even the most die hard of Trump supporters will support things like a strong minimum wage, and some supposed members of the left would chop up the poor and turn them into hamburger given a chance.
Then there’s the leftist infighting online. Anarchists vs. Communists.
Constant belittling of each other. Yet leftist infighting that exists on social
media really doesn’t exist in the real world as much. I’m in a mutual aid group
with liberals, commies, and anarchists like me. We don’t spend time arguing
over petty differences. We have too much work to do for that. Work like making
sure the poor get fed, or fighting eviction, or joining labor unions. We need
people willing to do the work. Demanding that we all have the same political
philosophy would doom us because it would kill the numbers of people we need
doing the work.
The social media cult demands that we always be fighting. Always be mad at everyone and everything. It keeps shit from getting done. Worse yet, it makes people feel like they’re doing something when the only thing they’re doing is destroy their mental health. It’s easy to feel like an activist when all you do is make content and argue with idiots, but it doesn’t make anything better. It makes it worse. Which I’ll be discussing in the next part.
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