I find myself clicking into other sites absently looking for something that isn’t there. Writing super-long emails to friends. I don’t have to listen to the mainstream media endlessly explain why I can’t have Bernie Sanders for my candidate, or how we Really Don’t Know what will happen at the GOP convention.
We really don’t know!
Two of the five hundred or so people on friends list have interacted with me, having noticed my absence. But that’s it, after a month.
My word count goals are still a hit or miss thing. Many variables.
How many hours a day was I on FB? For how long?
Say 1.5-2 hours a day for… 4 years? Five years?
(fumbles with calculator… subtracts the week a year fast…
120 days, 24 hour days… call it 200 days, with sleep and going to bathroom and such.
Two hundred days.
Reading. Writing. Forwarding. Liking. Posting photos.
I’ve compiled lists of people to try to stay in touch with in some other way.
I’m trying to pare myself back to something essential, to focus on what I have to do. I have to try to be better than I am. Stretch.
There’s a kind of sadness I call trying to be taller, where you just flail at these impossible to change things about yourself.
I felt like a lot of my striving as a writer was turning into that, but now, I think, maybe I can…
…myelinate.
The takeaway: practicing skills over time causes those neural pathways to work better in unison via myelination. To improve your performance, you need to practice FREQUENTLY, and get lots of feedback so you practice CORRECTLY and enhance the right things.
I want to make a fucking t-shirt with the word myelinate on it.
I want to be better than I am.
Awesome that you’ve kicked the habit. I try to mostly use Facebook for occasional but real updates about me, and for some real-friend messaging. Though in times of stress or really boring work, I surf Facebook more than I want to, with the excuse that I “need to relieve stress with a break.”
I quit television 7-8 years ago, and feel so much better never seeing the ads.
As the Buddha said, what we choose to expose our minds to has a very real affect on our mental lives. Let’s try to choose wisely.
I’m experimenting… I still have a lot of tics, joyless compulsive kinds of behaviors that somehow are part of my ecology, which I want to kill. What gets me is that I have no control over the what subset of my friends see my stuff; it’s some sort of weird experiment _that is completley out of my control_ and the goal is to monetize that network. We are the content and we are the advertisers… theres this good youtube movie about how fundamentally fucked up FB is, trying to sell you back your own relationships via ‘boosted’ posts, when what you’d really like is the ability to just share stuff with your friends… and you can do that, on your own, in person, on the phone, in email, or with a blog… and for me it is definitely this wire monkey, this surrogate behavior; it’s pretending to be someone that people would want to listen to. When I haven’t done anything that would make anyone want to listen to me. Yet.