My Social Media Addiction

Reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism at the moment.

It’s good. It puts meat on the bones of what we have all read in one form or another, or had friends tell us, about the problem of modernity; social media addiction, information overload, FOMO, fractured attention span. One has to wonder about the increased incidence of clinical mental illness in young people, too, as it relates to information technology. I should google that, someone must have figured out if there is a real correlation there.

I’m a few chapters in, abstaining from Facebook, my biggest problem, but of course, like all addicts, I find myself just shunting over to other similar addictive behaviors. Looking at my email every ten seconds. Checking my amazon KDP dashboard. Looking for any reviews of my current novella, which will be off the stands in a week or two.

I read too much News, staring at the same stuff over and over, zeroing in on stuff that outrages me, staring at COVID numbers.

I write this blog, and look for hits. I scan twitter, where I have no significant interactions with my content beyond a half dozen people I could email in a small list built in gmail if I wanted to really stay in touch.

What’s interesting is that the impulse dies pretty quick in these other spaces, they can’t really hold my attention, though they can fragment it.

I don’t get enough feedback, here, or in professional fiction writing, to be honest, or twitter, or email anymore, for the feedback loop of addiction to really catch and take hold.

My apple watch just told me to breathe. I did. This kind of interruption I’m told is healthy, as is the get up and walk around thing. I need to keep this and turn off other alerts. Fucking Hello Fresh is still bugging me somehow about signing up for the meal delivery service again. I know I turned that off.

But here’s the real problem.

The currency of social media, how you are paid, is in the interactions; comments, and likes, and shares, and hit numbers. It’s what writers used to call ‘ego-boo’ for ego boost, and it was widely understood among writers that this was a terrible thing, as you didn’t get paid for it, and even in the old days, it did nothing for your brand. It was, in short, writing for free for any reason, not doing your actual work.

Social media normalized writing for free for others. This had literally never existed before outside of letters to individuals, or to the editor. Writing is, or used to be, kinda hard, just getting the words grammatically and decent looking on paper; hand written in cursive or typed.

The killer quality of writing instead of calling people on the phone or talking in person is that it is asynchronous; I can write a FB post or a text and the person can respond whenever they feel like. So the communication feels less like an imposition.

What this really does is turn everyone into a very casual friend; the kind of friend who can ignore you and you can’t feel all that angry about it, as you behave in kind to others, now that it is normalized.

So the way that social media pays you, using the intermittent reward schedule that is addictive to every animal with a brain larger than a walnut, is approval, social interaction, but it replaces the deepest social interaction with a version of the same thing that is a much milder hit. So, of course, you need more. And, once used to more, you can’t be happy with less. At some point, social media will start to feel less dense, less meaningful, than IRL interaction, but we never really know the degree of other’s engagements. Who is hitting like out of habit, who just likes everything all the time to create engagement with their own content,

But again, I keep dodging around the point, which is, why is talking about something more important or funner than actually doing it?

Why aren’t you doing the thing you most want to be doing, in your own self assessment, in your own value system?

Are you lying to yourself about what you really want to do?

Going deeper, why do you care what other people think of you? People you barely know, I mean. Or even larger groups of people that aren’t your immediate family or coworkers?

Well, there is research that suggests that big networks of casual acquaintances works well for job hopping. Any everyone is always a heartbeat away from looking for a new job. So, there’s that. It’s a kind of prep work or hoarding.

But if it was a job search thing, really, you would do it an hour a day or something at most and be done with it. More of course when you are actually looking for work.

Remember when your teachers would say about you, on a report card, that so and so spends too much time socializing?

This before we had any kind of media at all, beyond phones that weighed as much as a quart of milk bolted to walls with corkscrew cords handcuffing us to them?

So, I think, for me, there’s a problem under the problem, which is why I can’t really fix the problem, as it lies deeper. And maybe it means there was something else I should do, or should have done, now that I’m too old to start a lot of stuff. Toiling away at Stand-up (probably to become one of those middle aged losers who have one act that they flog around and make barely enough to survive by leeching off others… hey I dream big.)

Working in a writing room, more collaboratively?

Being in some sort of field where I present a lot? Dear God, politics?

Because my brief experience with story telling, at the Moth, in person, was like taking crack. It let me focus in on that give and take between me and others like a goddamn laser with INSTANT split second feedback.

I was once a kind of lonely kid, reading books, and I became a very social kid, running around with a tribe of friends, splitting my time between them and my LTR girlfriends, reading books around the edges. Oh, and doing my work work, when I had to.

Anyway. I’m gonna do the Cal Newport one month fast and then try to add in the tech that aligns with my core values or whatever the fuck he’s going to tell me he does, because he’s better than me, but I’m guessing it won’t stick unless I fix what is wrong underneath, or stop defining that thing as wrong at all, and accepting it; to stop flogging myself for being a distracted creature that plods along at creative careers unable to ever get into, and stay in, the groove.

Because every groove feels like or a rut or a prison.

So, on that note, I’m gonna walk and listen to books. And switch them off and think. Intermittently. Fragmented.

That’s me. Now.

Does it have to be?