30 Day Focus Challenge: Day 5 again. Life without the Feed

So, I’m trying to tie the meditation into a trigger, which is coffee; drinking it, finishing it. Failed today, got distracted, but I’ll keep at it.

I’m resetting the clock, going for a full 30 days in a row, because I want to be sure I can do 10  minutes before I go to 15.

So, without my Facebook feed, I look at my other feed-like things; email, my indy-pub sales, (somewhere between 0 and 3 books a day; closer on average to 1.) my NYT alerts. Check my blog hits.

I read the promotions tab in my gmail.

I waste time. But you know, these things hit empty. And then you gotta do something else.

Because none of these things is designed to keep you glued in. You can waste time this way… but you have to put some effort into it. It is not effortless to waste time reading the news, looking at your email.

I miss the feed, but not how it made me feel, often. My political screeds would get some positive feedback, as i articulated a shared rage, but more and more, I wonder what that is for.

I like writing. I like people reading my writing. The feed is instantaneous. You don’t get paid but you barely get paid for writing fiction most of the time anyway, even if you can sell a fair amount of it at professional rates, which I can, and do.

So the feed is seductive. But it’s insubstantial. It’s ephemeral, topical. It creates cortisol spikes, rage, anger. Or rather it takes a rage, an anger, and it feeds that flame, so that temporary feeling of rage becomes a solid glowing coal. The feed fans the flame. The feed adds fuel to the fire.

The feed leads you around and you know it does that, but you pretend you are doing what you want to do, that what you do for the feed is your choice, but if you get away from the feed for a time, you discover, no.

You’re not really like that. You’re not the person the feed makes you. Not really.

The feed encourages you to perform an identity which creates feedback. It’s operant conditioning. The feed has you creating a bazillion niche content channels, cultivate an audience, filling those attention markets with free product, an endless long tail, that becomes eyeball glue, which becomes profit. But not for you. Never for you. Unless you win some sort of viral lottery. If you’re amazing, or sexy, or cute, or outrageous, or lucky, or some combination of those things, which 99% of aren’t and never will be.

You bring yourself to the feed, but you’ll find that much of what you bring sinks like a lead balloon, and you shrug, and you don’t mind, because that’s how intermittent reward schedules work. Nobody stops being addicted to slot machines because they don’t always pay off.

What matters is they spin, and and ping and pong and ring and clatter, and all of that bonds to those moments when you do win, and so every time, it starts up again, you remember, you could win. You could win. Like the time that open letter to those assholes at the radio station lead to a thousand shares and tens of thousands of hits and phone calls and sponsors pulling support and that actually did something.

That one time.

Life without the feed is this endless succession of things you find yourself gradually losing interest in; because that is how consciousness is supposed to work. That is how we find balance in our lives. By doing various things. But getting enough of some things.

I may be an extreme case, an edge case, someone for whom social media is particularly fucked up. I don’t know. But I find myself standing here staring into the sky wondering what the hell am I doing. Really. Who am I talking to.

Why am I talking to strangers at all.