So, to cross the two challenge streams here, I took a 50 day break from FB, and a 30 day break from Twitter, and glancing back through my feed to see how folks are doing, again and again I find people arguing with idiots. (GOP/ Trumpist Wing Nuts)

I feel like I need to join in, and add my two cents.

My heart speeds up. The words start forming in my head. My fingertips itch for a keyboard. I search for a link, to a recent NYT piece, to counter the dumb ass meme about Biden’s COVID deaths being just like Trump’s. The deaths are red-shifted, see? Because the fucking morons aren’t getting fucking vaccinated; because of fucking Trump and fucking right-wing hate radio, and social media, and also because people are sometimes stupid for other reasons, too.

Then I think why?

Why would I do that?

Who’s mind is going to be changed? Why? Oh, and what’s the primary cesspool spreading the poison?

Facebook. Social media. Youtube.

It’s the fucking Gamesters of Triskelion. (It’s a Star Trek episode, TOS, The Original Series, look it up I guess?)

We fight for their amusement. Oh, and our fights are monetized. Am I a hot chick in a green wig in a metal bikini? Or maybe I’m a megalomaniac in a toupee.

The brains laugh and make bets. Kirk tricks them into trying to care for the pathetic drones they have been parasitizing. Says that’s an interesting game. The Enterprise flies off.

I hope to hell the candy colored brains stuck with the program. And didn’t just go back to the pitch black oven like robot warehouses and the monetized dopamine trigger rage machines.

Meditation wise? Yeah, five days hasn’t transformed me into Buddha yet. My therapist said it could take, you know, years.

So maybe I should take the Adderal.

We’ll see. But seriously, FB and Twitter is miserable. Get off of it for six weeks, and come back and look at it, and monitor your body, as you do, your heart rate. It is so, so obviously unhealthy.

But you knew that already, didn’t you?

ADD limits executive function; what we used to call ‘will power’, when we linked the concept to free will. Of course it never made any sense, to berate someone for lacking will power, because if will power was simply a matter of choice, a free willed quality, who the fuck wouldn’t decide to have a lot of it?

People without ADD are better at creating routines which allow executive function to be redirected in various ways; getting out of bed and doing your work and paying your bills can be on a kind of autopilot; your executive function is now free to clear our drawers or plan vacations or take night courses.

Successful people often articulate their success as a series of schedules, or period of focus, time invested in certain things. “I goof around a tremendous amount,” said the famous entrepreneur, never.

You can build habits with ADD; but you will have to expend more of your executive function keeping them going than a normal person would. So adding even something as trivial as a ten minute meditation a day to a schedule can backfire–or rather, that ten minutes can knock something else out of the schedule, not because of the time involved, but because of the limited supply of what I’m gonna just call will power, because I’m tired of saying executive function over and over again.

So, I have been maintaining my weight with intermittent fasting, (is everyone still talking about IF? I’m off social media… so I don’t know!) and filling my apple fitness rings and doing my freelance and chipping in on a weekly adult ed writing course, and I added in the ten minutes, and now I’m eating at midnight again, fasts dropping from 15-16, to 13-14, and the number creeps upward on the scale.

So this is day 5. At some point I should start getting some kind of ball rolling. But this is sad. Because its not the time. It’s the mental energy.

It’s also of course, the yak-shaving, the procrastination, which I’ll talk about tomorrow.

 

My insight timer app on my iphone is recording this streak of meditations; this is an example of hijacking the additive, gamified, interruptive nature of the smart phone / watch for health purposes.

So I guess… it’s okay. Big Brother is nudging me to be healthier, instead of going into fits of adrenal rage at the stupidity of my friends friend’s and family who think COVID is a liberal hoax.

Beware the Feed.

My pathetically easy, ten-minute a day rule is hardly something to brag about. But here I am, doing it anyway.

I realize I went the full ten minutes without thinking of my dead parents this time, even though I am again being sucked into their tax stuff. I had a few interactions with the accountant today about deductions. I need a form from a doctor that dropped dead during COVID, ironically, from an unrelated heart attack. This is a perfect encapsulation of the estate process. Not impossible. But in no way straightforward.

Again, this stuff is only a pain when there’s money involved; this is a first world problem.

Every problem I have is really like this. I try to remind myself of this. I try to be grateful. I model gratitude. God knows how good I am at it. Having never been anyone else.

Bipolar 2 and ADHD. And my own decisions, and capabilities, as dictated by the three things interacting. The extant of all my issues.

I am a whirlwind of petty symptoms and partially realized potentials; I am a stack of yellowed paperbacks; I am the voice that chatters endlessly; I am the silence that settles when the voices are stilled. I am the voice that is about to emerge, again, when the last bell chimes. I am a voice like a billion others. I am conscious. For a time.

I am an illusion with delusions of grandeur.

I am getting back to work.

I haven’t meditated since my mother died nine months ago. Not really sure why. My apple watch tries to get me to do a minute now and then, but I’ve averaged less than five minutes a week.

Having cleared time, with the social media abstinence,  I want to actually use the damn time in some ways other than procrastination.

Lots of research shows tremendous bang for the buck with really trivial interventions in lifestyle. A little walking, a little mindfullness. I want to try to use some of executive function to do this, to see if I net… more executive function. I want to try this before I do a month of Adderall.

I am avoiding head-on approaches (word count; time at the keyboard) that don’t work long term; I want to want to do my creative work, and to be able to keep at it; I want to create an ecosystem from which the work flows without painful, unsustainable effort.

Expect a daily post about this now. You lucky bastards.

So I’ve been 30 days off Twitter, which was never an issue really, and 50 days off Facebook.

The desire to write FB posts has been converted into writing blog posts, which are much less addictive… I think because I get 1-10 reads a day on the blog? Or is it that I don’t have news stories thrust in my face to talk about?

I do get the desire to write political essays, but those essays were always slap dash. I found decent prose in them, in places, and what I thought were professional level insights, combining my worldview, previous knowledge, some light research, with the story at hand.

That effort would need to be focused, and then, sold and marketed in some way, which would be, frankly, impossible. I’m a teenager that plays good pick-up basketball games in the neighborhood but would never go pro most likely. Maybe only because lack of focus; maybe because he’s too short.

There’s this endless, unassuageable ache, as a writer, of wanting to be better than you are, and it’s broken into two halves; one is the stuff you feel you can work on, and one is the stuff you know you cant.

That’s an aside. ADD brain flipping channels every five minutes, which it does.

Maybe I do a 30 day Adderal challenge, where I see if I adjust to the meds while I work on the novel that’s stalled at 30k words.

There’s some folks I feel bad about disappearing from if that makes sense. It’s as if my leaving FB says that they weren’t all that important to me. This has happened in my life, I guess it happens to everyone, of people you thought you were important to who vanish and you don’t exactly know why; maybe it’s only that they weren’t that into you.

Inviting them all into one on one relationships would overload me. I generally want more friends than I have, but I can barely get work done with as many as I have now. I have one friend who I love talking to who, at the end of the conversation, talks about scheduling another talk in two weeks. Which is appropriate.

But I remember fondly these friends, when I was young, who could just show up. When you were pretty much always hanging around a group of friends. I’ve been watching high school anime and TV shows about high-schoolers I think mostly for that reason.

It’s not a grown up thing; in general, grown ups need less and less of that.

Social media simulates that–for grown ups. This endless sea of connection.

I think there’s a place for it, around stuff you are interested in that you can’t find IRL. My friend Ron uses the web to connect with people who share is interests and tastes without being hugely parasitized by the experience. But he steers clear of social media, because that’s not really what that is.

Social media is high school; it’s wanting to be liked, or thought to be cool, by many, often relative strangers. It’s the life you imagine when you start writing, some group of people that are interested in what you write. A group you know exists. That interacts with you. As much as you feel like mostly. It’s a kind of arrested development. A kind of nostalgia. It’s harmless, in a way, and life consuming and evil in another.

It’s something I will be glad to do less of. We’ll see what happens. I have no desire to write a ‘hey I’m back!’ post.

Because many many folks I imagined I was important to probably didn’t notice I was gone, in part because FB is like that–because FB will shift it’s algorithms, and people will come and go.

FB’s ego boo (ego boost, the old school term for writing that you do for free for ego, a term older than social media) and connection emanates from a profit layer.

Even someone like Cal Newport, who generally believes in conventional notions of success and utility, now sees social media as an example of regulatory failure.

Social media isn’t a win win. Its beer and big gulps and scratch tickets and vape pods.

Something that should really come with a warning label.

 

 

 

 

TL;DR. I’m okay. Not getting any more work done, but I feel like,  maybe, I will soon. The endless craving to post is gone. Or rather, this posting is enough.

I’ve been off Facebook, my biggest issue, for almost seven weeks now. There are people there I miss, but then, I miss everything. I never let go of anything.

My parents, the family I grew up in, my kid’s childhoods, playing in the parks, my early romance. The career I hated when I was making a ton of money in the bubble, nervously playing the role of an adult. The drudgery of temping after college. Our first shitty apartment with no garbage disposal and the room air-conditioner that sounded like a helicopter landing. Without a vacuum cleaner, I damp mopped our single rug to remove thick matts of cat hair, which I peeled off with my fingers.

I miss my high-school friends who were also my college friends because I made no friends in college. I miss my former writing workshops.

An ex-girlfriend who I feared might be dead for various reasons gave a speech at a conference a few weeks back, that I found on Youtube, which was a relief. She was fine. She was ignoring my contact attempts–not dead or demented. And she should ignore me. I should mean nothing to her now, or less than nothing.

I could hear the nineteen year old I knew, in the voiceover of the powerpoint deck, the voice the same, but different, more confident, maybe, so confident. I’m not even a speck in her rear view mirror.

Good.

Let go.

This goes beyond addiction and productivity. Beyond living intentionally. Something deeper. Unresolved.

I love the noise of the party because it drowns something intolerable out.

“I don’t really believe in diagnostic categories,” my psychiatrist said one day after I’d asked him to give me one. I was shifting from one drug to another, so it seemed like a relevant question. I’d had anxiety and panic and depression. But I’d come in for a state that I had started to think of as something else. Not full fledged mania, but something like it.

“Bipolar 2,” he said.

“The disease so nice they named it twice?” I asked.

My psychiatrist flashed a pained smile. It was an expression he used a lot, along with his sympathetic smile and his delighted smile, when I said something we both found fun or interesting.

I’d figured my mood swings weren’t bad enough to make me bipolar. In my abnormal psych class the teacher, a clinician, had told us about a patient that had spent his life savings on aquariums, pumps, tubing, chemicals, and told his wife that he’d had a eureka moment, and they would be rich soon.

“Fish,” he said. “Need never die.”

So, you know, I was never that nuts. Not quite.

So I’ve deliberated for years as to whether my depression was bad enough, to be called that, I thought of my hypomania (means a little mania, almost mania) as being happy and believing in myself, my periods of hyper focus and inattentiveness as totally normal, and my panic attacks as a full on mental health issue, because you know, the emergency room visits.

So I was focused on those, and figured the other stuff was just me being a hypochondriac, which as far as I know, they don’t give you pills for?

The ADD diagnosis came in my 50s, when during my long delayed therapy my psychologist told me that the degree to which I was beating up on myself to get shit done wasn’t normal.

Of course it is,” I told her. “Everyone has to make themselves feel like shit all the time about the stuff they need to do, or how the fuck does that shit get done?”

“Some people just do what they know they have to do, without hating themselves,” she told me.

“Really?” I said. “Huh.”

Suddenly, a lot of my life made sense.

But we were talking about withdrawing from social media, and nostalgia, which I have probably not called by name. Nostalgia always seemed stupid to me. For me, it was the show Happy Days, which my father told me was bullshit, a 50s without the cuban missile crisis and the nukes in the b52s circling the globe and McCarthy and a stultifying culture of Normalcy at All Costs.

Then my father died, and my mother died, at ripe old ages, and we were all stuck inside for the last few years; as a writer in a big city, your writer friends all move away all the damn time, and also, your hair falls out. You have kids and they’re little then they’re six foot tall creatures who leave home and you don’t go to parks and play on the swings anymore.

They tear down all your favorite places, or they become banks you don’t use, or cell phone stores, or sit empty and dark in the COVID era, staring at you like the empty eyesockets of a discarded Halloween skull.

And you find yourself falling into the past. And it’s a lot like depression. And you look it up, you google, “is there a cure for Nostalgia?” and you read about nostalgia, lots of common sense things, mostly that they have given up on the idea that it’s a bad thing most of the time. It’s seen as vital to identity, vital to coping with loss.

So finally, I’m right about something just me being a hypochondriac, as I find the books from my father’s nightstand on the net and buy them and hold them and study the covers and remember the boy who gaped at them, particularly when they featured the scantily clad women. But the space ships and robots were almost as awe inspiring.

I smell them and I read some of the stories.

I guess I’ll come back to the present some day soon enough.

Social media, as I said before, did glue me into the present, in a way that a daily NYT read doesn’t seem to. My feed, which, I realize now, is where my friends mostly are. It’s sad that I let a brutal monopoly do that, curate my friends and present them in a format that works for me.

Should I ask if I can call these people on the phone? I have talked to a few that way now. Should I go in a grab a few more? Or try to schedule a monthly zoom party? Or some damn thing?

That last thing seems like a cool idea… but middle aged people tend to be busy. Pretty soon, though, it will be retired people I mostly know. Maybe then.

Oh, and my father never believed in my bipolar or ADD. He humored me about them, though.

“I suppose the scarecrow’s diploma can still be of use,” he’d said.

 

So, I have the 900 Facebook friends, the 400 linked in connections, and the 1300 twitter followers. 2,600 contacts, though of course, there’s overlap.

So, I’ve sunk thousands of hours into Facebook over the last decade, less into twitter or Linked in, but still, I’ve been there, and of course, maintained this blog, maybe a few hundred hours over the years.

There’s this tendency to see all this building a kind of equity; as something useful beyond its obvious meaning, friendship, connection, conversation.

So I spam out a link to my new portfolio site, stuff a lot of folks have seen already, to be fair, but still, this is what happens:

We do the math, and we see seven and a half minutes of engagement spread over 25 people.

One in a thousand response rate, 18 seconds per response. And then? Flatline.

He’s dead, Jim.

No contact. No messages. No contracts. No work. Nothing at all. Well, seven and a half minutes, shared by one in a thousand people.

Look, I get that my work isn’t genius, that my feeds aren’t optimized for anything to do with my professional interests. My feeds are designed by billionaires for billionaires.

But I have spent maybe two hours a day on average, seven days a week, 365 days a year, for ten years. That’s 6720 hours. That’s a conservative estimate.

But what I am telling myself, reminding myself, with this post is that thousands of hours of time ‘invested’ over the last fifteen years earned me seven and a half minutes of rubber necking and not a single viable lead.

Not a single penny.

call it 6000 hours, 500 words an hour, 3 million words divided by 50,000 per novel…

Sixty novels.

Sixty.

Let’s say I split the time, between novels, and going to conventions to schmooze with editors, other authors, agents.

Uh. I’m pushing 30 books at people for 3000 hours.

My social media activity is very nearly worthless in every sense of that word. Or rather, it’s value beyond itself, beyond what you get from it, is negligible. I get that it has meant a lot to others, and I like that. I have had some people reach through social media towards me, in heart warming ways. But what would 500 hours of IRL networking have done?

If you like making sandcastles, you should make them. You can remember them, before they’re wiped away, you can even take a photo.

But sandcastles aren’t real estate.

And social media isn’t really social.

It’s like the carbon dioxide hissing away into nothing when you pop open a soda.

Gas diluting itself into undetectability.

The gas molecules are the hours of your life.

What do you want to do with them?

Imposter syndrome hitting hard. I think the social media helped me with that?

This will pass. I hate complaining about this shit.

This post was really whiny and I pulled it, without thinking about the people who have subscribed to the blog. And the fact that the headline is scary and it went to twitter.

My apologies. The shame inducing overshare is one thing on the the long list of things that I want to free myself from.

Nowadays BF Skinner’s Behaviorism is only a little bit less suspect than Freud’s armchair  secondary creation, his fictive ‘science of the mind.’ My friends with related degrees excoriate Skinner, and a little research uncovered that this near universal slam-dunk discarding of behaviorism stems from a paper by Noam Chomsky, a review, rather, of Skinner’s text Beyond Freedom and Dignity. In short, Behaviorism doesn’t explain behaviors like Nelson Mandela’s. Fuck Behaviorism.

That said, let’s look at this idea:

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-extinction-2795176

In operant conditioning, extinction occurs when a response is no longer reinforced following a discriminative stimulus. B. F. Skinner described how he first observed this phenomenon:

“My first extinction curve showed up by accident. A rat was pressing the lever in an experiment on satiation when the pellet dispenser jammed. I was not there at the time, and when I returned I found a beautiful curve. The rat had gone on pressing although no pellets were received…

The change was more orderly than the extinction of a salivary reflex in Pavlov’s setting, and I was terribly excited. It was a Friday afternoon and there was no one in the laboratory who I could tell. All that weekend I crossed streets with particular care and avoided all unnecessary risks to protect my discovery from loss through my accidental death.”

***

This is fun quote, as it reveals Skinner’s deep, deep weirdness along with this pretty cool idea.

The problem with Behaviorism, in a nutshell, is something that a psychiatrist who worked with trans kids and their families said to me in an elevator in the 90s– thinking of people as being just like animals is often a really really bad idea.

Behaviorism of course, is everywhere in human culture. It’s the foundation of capitalism, among other things, that people will rationally compete in the market for more food pellets of various sorts.

And there are plenty of books out there that claim to show that you can use animal training models on people.

Bottom line, of course, being that animal training works. It’s a fucking science.

So, when we dive into this behavior, this internal theater, are we, humans, am I, best understood as that rat banging that button waiting for my food pellet?

Who will eventually give up on the behavior when I don’t get the food?

As I watch my hits on this blog drop off almost immediately to zero in a single day of not posting, I do feel, I think, social media’s allure fading. Without a Feed algorithm to guide me, reinforce me, titillate me, do I do this thing I am doing here less, do I do it the right amount?

Does this blog’s extinction curve help heal my social media, behavior?

Again, I am not begging you not to read or comment here. Do what you want. See, what I want to know is, what if social media was just people doing what they want, without it being meddled with by toxic billionaires?

What would that look like?

That’s what I’m looking for. That’s what I want to see in action.