As a contrarian minimalist, pack rat tendencies interest me. In particular, I've been thinking about how much time some people spend parting with their possessions.
Getting rid of things is not hard. I could throw all of my belongings in garbage bags or call a company to clear out my apartment. However, it is challenging to decide which material things to keep. It's hard to figure out which items spark joy.
Getting rid of things is not hard. Keeping things is.
Being right is not the same as being effective.
I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible. Although it's often painful, I appreciate when evidence proves me wrong. The alternative is worse; running away from uncomfortable truths brings neither comfort nor growth.
This micro-blog won't focus exclusively on social media. However, given that the service that powers it*, thoughts.page, offers a compelling alternative to the enchanting digital battlegrounds of Twitter and Facebook, it only seemed appropriate to share those thoughts first.
* This content has since been migrated to another platform. That said, I do still very much admire thoughts.page.
Incidentally, my biggest surprise in leaving social media has been just how little I miss it. Perhaps that's one of the lies it tells us, that we need it. We don't.
On social media, communication is not about learning. It's not about listening. It's certainly not about changing our minds. Instead, communication serves to score points, to show others how smart and how moral we are, to perform. It's no wonder we can't get along when we use it.
A keynote speaker once made an interesting observation that I hadn't previously considered. “The dirty little secret of social media,” she said, “is that people mainly use it to brag about themselves and only incidentally see what others are up to.”
I think she's right.
I believe that social media is making us profoundly antisocial, profoundly unhappy, and profoundly stupid. By using it, we are becoming ineffective, misinformed, and narrow-minded. I believe that we would be better off without social media or with a radically different form of it.
I believe that social media is the cigarette smoke of our time. Some day, our grandchildren will demand answers.
“You knew it was bad for you. Why did you keep doing it?”
For whatever it's worth, I tweeted that sentiment in 2019, before it was cool to compare social media to cigarettes. Of course, I later deleted my account.