Methadone

Quitting social media is hard as hell.

First, why I have a problem

I went to college. I looked deep inside myself and figured out which corporate slot seemed the most useful for my talents. Started at community college, changed focus four times, got scholarships, finished my degree, and I haven’t been asked to write text since.

I have an English degree, so I spent literally years producing thousands of words of text a week while also taking exponentially more reading. I was disciplined into the skill of interpreting texts that came from a huge variety of sources, comparing their audiences, goals, methods, relative levels of success, and comparing it against the historical record partially constructed by those same texts. As a side effect of that, and partly through my own elective choices, I spread that education into spaces such as business writing, technical specifications and manuals, and marketing theory. Buoyed along by reassurances at every stage both inside and outside of the academic system that I was picking up skills for the real world. There was a sense that I could pursue both a “life of the mind” in the manner of the old gentlemen of letters we were all studying, while also serving as a dutiful agent of commerce and sliding in wherever the endless bureaucracies of life would have me. Was it foolish to believe everyone and every level of culture I interacted with? If everyone called the sky green, don’t you think the people who differed would keep it to themselves? Either way, that was how it shook out. I found myself in a world where those skills were not exactly in demand.

There is no place for a simple sentence mechanic anymore. Any honed academic voice is useless outside of the academy, the clipped and monosyllabic technical voice is useless outside of reading already written manuals, the florid and lugubrious poet voice wastes away in a world of character, and attention span, limits. There is the professional, polite, indirect, passive voice, which is adored by corporate and public service culture, only almost no one actually uses it for anything but disguising politics. The only voice that flourishes on the internet is a snarky, knowing condescension: a laconic, crisp cynicism that lets the reader know that I know they are also above all of this. Designed to bob to the top among ads and sponsorships to reassure the reader that yes, there is something redeeming among all the marketing, some reason to endure it and feel some reaction. The MTV smirk between medication ads.

I now have a degree in reading things that no one reads and writing things that no one wants. Although sometimes it is fashionable to claim to want it, and there are many who still do consume it, we live in world where customer satisfaction and business success have a loose relationship at best. Most of the great writers I know (great in quality, I’m not name dropping) have something else they do with their time that supports their scribbling habit. Fan-fic writers, independent authors, and even most of the traditionally published ones are all struggling against the tide of life to produce anything, let alone something that will be read widely. Any results at all are a miracle. These days, the main function of writers who call themselves journalists at formerly respected publications like the New York Times and Washington Post is to seed prompts for people to write terrifying screeds about on the internet. I can’t explain some of the content I see there otherwise. A career where someone can make money primarily through the act of being really good at communication is basically extinct. Everything is a fusion of roles, didn’t you hear, keep up if you don’t want to be homeless. So if the written word is your chosen medium, social media is the beast crouched in front of the door to success.

When I was younger, social media was different, and I thought maybe there was a real community that could develop from that. Nowadays, it’s like visiting the old strip mall where your favorite store was as a kid, except with fewer cell phone ads. There’s probably an insane person having a fight with an advocate in front of the worst looking dollar store you’ve ever seen (this is supposed to be Amazon/Etsy/ebay/Temu/Wish.) You still might run into that one Aunt though. Overall, not a place you want to hang out if you want to encourage a healthier and happier life for yourself.

So that’s why I’m trying to quit.

Like any good addiction, the main thing social media offers is dissociation from your current circumstances. It’s spinning a roulette wheel that may point your focus to the most enraging thing you’ve ever seen before, a cute cat picture that can sweep you away with awww, an inspirational motivating speech to do It harder and better and now, a literal beheading video, a sweet birthday post from a local single mother, a charmingly garbled note from your grandparent, a video of a child being vaporized by a drone in a far off land, an expose about the most corrupt person you’ve ever read about, your childhood best friend’s wedding, and the hole deepens. Falling into a train tunnel like Gene Wilder’s Wonka, losing hours, seconds by seconds, and recalling little of it when you return from the land of far away things. Don’t give the fae your real name, they’ll steal your credit card.

There are many friends and some family that I only talk to over social media, and losing those conversations would be awful. However, it’s not enough to keep submerging my head in bleach water just to see the posts they drop quarterly. I long ago instituted a “once a year” approach to Facebook that I still don’t feel great about, every time I have to log in for something I have to guiltily avert my eyes from the notification counter. Every now and then I have to buy something on marketplace or get logged in by the messenger app, but I’m not there. It’s been sufficient for most of my wants from Facebook (sorry to everyone who has tried to get ahold of me there, but I’ve got plenty of other ways to be contacted.) Even this is more presence there than a lot of people my age and it basically doesn’t exist for anyone more than ten years younger than me. Most of the people I call peers have a half active Instagram and are more into discord groups and group chats on special messaging apps.

There’s a big push to ban Tiktok lately, and while I think this is obviously another gross overreach by the security state, I can kinda understand why the idea is popular. Even in a world where YouTube has shorts, Instagram has Reels AND Stories, Snapchat, etc. all exist, Tiktok still has the best algorithm running for identifying and subtly influencing its users on a larger scale than just the USA. This brought back a lot of the old social media juice for a while. Lots of hard to fake content, spontaneous stories of connection, a thriving young userbase, and all of it delivered by a single swipe up. It’s literally hypnotic, and I have yet to meet anyone who has put time into the app who hasn’t lost hours just swiping up. The Tiktok shop has definitely been the biggest signal of the app’s downfall, and that doesn’t say much about its effectiveness, just its leadership. It indicates that it’s just going to get worse, whether it gets “banned” or not. Among the giants, only Tiktok and Snapchat aren’t under the umbrella of a huge American tech company, and I don’t think anyone could claim that Meta or Google are threatened by Snapchat. Tiktok is a problem for American dominance, so it’s a problem for all politicians, red or blue. This isn’t to excuse another grasp for some of the last shreds of agency we have left, but it is to point out that whatever your opinion about red or blue team, they will both attack enemies to their donors. So trusting what politicians say about them is about the same as believing in the old war on drugs propaganda, while still not being completely off the mark.

What I’m driving at here, is that, in my case, in my humble experience, social media is like a narcotic. For some it’s harmless, a minor indulgence, for some it can wreck every aspect of your life and leave you craving for more. I’m not sure where exactly I fall on that continuum, but I’m further towards the latter than I’m comfortable with. Leaving Social Media is an often mocked form of post, but I think it’s important to signal to yourself and others that there is a change in your relationship to the thing you all communicate with. It’s probably no coincidence that I’ve been thinking a lot about the process of sobering up. It contains a lot of the same ideas as conversion to a faith or initiation into a club.

Either way, I’ve made posts like this enough to know that I’m not going to magically transform into a daily blogger overnight as soon as I finally delete Instagram. However, the incentives to do so have never been higher, and the downsides haven’t been lower in a while. A strong social media presence used to be part of being a person in my life, and now I think it matters less than ever. It can only count against you for a potential employer (unless you work in a social media facing role ofc) and it diverts time away from things that we really should be working on. It sates a craving for social stimulation and offers the illusion of making social progress while concealing the actual world around us by narrowing our attention to what goes viral.

But the biggest reason of all is that I can’t seem to keep my damn mouth shut.

So if I’m going to be doing this, if I just have to be expressing a certain volume of opinion at all times, it makes way more sense to be doing it on a site I “own” and at as far a distance from “content” as possible. “Content” has turned normal human self expression into a job, where your ability to share things with people is reliant on your ability to work with an algorithm. If you want to spread a message, to step on the other side of the producer:consumer relationship, your job becomes both to create the water and manage the fire-hose at the same time, with your relative success will be governed by things as unpredictable as house fires. Advice for making a living with crafts that people used to devote entire lives to is based on vague impressions, guesses, and urban legends, which is nothing to be wagering your future on. Replacing human motivations and innovations with data saturated trends and increasingly arcane prediction mathematics that most only understand through abstracts provided by the platform’s own publications. The act of production is just as monetized and exploited as the act of consumption.

At the root of all of it is that there is no existing capital investment structure for the arts beyond the unbelievably insular fine art world or what remains of the legacy media structures. In a system that labels itself Capitalist, that means that the only way to thrive is to attract investment on our own and there is no easy or reliable way to do that. Fantasizing about some past where people could be born into being an artist, spend their working lives pursuing mastery, and die succeeded by their trainees in the same trade is useless in a world where that is vanishingly rare.

So if I’m not gonna make any money at it, why would I frequently expose myself and my thoughts without demand or reward?

Alcohol is a bad drug. As a mild toxin consumed to relax our prefrontal cortex and let us actually socialize and have some fun, it does the job, but it is expensive, frequently dangerous, and leaves us so dehydrated and physically spent we have a name for the feeling of suffering from previous consumption. Still, for as long as we have had human civilization we have had some form of intoxication. When some people realize that alcohol consumption is negatively affecting their life bad enough, they become “sober” which is a condition where they are labelled as not-consuming something that is otherwise universally assumed to be a habit of every adult. I don’t want to get too wrapped up in this simile.

Just as alcohol on paper is negatives across the board, while still a relatively harmless and pro social behavior for a large chunk of humans, so too is social media. Just like an alcoholic some people need a substitute to take its place while trying to fix their life. Show me a sober alcoholic and I’ll show you somebody with either a truly massive cigarette habit or a fridge full of sparkling water drinks, probably both. This blog is my La Croix problem after having all this fridge space that used to be devoted to Facebook, Twitter, and other beer cans.

Will it work this time? Well it’s Easter weekend, so renewal after death is in the air. Flowers are poking out from their soil and we’re all hoping it doesn’t freeze again this week. So I have the same the hope, maybe we’ll be wilted and brown by tax time or maybe we’ll bloom till October.

Music choose your own adventure:

90s hit:

Alt country/gospel: