Withdrawing from social media
(I had originally posted this on Sunday’s daily notes but it’s kind of grown, so I split it into a separate post. Apologies if you’ve already read it there.)
Oh goody, another “Why I’m leaving social media post”! Feel free to skip this one. We’ve all read many like it.
For a week or so I’ve been back to posting on Micro.blog and syndicating to Bluesky and Mastodon. It has reminded me that although I enjoy sharing things on social media, doing so requires that I spend time on social media, and that no longer gives me much joy. In fact, it’s often the opposite. I’m just so tired of being told who I’m supposed to like and what’s OK to enjoy. Or worse, what or whom I simply must be angry about this very minute. There’s a lot to be troubled by and angry about in the world, but spending my time listening to people pointing it out to me and yelling “Look how bad this is, yo!”, but not actually doing anything about it, is not something I’m interested in. No amount of feed curation seems to help.
Another component is that I find myself reaching for social media the second I’m not doing anything else. Any pause in “real life” and I’m back to doom scrolling or looking for something to entertain me. This seems unhealthy, so I hope to tame it by forcing myself to ignore social media entirely.
I don’t know if it’s possible for me to just quietly write things here on the blog and never share them where they might actually be read, but I’m in the mood to pull things back and just live quietly by myself for a while. I reserve the right to change my mind at any time.