My cessation of social media followed the course of my cessation of alcohol four years earlier.
When I gave up booze, it went from a weekly imbibing ritual to an every-other-week one, until the cons became too apparent, and the pros became too attractive.
With Twitter, I enforced a strict five tweets a day max rule.
One thing led to another, and the moderation mutated into me missing from the timeline.
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Like my Enochian ending to alcohol, my Twitter experience ended in its own event.
A manic response to apparent problems resulted in a lot of 'all-over-the-place-ness', causing me to show my ass on a personal social media Summer Jam screen.
My name on Twitter, TheJK could have stood for "The Just Kidding."
Lessons crystallized in my 1st house year. Mea culpas internally digested, and outwardly broadcasted in a cloud of content on Two Dreams that hopefully shows a little more wisdom, and a little less capacity for malicious incitement.
Like deciduous leaves, Twitter became X in my absence.
I was kept abreast through Slow Media intermediaries, made aware of trending topics that became a sort of skinhead table of contents on the website I once touched the world through.
It didn't feel like there was a lot to miss.
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An unconscious choice of abstention grew into a deliberate one.
I began to see the appeal of not seeing thoughts leap over evolutionary filters, to be disseminated by enraged, anxious, or intoxicated eyes, and fingertips.
But before I sound all self-congratulatory for being internet-isolative, let me talk about what I found valuable in the decade-plus I spent spewing my internal dialogue, and viewing that of others:
I forged relationships that mattered at one point (though, many have fizzled for the time being).
I saw opinions in different countries and time zones, at the same time that I gave my insignificant reactions to basketball games.
It took me back to my early days on the internet when I exchanged letters with international pen pals.
But as someone that tends to keep fiction at the same distance of that Michael Jordan "Wings" poster, the biggest draw in my later years on the service was seeing link after link of potential informational salvation.
An article here that would enlighten, another that would help me make money, and a Tweet here and there that would teach me about a song that would soundtrack my emotions.
They were information snacks. And as someone that kept myself up-to-date on new Frito-Lay UPF substances, I liked snacks.
But let's talk about the downside of these bite-sized bytes of knowledge.
How Viewing Everyone's Moment-To-Moment Experience Takes You Out of Experience
The little dopamine-distributing rewards unconsciously made me believe the answers were outside of experience.
That solutions were outside of my body and consciousness.
But information not incorporated into experience is as hollow and as worthless as a discarded peanut shell, resting on a beer-soaked floor.
A Twitter thread telling you 10 Ways To Market Your Business is the Ultra Processed Food (UPF) of information.
In a digital land populated by people that espouse "first principles," you get advice summarized from books, without the effort and context that could make that advice useful.
In other moments, you get uninformed, motive-driven, or superficial responses to worldly events.
A scroll down an always-populating timeline puts you in a trance state before you ever get the chance to be with a possibility in a conscious way.
You're no longer with experience, you're with representations of experience, collapsing stories and interpretations onto actual events, like a dynamited building.
Soon enough you start voicing your opinion on things you have no expertise in.
You start putting out sentences that signal you're ___ to a group of people who may not even check on you if you go missing.
And if you don't put out definitive moral statements on x event happening in the world, you may fall into the opposite stance, of scolding others for not being free-thinkers.
The most well-meaning people can come down with a case of PR-Brain: a drive to show your moral stance on every issue, as if you're defending a Gen Z beer brand.
You're guilted into believing you're this decade's version of a 1930s German doing a compulsory Roman salute, all because of your silence.
I say that to say: You may disapprove of thousands of Gazans losing their life to Israeli bombings, but you may not personally need to add to the signal-obscuring-noise of social media feeds denouncing what's happening.
Your time may be better spent writing your state representatives, or, if necessary, tending to your mental health.
Or maybe just staring at a single black dot on a piece of paper to bring your mind back to your body.
The Danger of Thinking You’re Above Reproach Because You're Willingly Absent
I'm certainly not 'better' than anyone for not 'logging on'.
And, of course, that goes in the opposite direction, too.
In a world where so many are pressured into side-gigs, or are looking to self-employment to save them from the dissatisfaction we all feel at times from society, being on social media can seem like the only way to 'make it' outside of the confines of traditional 9-5 capitalism.
Maybe I'll even return to the site embodied by the tail end of the alphabet.
There's no judgement from me on anyone that chooses to face the sometimes unforgiving 'algorithm'.
Just as concerned tech executives steer their families away from the products they produce, there will likely be a fortunate number of similar individuals that don't *have to* be on social media.
If you have to be online, here's some ways to hopefully not be there 'terminally' so.
Making Your Own Algorithm
"your digital stream is your availability heuristic - this one is a crucial thing to remember."
"what one focuses on, one is” = the fundamental hack"
What you read, see, and hear creates associative thoughts.
If you want to know if 'subliminal advertising' is real, think about how many times your ears caught a sonic glimpse of a song only to have it circle your brain for the rest of the day like a cartoon concussion bird.
It's the same way sigil magic works. An intention, or a thought, word, or image, slipped under the door of your consciousness filter.
Because this is how our minds work, try your best to control the inputs in a way that makes them conducive to getting you closer to where you want to be.
'You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with' is, of course, a rule of thumb. An approximation that, at the least, gets you to be more conscious of your direction and the people and things that support the direction you actually desire.
There's also a feng shui element, where I remember Stephanie Stewart telling me that her teacher said we should surround ourselves with things we want more of in our life.
Ex: if you want to be in the fashion world, you surround yourself with clothes, fashion magazines, Venusian objects, etc.
When it comes to social media, this can apply to who you follow or put in a list.
But outside of social media, this can apply to the media you consume in other forms.
The books, the blog posts, the news feeds.
If you're surrounding yourself with inputs that activate your fight-or-flight mechanisms without offering any solace, obviously, you might want to reassess things.
Some ideas for how to execute this realignment:
- A) Follow, Unfollow, And Sculpt Your Lists
This mostly applies to Twitter, but do the same with your other social media accounts if it's helpful:
As if you're inspired by Marie Kondo, prune your following list to make it more reflective of the life you're trying to live and the person you're trying to be.
- B) Set Up Google Alerts For Interesting Keywords
If there's subjects you're passionate about, set up some Google alerts for them and let them do the curation.
- C) Seek Out Slow Media
You can sidestep the anon avatar terrorists that exist on social media, and whatever the next far-right person with an anime photo wants you to see by paying a little money to get glossy or matte paper sent to you on a monthly basis.
Slow Media gets you news that's less expiration-al, without an algorithm programmed to recreate 'A Clockwork Orange' on your slab of glass and lithium.
It's not perfect, but it's preferrable to weaponized words that tie dukkha to your dopamine receptors.
Magazines do still exist, and many are still good.
Search for some. Go to a Barnes & Noble and peruse the shelves.
Buy some, subscribe to some, let them be the buffer, blocking out the inconsequential immediate, and surfacing the substantial that has some staying power.
Every piece of novel information can *feel* urgent, but time often reveals most to be afterthoughts.
- D) Make A Bookmarking Site Be Your Social Media Feed
One thing I did when I moved away from Twitter was regularly going to Pinboard.in, checking the recent and popular sections, seeing the articles that might possibly be interesting.
Another thing I did was search keywords and topics that I was interested in, saving articles for reading later.
And then keeping a list of users that bookmarked the kinds of things I was interested in.
It ended up being a more efficient version of the way I used to use Twitter lists to follow niche subjects and people.
- E) Read More Books
Without the blue bird slot machine I read more books than I had in years.
But most importantly, I acted on those books and incorporated their lessons into my life more fully than I had in possibly any other year of reading.
Instead of superficial insights from an ephemeral observation, I read the product of years of experience, arranged in thoughtful and effective ways (which is what a good book is).
Good books can make you forget about the impermanent rewards of a thread pretty quickly.
- F) Use A Social Media Absence To Create
The most productive result of straying from constant social media usage was that I created more public pieces of writing than I ever had before.
Dozens and dozens of posts, books of poetry, and solutions to my own problems reflected back out into the world in my own words.
We won't be remembered for the heart buttons we press, but most importantly, we probably won't remember them ourselves.
A drawing, a painting, an essay. They're things we can share with the world that actually have the power to satisfy us for a moment in addition to helping others.
- G) Create A Social Media Strategy
A drop of alcohol can sometimes make someone stumble back into alcoholism.
A drop of dispensing unsolicited opinion may be enough to bring one back into the cuffs of the social media slipstream.
You have to decide for yourself whether you can handle moderation, or if total abstinence is preferable.
My favorite question can help here: Ask what would need to be true for me to fail to be at peace with social media?
Ask that and do the opposite.
Final Thoughts
Maybe the biggest danger of social media is seeing it as the world instead of a tool to use as you exist in the world.
When we put the tool down, the world does still exist.
Another way of thinking about it is as a medium.
A medium isn't the thing it mediates.
If we understand that, maybe we'll use this modern tool in a way that doesn't do harm to our archaic brains.
The tools come and go, but the human instincts and drives remain the same. The 3000 year old I Ching can help you see that too.
I wish us all a better way to use these tools, so we're not at the mercy of the manipulators of them.