The key difference...

 As per usual around here, I've been thinking about my social media usage. More so this time in how it relates to other people, because a few things have happened that I don't think I've spoken about on here. 

The first was quite a shift for me- I deactivated my facebook account. Why? Because I was invited to my best friend's daughter's birthday and missed it because she only invited me on facebook. I could be livid about that- how could she not text me, we text all the time?- but she's a busy mom now. Inviting people on facebook was convenient for her and the last she'd heard from me I checked it now and then. That was true, but in this case I didn't check until after the party had already happened. I was beside myself. She and I are ok- she knew and trusted I wouldn't just skip something like that for no reason- but I realized I had to make a decision, because I had also been invited to like 3 other events I'd missed. People were using facebook as an invitation system for events, and because I had a profile there, it was fair game of them to assume that one way or another, I'd get the message. 

So I deactivated. I kept messenger, and haven't had a facebook profile since the end of July 2024. And you know what? I don't miss it. 

The other thing that happened in July 2024 was the end of my wet lab work, and really diving into my thesis writing. I wrote my thesis largely during August-October, 2024, and in those 3 months (wow. was that only three months? Let's be honest here too- I wrote most of it in October) I realized really quickly that instagram was distracting me again. I deleted it sometime in August, citing a need to focus on graduation.

Well, I've graduated (oh yeah! Small update. I'm Dr. Swegan now, I did it 🥳) but I still haven't downloaded instagram. I got rid of snapchat too, partially because a lot of young people kept implying it was cringe to have snapchat as an almost-30-year-old, and because I kept getting sucked into the garbage content they have on their version of an explore page. My friends were bewildered, saying they didn't get sucked in, and I was like yeah, because you have better apps to use. This is all I have. When I got rid of that one, I turned to youtube shorts of all places. Truly, I was just desperate for my short video fix. For the past few weeks I've been sticking to just tumblr, and eventually yesterday I realized I wanted a break from that too. For once not for any dramatic reason, just because I wanted to take a break. I've read three books in the past two days, so suffice to say I've been starved for input.

As I think on this, though, something keeps coming up that I've failed to consider, which is that yeah, ok, on a base level, I am kind of reverting to an older time, regressing to the past when I didn't even have any of these accounts and when many of these apps did not exist at all. Except today it really smacked me in the face that no, I'm not... because nobody else is. Back then, nobody could be on instagram because there was no instagram. We were all off social media and forced to do other things. Back then it was too much TV that was the issue, too much time surfing the net, probably still too much time playing video games. Now it's all phones. We're always addicted to something. But at least back then I didn't get constantly pestered by people about how annoying it was that they had to screen record tiktoks to send them to me, that I hadn't seen their snapchat story updates and so was out of touch with their life while everyone else was up to speed, and I didn't frequently enter conversations with multiple other friends where they'd all start talking about some event in the life of one friend that I was simply unaware of as if it was common knowledge. 

I'm not saying my friends are bad people. One of them admitted to me recently that really she just wanted me back on social media because it was more convenient for her. They're just living in the modern world like anybody else, the same way as other people. But it's hitting me now that by trying to escape doomscrolling because I know there's no way to moderate myself on those platforms, I'm functionally escaping life. I mean, it's not even just my friends- nearly every local small business I know and love does 99% of their web presence on social media, if not 100%. And I get it. It's free to make an account on those, and when you're trying to get a business off the ground and reach people, well, they're all on the app. It's just annoying when I can't order the cookies I like because the person who makes them only takes requests in instagram DMs, and sorry, but I don't want to have to download the app, log in, ignore the probably hundreds of notifications I have now to just find her page and send her one message and then what, leave the app on my phone until she responds? until I've picked up the cookies? And just trust that I'll resist temptation that long? Give into the scroll for a few days? It's all so damn inconvenient I've just been going without the stupid cookies. I can't look at facebook or twitter without an account... would it kill you to make a fucking website? But then even when they do, as is the case with an ice cream place I like, they barely update it. Please, queen, you can't just have rotating flavours and only tell the social media-ites when they're available. Think of the rest of us.

It's just annoying that these platforms have ensnared us so that now in order to connect with friends, support local business, and hear about local news sometimes (I can't tell you the number of times a local traffic jam only has information posted about it on fucking twitter), you have to also be served an ungodly number of ads, curate a platform-self, and resist the temptation to lose yourself in the endless scroll when literally everything about the app is designed to keep you trapped there forever, showing you content you literally didn't log on to see, god damn it facebook stop suggesting groups to me when I just want to see photos of my cousin's new baby!!! It's infuriating! and what's worse is that I am doing this ALL ALONE.

I am the ONLY person I know who is off social media and it is fucking lonely. I can handle being behind on the trends but it hurts when friends post exciting or even mundane updates about their lives and I just don't even know I'm missing it. Because the cost of staying up to date on those apps is too high a price for me to pay. I don't want to spend all my spare time scrolling. I don't know what I want to do with it instead, I just know this ISN'T it, but also that these apps are so fucking addicting that I can't use them in moderation. No, the other apps that block those apps don't work, the screen time limits don't work, the only thing that sort of works is only signing in on my computer, but half these apps don't even work that way. Because they're, you know, apps, not fucking websites. 

I was going to say the worst most ironic and cruel part is that I can't connect with other people doing this, but to be honest, I just haven't looked into forums that much. I'm sure they exist for social media luddites like myself, I'm just intimidated because to be honest I wasn't really old enough to be using the internet that way when that's how it was. That seems insane for a grown adult to say, but on the off chance there are any older, adultier adults reading this, please remember that at the turn of the century, I was in kindergarten. By the time I started really using the internet for much of anything, it was like 2009. Before that was all barbie dot com and looking things up for school sometimes (back when search engines actually worked. remember that? good times). But this isn't really an excuse, I'm sure I could find some. I think the thing I'm really yearning for though is like, real-life connections.

Doing this has made me a little better at that I'd like to think. I don't connect with people via random DM chats that happened to go on for hours anymore, but I do text my friends more often about real stuff, I do call the long distance ones more, etc. I just wish that we could all live an analog life together.

I also know that a lot of different people draw the line in different places. We all know that people have been whining about the dangers of new technology since chalkboards were the hot new thang, and personally I don't think the internet is bad. I think it's just been monetized to shit. I don't even hate the idea of a fucking social media platform. I just want it to be encrypted and honestly I'd pay a small monthly fee to use it if it didn't ever show me ads or suggested posts, did not try to keep me on the app as long as possible, and only let me connect with real life friends to share real life updates. No business accounts! No insane data collection! No memes (I know, I never thought I'd say that, but honestly, they have to go)! No trends! I just want to see like, photos of my friend's new baby, my cousin out camping, heck, even that girl I went to high school with posting about her messy kitchen. Just real ass people showing real ass stuff about their lives. Sure, let it be a highlight reel, whatever, fuck.  

I'm just TIRED OF IT. Tired of social media and it sucking up all my friends' time and attention. Tired of missing out on trends and updates alike. Tired of constantly feeling like a big stick in the mud who won't just be like everybody else and use the damn apps. And don't even get me started on AI, if one more person recommends a suuuuuper great use of AI to me, I'm going to scream. JUST DO IT YOURSELF OH MY GOD WHY CAN'T YOU WRITE AN EMAIL A REFERENCE LETTER A ROUGH DRAFT A BLOG POST A CAPTION... I can't even go there. 

I want this post to end on a slightly hopeful note so I will say the reward of trying to live by your own values is something. Not catching myself in bed scrolling or on the toilet scrolling or at work scrolling is fucking refreshing. It frees up a lot of time and energy, and I'm not getting so angry all the time. I also don't want to constantly film myself and post like an influencer, which is cringey but something I absolutely start doing if I'm on any of these apps for any period of time. Look! Here I am! On my Blog! I'm Writing! Plus I definitely feel like a lot of people are getting fed up with these things, so... here's hoping it won't just be me that I know irl who is social media app-less. On that note: if you were looking for a sign to delete your whatever social media app, this is it! Do it! Just for a week. a month. a year. you're in control. never forget.

Appearances

 I had a thought just now, reflecting on my time off social media. Something I remember being annoyed by on those platforms was the moral posturing. Maybe it was borne out of legitimate concern, but I can recall a loooot of instagram stories where people insinuated that if you weren't posting about a certain hot button issue, it meant you didn't care enough, or you were guilty of letting it drag on. As if by not posting photos that legitimately need a trigger warning on your story meant you didn't care about what was happening or want it to end. The worst was when people posted about a local political issue insinuating that people who agreed with the politician were the worst kinds of people- who weren't contributing well to our province. Some people even implied things would be better if those people died. I shared the opinion of that politician- even if I disagreed with the policy. But I learned there were a LOT of friends I had who thought the place we lived would be better if I wasn't part of it in one way or another. They didn't know I was included in that count, of course, and it made everything feel really fake. I knew I couldn't share that opinion- I've faced enough social cruelty and rejection for it already and didn't feel like piling on, nor did I feel like sabotaging my chances at a good job with coworkers now following me. The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth.

I do think the friends I had who were posting about these issues genuinely believed the things they said and supported the things they claimed to. I don't think they were lying to try and seem like good people. And yet, the entire thing came off very fake. I'm hardly the first to make the claim that social media turns the self into a commodity that must be advertised and marketed, but I could see it here even in circles of people with private instagram accounts. The goal wasn't to appear cool anymore, but to appear moral and virtuous. To have the right opinions, support the right causes, and say it all just loudly enough and share just enough petition and donation links to reassure everybody else that you cared. It was the "you can't be silent" of it all that got me, I think- the idea that every decision on social media was a branding decision, carefully thought out by a marketing team at an imaginary conference team in my head. That you should ascribe meaning to every move a person makes on social media, every post, every word. I thought we all agreed that we HATED that aspect of it and yet here was everyone around me sharing things that said otherwise- though perhaps I should have interpreted that as a conscious choice to make them seem like they had the right opinion on that too.

In that way I think social media does not bring us closer together or build communities. It sows distrust. You learn slowly that you must carefully cultivate your image in this permanent online world, and thus you conclude that everyone else is doing so as well. Then you wonder what everyone else isn't sharing, or is carefully editing out of their photos and captions and posts. You disagree with something and people who say those who disagree with that thing are awful people who don't belong in your community. What a way to build trust!

And of course these aren't new problems to human community. I saw all of these unfold in my fifth grade classroom. I'm sure everyone in a small town witnesses this daily. But the online, the forever, the permanence, the accessibility of it all is really adding a new dimension. It pushes you to post and share more and more, to keep up and maintain your image, even if you are like me and claim not to care. I have not felt a single iota of pressure to post about the hot button issue of the day (in just the approved format, of course, with the correct opinion) since I left social media. I might talk about it with friends, family, or colleagues, or I might just mull it over myself. I might seek out more information and context, or I might decide that I don't need to care about this. The truly great thing is- it's up to me, and people are not going to have time to care about whether or not I brought up whatever topic or issue or event in conversation if we don't talk to each other every day.

I actually still don't know what to do with my life

This is about careers and work because of course it is. Barring a revolution, I will spend most of my life at work earning money. I better be able to fucking tolerate my job. Unfortunately for me I have spent the past 6 years training exclusively for a job I can no longer stand, which is any kind of lab or bench work. It turns out that when I was 16-22 and just doing bench work to support the experiments of others, everything was fine, but now that I'm expected to align that with current research and optimize experiments myself and navigate who to ask for help when they don't work, I hate it with every last fibre of my being.

An instructor (basically someone whose entire job is to teach at the post-secondary level) told me recently that if I wanted to test out if it was my lab or research in general that I hated, I could always take a post-doctoral fellowship somewhere else and just quit. I think I've been in school so long that I kind of forgot jobs are just kind of endless and you can decide when you're done with them. I'm so used to school and I'm so used to pushing myself through unpleasant things because I feel like I'm Supposed To that I forgot I get to actually have an opinion about what I want for my life. That being said, the idea of joining someone else's lab and generating data and trying to make experiments work to present at some regular meeting just fills me with sadness and dread and unhappiness so I think I have my answer.

Still it's hard to say no completely. It's hard enough to pick a path to commit to, let alone letting go of one entirely. When I leave my PhD, I don't think I'll ever do bench work again. I don't even know that I'll continue working as a scientist. There's a lot of identity wrapped up in that. This summer at work, being a PhD Candidate and one of the oldest ones there has gotten me a lot of respect and admiration. It's a nice ego boost for people to say wow, you must be smart. It feels like a waste to have put in all this time and effort and not actually use the training for its intended purpose. But if my husband came to me tomorrow and said hey forget all this nursing stuff, I want to pursue writing, I'd say of course, that's not a waste, let's find a way to get there. If any of my friends were to come to me and say hey I don't want to use this degree anymore but I feel like I wasted my time, I'd find something comforting to say. I'd encourage them to live their own lives. I may even tell them hey, what a flex that you can do an entire degree in that despite not wanting to spend your whole life in it. That's a level of commitment and drive and intelligence that haters want for themselves (haters being the mean voice in your head, primarily). So why is it suddenly not okay for me?

In any case it's not like I want to throw out everything. I've learned a lot of information throughout this degree. But when I saw an instagram micro-influencer (for lack of a better term and yes, I'm on instagram again, please don't say anything mean about it) say her dream was to discover a treatment for neurodegenerative disorders or whatever she studied in her PhD, I was like. well. Fuck. I have about the coolest PhD project anyone could work on, in my opinion, and yet I am not passionately dedicated to the cause of treating pediatric brain cancer. That obviously doesn't mean I think that's a stupid goal, or that I want children with brain cancer to just die, but I no longer want to actively participate in the research process.

The most value I've found is in my understanding of this process, and helping others understand. The best part of my degree was teaching despite all the hostility from students (almost exclusively men, but that's a rant for another time). My summer job involves a lot of teaching. I've even taught my coworkers things. I care about things being accurate when I teach, and that fuels my curiosity and drive to understand. I love when I can put something in simple terms so someone else gets it as much as they need to get it. I love when I inform someone about how something actually works. The someone can be a stranger on instagram, a stressed out biology undergrad, or a 6-year old. I've genuinely enjoyed myself so much this summer I've debated graduating and going straight into a B.Ed degree to be a teacher... if I can stand 2-3 more years of school with NO income and much more tuition and all the many downsides I've heard about teaching. Though to be honest... if I could go back in time to 2018 and have all my memories, experience, and knowledge from grad school, I'd just get an ed degree, so maybe that should be telling me something. 

As it is I do have... well, a half assed plan. I've definitely hit the Final Point of Desperation. I hit that point months ago and told my supervisor I need to fucking graduate and I can't keep being here. My plan is to graduate April 2024, so hopefully that pans out. In the meantime, I've got about 3 "side hustles" for lack of a better term and have a lot more confidence after this summer job to volunteer and apply for things (after all, I have experience now... and I also have my police records check and first aid training, so let's just fucking go for it). I've been told I can definitely come back and do this job again next summer, so I have that ready and waiting just in case. But my real goal is to have some kind of job lined up for me next September. September 2024, I want to be starting work... somewhere. Or starting my fucking education degree if that's where life takes me. I feel like maybe I should have more of a plan but then again, this is more than I had about 5 months ago. It's definitely more than I had 5 years ago. 

Maybe I'm posting this here in the hopes that someone will read it and in September 2024 will think "huh. I wonder if that random woman online ever met her goal" and come back here and check, or maybe not. But I want to be able to say I did. So I'll do my best to get there, understanding full well that it may take longer than expected, thanks to my fucking PhD.

Diagnosis: Boredom

 Oh My God I Need To Do Things...

Turns out having a full time job and being busy on your feet all the time means you can't pontificate endlessly on the meaning of life or whatever. Particularly the kind of job where you are actually legally exempt from the regulations about breaks (I don't get a half hour paid break after 5 hours because of my job, which means I do not get any breaks at all, all day. I am working over lunch). Someone is always asking me to do something and when work finishes, my experiments start, or I need to put time into my marriage, or a friendship. Bonus: I make money now. I have earned more money than I have spent in the past two months, and while doing it I've made new friends. Serious, actual friends in some cases- and some who will be around to Do Things With even once the summer ends and with it, the summer job.

Do you know what I was doing before? Fucking nothing, most of the time. I didn't want to work on my research because it was boring and there was no structure or deadlines to keep me going. There's no mental health boost of feeling useful or hardworking when it doesn't matter if you get something done today or tomorrow or next week or next month or next year. And those things I have to do are difficult and painful because I keep failing at them and that's just normal and expected. Why would I do them?

You can't get the mental health boost of doing a good job if the job doesn't matter at all. That's all I'm saying. But having a job where it does matter if I show up and give my best effort, and get things done, and have a good attitude, and need to prepare food and some other stuff in advance... a job where other people are relying on me... it feels good. It feels nice. I needed the reminder that I have something to offer the world. It's a very potent depression-zapper. You can't be useless because you solved a fire at work. Actually you solved about 18 of them. YOU did. By yourself, with sometimes no support from coworkers, and not even because they suck, but because there was another fire at the same time that they had to deal with. That means I'm part of a team, that means I can be integral to that team's best functioning, which again, means I cannot possibly be useless and my brain really WAS lying to me.

Some people have legitimately said to me that this $17 an hour entry level job is beneath me as a PhD candidate, particularly because it's only tangentially related to my field. My job can be done- and is being done quite well- by a coworker who didn't even take high school biology. That coworker is one of my favourites because we collaborate so well. We fill in the gaps for each other. And in the meantime- I feel useful. I am being paid for my work. People care that I show up both because I said I would and because they care about me as a person. How is that beneath me? Am I above feeling... useful and important? The prestige associated with getting a PhD doesn't fulfill that for me, even though it is a nice ego boost to have people constantly assume you are very smart. That's fun and all, but it obviously wasn't preventing me from feeling like shit.

Like no, it's not a full time job that's going to allow me to move out of my parents' house with my husband just yet, but it's something. It's a reference letter. It's experience. It's some fun money. It's the potential ability to find a job later that will let us move out and buy property. That's not nothing, and it certainly feels worth it to me. Given that I have to live with the consequences of my decisions, I think I'll take it.

It's all the same

This is the rare post that I actually edited from a draft I made a few days ago, and also may be my last post for a while as somewhere in here I got to thinking there's a difference between me writing something to have it be read and writing something to have it be written.

Anyway. This is a loose collection of my own personal thoughts about how social media somehow does not connect us and in fact makes disconnection worse. It's very navel gazy, but I hope you'll enjoy. It was, after all, written to be read.

I'll start first with the observation that I think hobbies are kind of rare these days. The idea that young people don't have hobbies in the same way comes from a couple places: several posts I observed on tumblr and my own personal experience. This is the "what do you do for fun?" story, where my husband asked me that very question when we first met and I didn't have an answer. I had given up writing a couple of years prior in the middle of a busy NaNoWriMo in my grade 12 year, and hadn't done so very carefully, and I felt I didn't have time to read with my busy university schedule (and this was even while I was living on a meal plan). Those had been my two main hobbies for years. This was also in the mid-2010s, and in retrospect now I can see this was the beginning of social media really starting to take over people's lives. I say this as someone who genuinely lived through a period that saw the beginning of facebook, youtube, instagram, snapchat, tumblr. I remember when those things were new, and they were very different. facebook in particular I remember changing quite a bit in the mid-2010s to be a lot more focused on ads and business pages and suggested posts, etc. we were all being kept on the platforms longer, and this was before even vine existed. now it's so much worse and you don't really realize that until you look back.

If I didn't have hobbies, I didn't conceptualize of this as a problem until I was asked that question. that age is classically the age where one establishes their identity etc, so it's also not unreasonable that I would have had a crisis about the same thing around that time (he asked me this when I was 19). Who was I as a person? How was that connected to the things I did with my time? I'd never stopped to ponder those questions before, and in a way I didn't really realize that's what the problem was. 

But everyone was online. it wasn't just me. And yet somehow that wasn't a unifying, connecting experience in the same way it was when I'd attend writer's groups with a bunch of middle aged women in my hometown denny's restaurant, or when I meet up to play board games with friends, or when I used to go swing dancing. I may have engaged some with those activities online- one could connect with people on the nanowrimo forums, for example, or play video games with others online, or join swing dancing groups. But just doing that itself was never the same. and this is assuming that the online activities are connected to a real life hobby- a lot of people online were just sort of there. Still are. just passing around memes, watching shows and movies, having extremely bad discussions about serious political topics, whatever. I also find that more modern iterations of social media require less incentive to produce content yourself. Think about facebook in the early days, vs tiktok now. There are probably millions, if not billions, of tiktok users who use the platform for nothing except to consume content. They're just there to watch, maybe use some of the fun filters on themselves. That's how I used it. Facebook in the early days was nothing if people didn't post shit about their lives, share photos, updates, etc. You could just go on there to consume, but your audience was allegedly just people you cared about anyway.  But now you can go on facebook and be fed content for hours. I've been sucked into that. my husband still is. and the crazy thing is, probably 99.9% of that content isn't even from people you know or personally care about that much, or even from a person's profile. it's from a page. 

The point is that a lot of social media experiences now aren't really very social for most people. They're parasocial at best, and mostly involve the consumption of information. Endless amounts of it, about the most random things. I found myself going down the path of watching every video I came across about parenting "just in case/for later." Eventually I realized I was spending my precious time watching videos to get information about a subject that wasn't even relevant to me. I don't have kids and probably won't for several years, what's the chance I actually remember all this shit from random videos about a topic I didn't even actively seek out? And that last part made the experience worse. I had to manually scroll past videos with children in them at all in order to get the algorithm to stop showing me that content. The second I saw a child I just skipped it immediately without watching it at all. I had to do this for two fucking days. The fact that I had to, and that I did it, is really strange to me when I think about it. 

I was just being provided information + entertainment (infotainment is a useful portmanteau, but I didn't really want to just use it here) at random until something grabbed my attention. That's all I was doing. My hobby was taking in information. Just like everyone else. And despite that, I didn't feel some sort of connection about it. I didn't feel like I was part of a community of people using these apps together. I mean, fuck, in every ad you've ever seen for these platforms, they feature people using the platform to... plan and do things in real life. But online, everyone is lying, and the basic rules of internet safety dictate that you should not plan to do things in real life with people you have only interacted with online. So these online platforms are at best a way to facilitate you doing real life things with your real life, pre-existing friends. At worst, it's a way for you to feel like you are communally connected with others while not actually doing so. It disguises parasocial relationships as social relationships. 

I had come into this wanting to describe it as we're all having the same experience yet somehow not connecting. We all need to do something to unwind, and now we take the easiest and most accessible option. But instead of everyone finding interesting things to do that connect with their own personal skills and interests, we all do the same exact thing, and life is reduced to a flat monotony with no opportunity for connection. It's so bland.

The notion of what I spend my time on is top of my mind these days, obviously, and that connects back to social media. I was scrolling just to scroll, just to be entertained. It was entertainment with nothing that I got out of it. It was a bland monotony, only on the surface customized to who I am as a person, never allowing me to connect with others. It made me just like everyone else yet somehow paradoxically prevented me from connecting with everyone else. We're all the same and we're all lonely and somehow we can't bond over that. That's why I don't want to go back to fucking instagram.

To be fucking real with you instagram is the last thing on my mind these days

it wouldn't even rank if not for my husband's continued presence on the app, combined with my father's. They still both constantly show and send me things and were it not for this I don't think I'd think about it at all. I saw someone in person yesterday who I used to get updates from through the app, and I can confirm now that the app was providing exactly 0 useful information about their life. The connection isn't real and I knew it and you know it. Sitting there talking to someone in person, I got more connection than I ever would have looking at a carefully curated selection of posted pics. 

There's also a lot going on for me now all of a sudden. I've been continuing to read one person's tumblr blog just for something fun to do in my downtime, because while it's limitless, it's also just one thing with no interactive ability. 

Beyond that I am reflecting on my consistent inability to be inflexible with my time boundaries. I find myself a little elated this summer that at last I feel like I have the hard expectations of full-time job hours to point to. This is a time of year I often find myself traveling and/or seeing family and often realize it's not the right time to be doing that. A lot of end of semester commitments and lab work always rolls around early April, and unfortunately this year I also missed out on some volunteer commitments and personal development stuff I was interested in.

All things being what they are, though, I know it's my fault. I'm the one who has, for years, consistently failed to just say that I'm busy and be okay with that being a lie. I'm the one who keeps agreeing to stuff. I'm the one who can't seem to manage to work while traveling. Here I am at 11:30 PM writing this and working on some volunteer stuff while my husband sleeps. When we get back from our trip, I have a bunch of stuff to play catch-up with, and while I know logically it will all be fine, I'm just annoyed that I have to do it, to be honest. 

I'm not sure why but I don't seem to give myself a lot of authority in my own life and this time-boundary stuff is one of those ways. I can and should say no, I can't come, I'm too busy. I realize that a great part of what I'm excited about this summer is that I can feel people around me shifting to make themselves available around my availability for once. For once I am not the one who is good whenever and just goes along with whatever to make everybody else's life easier. For once I don't feel like I have to justify not being available. Even this trip, I had to carefully coordinate some lab stuff to be able to take, and I opened up my email at 9:30 this evening to 14 unread emails, about 7 of which were actually something I needed to deal with. That's a lot for me, for context. But especially while I am here I find it hard to actually say no, I can't go to the pick-a-part and wander around for 2 hours, I can't just go wander around the outdoors store with you all afternoon, etc. And that's just on me. Somewhat on my husband's and my combined lack of planning of anything on this trip, but mostly me. I could have pushed harder.

I haven't been pushing very hard. I've been coasting. I've been prioritizing family and friends, above work certainly (which is probably a good thing in the long run) but also above myself in a way. It's not kind to myself to leave myself no time during normal working hours to do productive work. It's not kind to myself to never say no to family or social obligations. It's not kind to myself to be the only one being flexible, it's not kind to myself to be making everybody else's life easier in that way.

I have a sticky note on my monitor at home that says "It's only a lie if they have a right to know." And nobody really has a right to know what I am doing at all hours of the day. Nobody has a right to know exactly why I'm busy, just that I am (if asked). 

Not saying I have all the answers or anything, but felt a need to come put this out there. On the off chance you see some of yourself in this, I hope you can at least find comfort in the commonality of experience. You're not the only one who abuses their flexible schedule and makes it convenient for everybody except themselves (except the days I push my lab work a day later so I can enjoy a day off in the midst of a busy period).

Too Much Information (also, fucking OOPS)

The fucking oops is just to reference the fact that it maaaaaaybe wasn't wise of me to get a full time job while being a full time student and also having a second part-time job. Oh, and the part-time job doubles as soon as May starts. And also there's a ticking clock situation with it where I really have to get on the part where I digitize old files because... someone just quit, and with them gone, the state of the office and my father's role in it seems suddenly much more limited. I'm selfishly almost hoping my sister doesn't find a job in her field in the US and has to come home, but not really because it makes her life 10x more complicated. 

But there's another way of looking at that which is: how lucky I am to have so many things to do. How lucky I am to have money coming in. How lucky I am to have this opportunity to save. Not even necessarily all luck, either; I've worked hard to get that full-time job (the part time one is sheer luck of the genetic lottery). Last summer I earned $0. This summer I will earn over $10K, maybe even $15K if I really grind (this isn't counting the money I will be spending, of course, but still). That's a safety net for when I graduate, potentially unemployed. I feel like I've actually done something about things that I'm insecure and worried about. And anyway... the summer will end. And there will be more of them. 

The TMI thing is in reference to the latest thought I've been having about social media, and now the internet more generally, which was, to be fair, brought to me through a youtube video. There's this vein of philosophical thought that apparently it's not necessarily the best thing to be living in an information age. There's so much information coming at us all the time, and a lot of it is entertainment. Actually probably most of it is. I'm really bastardizing this, but I've only just begun to explore the idea and connect the dots.

Anyway, I thought about this tonight as I went to play a game on my phone (I've stopped scrolling individual tumblrs and it has in fact removed the urge to get one) and thought maybe I should listen to a podcast while I did so. For a while in February and March, I had a few podcasts I'd listen to while I cleaned at my part-time job, and I was actually caught up with them. I really enjoyed that feeling. Then stuff happened, like a family trip, and I am now weeks behind. I had this anxiety as I thought about it, like ugh, I have to catch up on my podcasts. And then I was like wait a damn second! What's this "have to"??? These fucking podcasts are supposed to be for fun. 

Remember a few entries ago when I talked about how I feel a sense of obligation to notifications? I think this plays into that. Notifications offer me information which claims to be urgent and important, but usually it's neither. It's interesting, and might even be fun, but as the last month proved, I don't need it. My life is just fine without it. But now I can see that I still consume a lot of information. In fact, last month I signed up for like 5 different substack newsletters to get even more information. And I realized today while trying to catch up on these emails that I was treating them all like an obligation before I realized hey, I don't actually care about this topic, I can just... not read this.

It's truly only hitting me now that I will never, ever be able to keep up with the sheer scale of information on any given topic. I'll never be truly well-informed. None of us can be anymore. There is so much stuff out there, and what's even worse is that a lot of it is just inane garbage. Some of it (which yes, does overlap with inane garbage, but not totally) is just fun stuff, fluff, no substance. I've often been floored by the sheer number of books that just exist (like JUST thinking about each individual title, there have been SO MANY books written and published) but this is going beyond, to just think about how much information and data there is, including some that I'm producing right now. And boy have I been trying to hoard it. 

I think THAT might be the next experiment. What kind of information am I taking in? Why am I taking this in? What do I consider important to know? What do others consider important to know? And just in general letting go of this obligation I have to consume everything. I think that has made me broadly knowledgeable and I can think of a handful of times having obscure knowledge has just come in handy, but ... something feels off. 

Being off social media cut me off of lots of information. Most of it wasn't really that high quality. I'd go back and look at some things to laugh or to get information, I found some crochet patterns I enjoyed, I followed local news... but I also spent time curating collections of information. I still do this. I like to collect things, and I didn't realize I was doing that with information. I don't know that I want to spend my time that way. I don't like how pressured I feel to take in everything. Did you know that for a while I'd look at every piece of baby/child development/parenthood/motherhood content that came my way, just in case/for later? Like what was I doing? As if that stuff wouldn't be available to me later, IF I even choose to pursue that life (or even if I do pursue it, if I choose to look into all that!). I was able to stop that habit, but I can see that things are more ... entrenched than that. 

I also want to be careful here, though. I don't know that I totally agree yet that having access to a lot of information is all bad. It certainly seems silly to claim that. I want to think critically about whether information is always the solution, though. Just now while writing this when I said "I don't know that I totally agree" my first instinct to rectify this was to ... look for more information on the topic from a different bias/ideological slant. Why not look inside myself? Why not reflect more deeply on what I already know, perhaps by revisiting it? Why not pore over old information? Goodness knows I've collected enough of it. 

Something is telling me that there is a part of learning that involves sitting, reflecting, thinking, absorbing, combining, curating, etc that isn't just reading, watching, or listening to something new. And that I have been doing primarily that- just taking it in. I've had the urge more than once to sit with some information and really process it and I stuffed that urge down in favor of consuming more information. Because I needed to check off another book on my goodreads list. Because I need to catch up on my podcasts. Because I need to look through the rest of this new song playlist apple music generated to see if there are any good songs. THE WORLD IS SO FUCKING ABUNDANT WITH ABSTRACT STUFF!!! I will NEVER get through it all! Why am I trying to? What am I losing in the process?

I don't really have an answer to all that. The theme of this post is that life is abundant. And I am overwhelmed.