not back on my bullshit, you will note. still on. i.e. I am still doing this no social media thing. It is still hard. It's day 5 and the habits of going to the former app location of instagram is still ingrained in me. I find myself doing it constantly, primarily when I know I have to do something that I don't really want to do and I want to delay it or make a kind of "buffer" between whatever activity I was just doing and the next one. this happens extremely often when i am going somewhere in my car and have arrived at the location to park my car and have to now walk into the location and I don't want to. You'd think that's just at work, but no, it's also at home sometimes.
i have gotten through more books. i finished 3 this weekend alone (one short one finished in two sittings, one I have been reading since the 2nd, and one I have been reading for months). i'm starting to feel a bit lonely, but also not. I'm more realizing hey, I used to be somewhat up to date on what that one girl from high school was doing, or what girl's kids look like now, or what my husband's childhood best friend's girlfriend's band is doing for their next show, or how someone I took ONE lab class with who later went on to run a club I volunteered for in undergrad is doing in law school. Now I just don't know. And I don't know any of those people well enough to text them and ask what's up, primarily because I don't know any of those people well enough to have their phone numbers or be on a casual text conversation basis with any of them. but i have messaged all of them on instagram at some point before, and had extensive conversations with some of them through this, and i think i came to appreciate instagram as this sort of way of keeping up with people like that, who I am friendly acquaintances with and care about to some degree, though we don't have any kind of closeness. I'm not really sure how that kind of thing was in the past.
the thing about drawing upon my past to think about how I lived before all this technology is that I was a child. The life I had as a child is fundamentally and totally different from the one I have now as an adult, even if I am still living in my childhood home with my parents. The level of independence and responsibility I have now is not the same as when I was 15 waiting to be picked up from school. Honestly, I'm kind of sad about it, in the way that I'm kind of sad that I don't know how to be single as an adult. There isn't much I can do about it (I mean, sure, I could divorce my husband, but I don't really want to do that). I can't turn back the clock to be an adult in even something like 2003, where the internet and cell phones were a reality, but social media wasn't (or was just barely a thing). I'll never know what that experience is like, and that's good and bad.
This does make me think that maybe when this month is up, I'll want to re-install the apps and just decide to have time in my day off of them. But lord knows that me trying to make timely schedules for myself never ever fucking works. As I type this, it's 10:17PM and I have to go to the lab at 11PM (for an amount of work 6 times less than the time to drive there and back). I feel constantly that I have no control over many aspects of my life like lab work because this kind of thing keeps happening. Someone is busy with equipment or I get there late or I have to wait on supplies or sometimes I just spill something, and suddenly I'm there at very odd hours to make sure things are done right. Then there's the fact of living with my parents and them often needing last minute help with something, or making a decision about dinner that enlists my help. The other aspect is that I feel like I have little to no control over my downtime. The kind of downtime I enjoy and find deeply restful does not often involve other people and their opinions about what we should do with that time. social media means that downtime can happen more often and I feel as if I am "stealing" my time back. So I know what will happen if I say that I won't use social media after 6 PM: I'll get stuck in a rut of late lab days, and will bemoan the fact that I can't use social media to get through those nights of work, but can use it during the day when I don't need it. If I can flexibly change when I need it to be used, then why bother having limits at all? And it all falls apart from there. The most I can seem to reliably manage long term is not using it when I'm in bed trying to fall asleep.
That part of it feels analogous to an addiction, for me. It's a crutch I use to cope with the fact that my life is not really what I want it to be right now. Maybe if my life was actually more interesting or satisfying, I wouldn't feel the need to use the apps. But then I think about happiness and satisfaction and how more often than not I have found it to be true that these things are more about the stories i tell myself about how I feel about what is happening in my life, and the focus points of those stories, than these things are about matching up my external with some preferred internal. I'll never get to the dream, whatever that is. I also won't ever be in this part of my life again, someone else covering most of my bills for me (functionally), with an insanely flexible schedule and little to no oversight, ever, though that also means little to no support or useful feedback and literally no pay. I won't ever be dependent this particular way again (at least I hope not), but independence means more work on my part to care for myself. It also means I can do it the way I think is best. It's all a mixed bag, but I really do deserve to enjoy being here right now.
Maybe being on social media takes away from that by being a focus point of "I need to use this because I don't want to be here right now." If I'm forced to be in the moment, I kind of have to focus on finding something enjoyable about it to enjoy it. Or learning to bear it if it's that unpleasant, and learning what I can from it. I don't know.
I miss being able to scroll for a bit to take off the edge of life's unpleasantness, but I don't miss that I was pressing the fast forward button all the time.
I also fundamentally don't think these apps and sites were designed to be used in moderation. I don't think it's something odd about me that I can't limit my use of them no matter how hard I try. I know it's old news now that these things are designed to be addictive, to suck you in so you keep coming back for more. I really, really resent them for that, and I feel like that's kind of how they became so central to our lives. When you have an app that everyone is suddenly on and can't stop using, of course people are going to throw their hands up and say well, might as well let this become how people market and network online etc etc etc oh my god it drives me insane. Is it even possible to opt out or would the consequences be too severe? Or is that just the marketing-gobbledegook-nonsense of every professional development course I've taken in the last 8 months lying to me about how the real world really is?
I'm not sure. The fomo is starting to get to me. my period cramps are too severe to continue writing this. goodnight.
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