Maybe this really is a crutch

I mean that in a positive way. Crutches are something you lean on, temporarily, until you heal enough to walk normally again when your leg is broken. Crutches are also sometimes things you need permanently to replace function that was lost that you can't gain back or never had in the first place. They're a tool. They're only a bad thing when your continued use delays healing and normal function.

I think the fact that I am missing more days here and there suggests that this is a crutch in that former sort of healthy way. Either temporarily or permanently.

Yesterday was still fairly productive in any case; I went to the dentist (less fun than I was expecting if I'm being honest, and it's already hard to expect fun at the dentist) and submitted a job application, and did a workout (that actually challenged me- this is to fix my hypothyroid-destroyed core muscles), and cleaned the bathroom (something I aim to do weekly now that I am getting paid to do it elsewhere). I also had a nice date with my husband and went to bed early. All in all... pretty excellent. It was also the first day in this whole thing that I didn't really think about social media as much.

That's normal, I think. When you remove something from your life, it's normal to feel its absence at first. Especially something you spent a LOT of time using. Something that dictated a lot of your life. I don't love that I'm saying that, but it's true. The way I approach the world and information and my life and who I am feels really different. It turns out that when you aren't constantly bombarded by the opinions of random people and when you aren't constantly barraged with a flood of information, you feel different.

I'm still taking in opinions and information, of course, but I have more time to sit with it thoughtfully and hear people out. I'm not getting in as many arguments- at some point I thought I was very argumentative, but I think the nature of the online world makes people that way. I really don't argue with people in my real life that much, which is both good (I'm not as abrasive as I thought) and bad (sometimes I need to stand up for myself and my thoughts). In either case, it's a lot more peaceful. 

The urge to constantly share information with others has not changed and I'm starting to doubt it ever will. Lo and behold (I'm learning I use that saying more than I thought), I'm still a social person with strong interpersonal skills. The skills assessment from Gallup that I took at a conference in 2019 and later paid $67 for the full report from is decently accurate- most of my innate skills are in relationship building. I play nicely with others. As a result of playing so nicely with others, I got a lot of nice, thoughtful, and kind feedback on stories I'd share from time to time. What I just remembered now is the way I'd sometimes directly solicit that kind of engagement only to not receive it, and how bad that felt. I'd wonder if I said something too abrasive, too harsh, too unrelatable. Were people cringing at me? Were the people who just swiped on past even watching the stuff I put up? I took it so personally. I don't have to deal with that anymore. It was like watching myself try to be an influencer on a small scale, and it was painful. 

Once again though I have to reiterate that I'd pay a monthly subscription to access the features of something like snapchat or instagram without the ads and the other explore page content. I'd pay for fewer features. I'd pay to have apps that allowed me the things I want from them (connection) without the things I don't (distraction). I wish I could use instagram sans explore page. I wish I could use snapchat sans the shitty stories from people and brands and companies I don't know. I wish facebook was just actual updates from friends and family. I think those parts of those services really do tap into something we all want.

My mom and I actually had a really good discussion the other night that was partly about this. She got facebook years ago but barely uses it, and that's the only social media she has. She doesn't even know how to delete friends; I had to promise her I'd show her how to remove a friend's ex-husband from her friends list. She pretty much just signs on to say thank you to birthday wishes and check updates from family far away, about once a month. The rest holds no appeal for her. It was interesting to hear her speak about the way she uses the internet- she watches a lot of old and cheesy sitcoms, she uses apps that let her read magazines and news sources (hence the barrage of articles in the family group chat that none of us ever read), and she likes to look up recipes (and print them. And print them again. Not in a printer-friendly format either. Our house overflows with printer recipes tucked in amongst cookbooks). She likes to shop online too, something worsened when she was convinced the pandemic would render supply chains inoperable and prohibit her from purchasing jeans (I still have some of the useless skincare shit I purchased at this time when she all but made it mandatory for my sister and I to make some online purchases). But she doesn't use social media. She doesn't look at reddit threads for horse lovers or Golden Girls fans.

My dad is very different. He's on facebook all the time, but I've truly never met anyone in as many facebook groups as him. It's an entire hobby. He'll find the group, request to join, and google the answers to the questions, or just guess. He claims he hasn't gotten rejected yet. This middle aged male physician from Alberta is in a surprising variety of groups, to the point one of my husband's friends in an entirely different city, who maybe interacted with my dad once at our wedding, asked me a few months ago if it was my dad in one of his facebook groups. These two have almost nothing in common. My dad is also on instagram (where he posts almost nothing but dog photos) and twitter (which he mostly seems to use to follow politics, particularly regarding healthcare in this province). The downside of this is that he is often scrolling, scrolling, scrolling while in the same room as other family members trying to have a conversation with him. He sends me memes very often now (and the ones from his on-call nights are often funny only to him). I will often find him scrolling when he is home and my mom has gone to bed.

If I'm being fully honest, I'd rather emulate my mom's usage compared to my dad's. My dad may be enjoying himself, but he is in that rabbit hole more and more of the time. Perhaps because he only discovered these apps in his fifties, he is still capable of unplugging to read, but it's become more and more common that even that time is interrupted by scrolling. My mom is starting to complain about it. Sure, he often finds funny videos or great deals, but he's less and less present. My mom will at least put down her article about whatever clickbait topic to have a conversation with me. 

It's interesting to observe things more as an outsider now too. I can see how much time my husband spends getting sucked into these things. I can see how little my sister does, despite her insistence that it's bad for her, too. She and I have a similar love-hate relationship to these things. 

I don't think I want to go back at the end of the month.

The job I applied for yesterday is one I feel fairly confident about. I'm somewhat overqualified. But come July and August, it would have me working full-time, normal adult job hours (8:30-4:30, M-F). I've worked similar hours before and it really leaves you very little time for the rest of your life. I may also have to do experiments or thesis work during all this. That is to say: if I have time off, I'd rather be doing something I enjoy, particularly in the limited summer months. Reading. Writing. Visiting the family cabin. Swimming. Eating ice cream. Walking the dogs. Walking myself. Eating outside. Sitting outside listening to music on a warm summer evening. All of that is interrupted by social media. 

At the end of the day, I have been more productive with my time. I'm not devoting more time to work- or perhaps I am. But it's not significant (at least, it doesn't feel that way). When I say productive I mean: my rest is more restful. I'm doing more of the things I want to get done outside of work. I feel like I have more energy for social outings. I'm more interested in leaving the house. While I agree that "time wasting" activities can be productive, I don't think social media is one at this point. It is a true waste of time, energy, etc. I don't ever want to get bogged down in a shitty comment section ever again. I don't want to send nothing to my friends except memes. I don't want to get sucked down the rabbit hole of whatever algorithm. 

I do miss hearing about old friends and acquaintances. But is that worth the trade off? I would say I could check once in a while, but if I'm being honest, the stories feature really kills off that practicality. Most people just post stories, which disappear after 24 hours, requiring you to check every single day if you actually want updates. And isn't that convenient. That's how they get you, as I like to say in real life often when anyone refers to any frustratingly appealing feature of anything at all. Maybe it's not that odd that way though. I mean, really, how much would I know about these people in a pre- or sans-social media world? About as much as I'd know from checking the thing once a month. 

I want to keep the freedom. I want to keep the peace. I also want to attend my high school reunion, so I should check facebook once in a while. I also want to write my thesis and have a full time job this summer, so I need to keep distractions to a minimum. Actually, that's not totally accurate. Here is what I am roughly aiming to accomplish in the next five months:

- Spend 10 hours reviewing applications for a summer research program, by April 17
- Spend 20 hours over 2 days getting first aid certification
- Spend 30-40 hours grading probably close to 90 final exams (that 90 number is assuming that about 25% of the class drops out, and based on the midterm grades... it might not be that far off) (I'm not kidding, most of them failed) (yes, really, most of the grades were below 50%)
- Start training for and then work a full-time job (a third one, if you count my thesis work as a job)
- Spend ~4 hours a week at my current second job, which is 2 hours of cleaning, and 2 hours of digitizing old charts
- Schedule, prepare for, and have a committee meeting with a 5-person thesis committee
- Start writing my thesis in earnest
- More experiments (planning, execution, troubleshooting, potential re-dos although I really don't have the materials to support this, data analysis, data presentation, background reading, etc)
- Start writing 1-2 research papers (based on those experiments and ones already completed)
- Finish a mentorship program I have been in since October, with 4 more hours of meetings, one of which I may have to attend on a plane
- Last round of edits on a review paper on which I will be last author (this is a big deal in research, or at least it is in science research, I don't know about other fields. The last author spot is usually for the PI/prof in whose lab the work was done, but because I took on so much of the editing and mentoring, my supervisor (who already has dozens of publications on which she is the last author) said I could be last author).

And probably more I'm not thinking of. So like. I want to hold this in mind the next time I think it's totally reasonable to spend 3 hours scrolling tiktok on a saturday morning. 

We'll see what changes between now and April. I will be on a trip during that changeover, visiting my sister where she attends grad school on the coast, for art history. April is where shit gets busy. But these things also won't be done in overlap; some are flexible, some are time sensitive, some are only a day, some are only a couple hours a day. I'll be busy, but I'll still find time to play with the sims and start my cross-stitch kit and go camping. It's not like last summer when, during my comprehensive exam, I worked pretty much 50-60 hours a week on preparing for 6 straight weeks, and only took about 5 days off the whole time (one of which was the day of my written exam, so the morning wasn't even really "off"). But you know what the funny thing was about my comprehensive exam? I knew even then- and I forced myself to follow this wisdom- that scrolling on my phone was not going to feel restful or like a break for me. I took days off to do things like have my bachelorette party, help a friend move, attend a friend's baby shower, and just generally leave the house and not be on my computer. I didn't just sit in the basement all day (except the day after my bachelorette, when I was hungover and forgot to take synthroid). I Did Stuff. I also made myself take walks and make tea on my breaks, instead of just scrolling (though I wasn't perfect at that). 

Okay, I think this post is sufficiently bloated and poorly written. Time to hit publish!