I can only have authentic experiences and connections if I don’t post pictures about it. And, this is a REMINDER regarding "like-based scrolling-feed" social media. The introduction of “scrolling,” and “likes,” on social media (by big tech) changed human psychology (we don't use those features here). They will NEVER stop engineering to make social media as addictive as possible. I feel the disease in our collective consciousness. The degradation of truth, humility, and so on. I feel it growing within myself. Unbridled capitalism brought the world slavery––modern society will not be different.

Destroy what destroys you...

THOUGHTS ON SOCIAL MEDIA:

• I do not want to pull people out of their lives to look at mine.
• Social media algorithms flatten culture and art, creating cookie cutter content that sells and pleases the algorithm (versus art being provocative).
• Not selling family. I don't want to package my family as a sellable commodity for their profit. We try to avoid peddling family for public consumption for corporate profit (the behavior they reward). Our family and friendships are not a brag, not a brand, not a hashtag, not a staged photo advertisement.
• If I take inventory, I never gained anything from SM, but I definitely feel like I’ve lost spiritual parts of myself.
• The culture is addicted to attention. Even therapists peddle psychology clickbait on tiktok. Disgusting.
• Capitalism's profiting on hate, gossip, and division will snatch your soul. You have to steal it back.
• SM makes genuine life experiences and relationships performative.
• Companies are actively hacking and pillaging for our attention, creating the growth of ADHD. We are losing our ability to focus, to listen, to process, to critically think. They are re-wiring our minds with a bad combination of short attention span and anxiety. Teen girls depression and suicidal ideation up 60% since its invention.
• There's a spectrum of mental illness on display and followed by millions. Negative behavior is emboldened with likes. They are cashing in on our biological desire to "look at the car crash".
• “Because of the internet age we live in, we shit on people with what little we know of them; we don’t give time to the full context. 'I’m just going to get angry about this and move on with my life.' Everything in life needs context. If you cut out details, then you lose it. Context is important. I want to live in a reasonable world because when people are listening you have to be responsible.” --Trevor Noah
• SM does not nurture critical thinking and reason. Reason and science have been replaced by personal opinions and emotions which make great clickbait.
• SM rewards vanity, hate, and 'come watch the fight' mentality. Trump is the spectrum that negative SM encourages —-unleashing the attention-seeking that exists in all of us and the go get your pitchforks mob mentality.
• The internet is flooded with people who want attention for doing nothing or inventing something out of nothing.
• Most SM is never-ending forgettable content on a conveyer belt.
• The world feeling shitty is the end result of SM providing platforms to project emotional vomiting. Individuals, & the media, light public fires over and over again and then walk away.
• SM becomes another avenue for emotional abuse (adding public comments from strangers to the fray), and contributing to depression and suicide rates.
• SM profits on us focusing on our differences rather than commonalities. Focusing on where we align is the work of love which is much harder. The spectrum of hate is more easily accessible than the spectrum of love. I think there's a spiritual reason for that?
• We broadcast to each other with a hunger (desperate hashtags, people paying for followers, etc). Even when I am not hungry for anything, even when I feel whole, it creates hunger.
• SM is NOT a basis for measuring anyone's happiness, success, connectedness, or relationships. It is a veneer.
• We project to an audience without the humanity of being together face to face. SM leaves behind a trail of unbridled one-sided no-context emotions. It creates an echo chamber, not dialogue.
• I have privilege, as many Westerners do. I don’t want to subtly, unintentionally, be in the habit of bragging. I want to nurture humility. The world is WILDLY imbalanced, and unfair. I don't want to project my privilege when MOST of the world does not live the way we do.
• I don’t want to make others feel excluded by doing things I wouldn’t do in person. I.E., I wouldn’t show up at your home and bring photos of me with friends at a party, and make you look at the photos. Even if indirect, I don’t want to bring that left-out energy to ANYONE I know. We don't know the emotional impact of what we broadcast to others.
• The loss of intellectualism and expertise due to anyone with a laptop becoming a medical, psychological, and climate expert. So bothered when people say, "I'm not an expert but..." Facebook and Instagram PROFIT OFF misinformation which is genius because that is what the masses sell to each other like snake oil.
• I don’t want to push my life-style onto a feed. I try not to sell my version of happiness.
• Nothing changes your feeling about a moment more than seeing hundreds of people taking the exact same photo or video. And we now COPY each other’s moments and MIMIC each other. We remix in an endless fucking loop for their profit.
• The photo/video is now a social commodity, a projection of our worth. Like a Ferrari flaunted by someone “over compensating” for what they're lacking; we instead flaunt and over-project on social media.
• The extensive amount of psychological research being done on social media with regards to causing addiction, depression, and anxiety that we ignore. It is an empty experience with the false and failing promise of humanity. Every time we create content we contribute to the machine.
• I don’t want a HABIT of scrolling out of my present by looking at another person’s present. I don’t want a massively capitalistic application to have that power of theft. I don’t want to find myself looking at a beautiful view and then contextualizing it in terms of a SM post. I also don’t want to take someone out of their present with mine. I don't want any gimmick that steals my present.
• It is the lowest common denominator of our DNA to want attention, a shallow fame, and that’s why it’s a BILLION dollar business. Advertising for decades has played upon our weaknesses to be like the ideal images they sold us, and our deep-seated feeling that we aren’t good enough. Now they’ve simply found a better way to make money, for us to advertise ourselves to each other.
• I don’t want to be the new stand in for what use to be shitty ads that made people feel longing, and like they’re not enough.
• SM does not nurture authenticity. I’ve known people in unhappy relationships, or who are generally unhappy, selling a projected idea of happiness via a photo as though they're modeling for a catalog, but not the truth of their lives.
• Don’t want the habit of choosing, scrutinizing, what to like or not like. Don’t want my judgement brain functions lit up all the time. I don’t want to judge people in a scrolling loop and sharpen that part of my consciousness.
• The trends and hashtags and "phrases" that we cycle through, always jumping another train. Suddenly, every person is in a hashtag toxic, abusive, narcissist, gaslighting friendship or relationship. We're leeches to these phrases, often using them inaccurately and without context, until the next hashtag comes along. It's not surprising every outlet pushes these phrases into our feed like bait, and then we regurgitate it out. I can label every ex-boyfriend or lost friendship with hashtags, and that's why they work, (similar to why song lyrics universally work and can be sung by both parties), but it is not the full picture of human interactions. Most of our relationship dynamics and events within those relationships are more complicated than that.
• I want to protect myself from psychological habits created by white men for their profits (unhealthy habits that destroy our spirituality). I want a love, and a life, that is genuine before I go––a life where I show up for my friends and family without an audience.
• I didn’t really use SM until Covid hit. Most of my in-life friends retreated because they've evolved past me, LOL. My generation was the last to know what it was like to not have SM.
• "The real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings." -- David Foster Wallace.
• I want to avoid the mindset that I need attention for doing everyday things, especially in the context of ENORMOUS problems facing the world.
• "Say it in the street, that's a knock-out. But you say it in a tweet, that's a cop-out. And I'm just like "Damn, are you okay?" --TS
• People don’t walk away from SM feeling good. It is an act of self-love to stop doing things that don’t feel good, that are empty (like reading celebrity gossip and our self-righteous condemnation of strangers from our laptops).
• The Black Mirror dystopian “Nosedive” episode

TRY TO KEEP BALANCE:

• ten minutes a day or less
• avoid lifestyle brags
• avoid negativity
• share things related to things I create, or that are light, funny, helpful, etc.
• do not cater to the "like" algorithm, eliminate likes

POSITIVES OF SM:

• ACTIVISM
• Exchange of ideas from minority voices
• Animal videos
• Funny videos that make people laugh
• DIY or educational videos
• Sharing Projects: music, books, films, art