mognet#2 | re: re: social media
(context: this is an email response to a reader who provided feedback on my scathing critique of social media found in the first issue of Mognet; essentially, this is a follow-up clarifying some of the WHY of why I left social media.)
Hello Reader,
I really appreciate you reaching out. It kinda made my morning when I read your email. I didn’t know I had this type of influence on people—or even one person, for that matter. I was especially surprised that it was you who reached out, as I was under the impression that, for some reason, you didn’t like me or something, but that was probably just my mind playing tricks, as it often does.
I’ll preface this with the classic Spider-Man quote that we all know so well, but I won’t actually type it out here; instead, I’ll just say the following: influence is a tricky thing that comes with a lot of responsibility, and I don’t know if I’m truly worthy of influencing anyone. So please take everything that comes after this paragraph with massive piles of salt.
Anyway, as I said, I really appreciate you reaching out. And I understand that, because of my previous Mognet post (and my actually-leaving-Mastodon), you, too, are now considering leaving Mastodon. So, let’s talk about that.
And yes, I know who you are. I averaged about four hours a day on Mastodon (between mobile and desktop) while I was still a user there, so I can confidently say that—up until the point when I left—I’d read every single one of your posts and either A) liked it, B) commented on it, or C) didn’t interact with it at all because it would have felt inappropriate to do so. To elaborate on that last one: like you, I have pretty poor social skills (even online), especially when it comes to expressing empathy for someone’s personal misfortune; and a large part of the reason I don’t like to console people online in this way is because, well, I just don’t care that much—OK, let me rephrase that: I care intellectually, but I don’t care that much emotionally. I can recognize when something bad happens, understand its impact, and realize that it sucks, but I don't feel bad for the person specifically. (Note that I am referring to online people I have never met here, not family or friends or someone getting stabbed on the street in front of me or whatever.) So, as you can imagine, the idea of me providing emotional support to someone online that I barely know makes me feel a bit fraudulent. What am I supposed to say? “I'm sorry your relative died,” “praying for your quick cancer recovery,” or send little heart emoji and/or animated dancing heart gifs or something? If that’s expected, do we really want a community where we’re all doing all these little performative, feel-good platitudes that lack real emotional weight? At that point, I’d constantly worry about the sincerity of the person telling me they’re “so sorry” for my loss or whatever. This ties directly into social media, which, in my view, has become very performative in this exact way. But perhaps I'm just the odd one out here; maybe quote-unquote normal people do feel deep empathy for literally everyone else's misfortunes. Who knows. Somehow, however, I doubt it, because if so, we would be seeing a lot more people just hanging limp from rafters or crumpled fetal in the corner sobbing due to the sheer volume of psionic shit they would be experiencing on the day-to-day; it would all be too overwhelming. Not even the main character Jesus Christ from the hit novel The Bible could maintain that level of empathetic care without at least breaking down into tears every few minutes. I just don't buy it. When we start throwing these platitudes around all the time for literally everything—especially when we don’t really know the people personally—we make sentiment cheap and, as a result, no one can tell what's truly heartfelt and what's not. Maybe you can relate to all this, maybe not. The important thing, though—(and I’m not just putting this in as a disclaimer, I actually believe this intellectually, emotionally, &c.)—is that, while this all sounds very cynical and mean, we have to remember that, even if we don't personally feel sorrow on behalf of someone's misfortune, that misfortuned someone is still a fleshy human person who deserves our respect; and, in my mind, refraining from empty platitudes is more respectful than flippantly telling everyone, “I’m sorry that happened to you” for every little thing; and in this way, when I do express empathy, the person receiving said empathy will absolutely know it’s genuine—because it will be.
That was a long-winded tangent. Sorry about that. You probably think I’m some sort of major asshole now. Like I said earlier: piles of salt, &c., &c.
Anyway, yes, I was (am) aware that you were diagnosed with autism. I have never been formally diagnosed with autism, but I was diagnosed with ADHD “pretty much five seconds after the pediatrician met you” (my mom’s words). What I think I’m trying to say is that, while I may not be diagnosed with autism, I feel it’s appropriate to respond to you here because I think I can relate to your situation personally. Outside of us playing very similar games at very similar points in our lives—(such as Half-Life 2, which you seem to really like [see—I have read your posts], and I also really like Half-Life 2; in fact, Half-Life 2 is probably one of my favorite games, if I had to pick; up there with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time [which I seem to recall you not liking very much—maybe I am misremembering?])—I, too, faced all forms of bullying in school; from wads of paper thrown at me in class to literal sitcom-like toilet swirlies (only happened once) to just being straight-up attacked while going to the bathroom (this happened, like, twice; both times I escaped unharmed). So, as you can imagine, I was “the weird kid” or “the future school shooter” or “the faggot” or, well, you get the point. After a while, I just exaggeratedly played into these roles to scare the other kids into leaving me alone, which started to work by the time high school rolled around, but by that point, kids kinda just stopped bullying me and retreated fully into their own little cliques. And all this was in the early 2000s, when social media was just starting out. It (social media) hadn’t caught on with adults yet, but it was mega popular with kids; everyone had a Myspace profile, and every Myspace profile had a wall of comments, and every wall of comments was located right under a “top friends” section displaying, at most, like six friends—which was a pre-programmed limitation for some reason or other. (And you can’t begin to imagine the amount of drama caused by that “top friends” thing; the number of friendships torn apart by the very act of changing the top slot on said “top friends” section was, quite frankly, unimaginable.) All that, plus the private message feature, plus the fact that parents didn’t have a clue about the internet back then, resulted in pretty much a wild west of teen and pre-teen weirdness that even I wish I could forget sometimes. And this was just the beginning of the weird shit kids got up to online back then.
Anyway, I think I’m getting off topic, again.
What I meant to say is that I originally started using online services (like Myspace) for the same reasons you did: to find a community of like-minded people, to connect with the youth of which I was also a part of. And I still think that social media is a good way to find like-minded people, but, unfortunately, it’s fraught with the perils you mentioned in your original email: cyberbullying (which is much easier to do—and fall victim to—online, as it’s easy to forget that people are indeed people when you’re communicating with them from behind a screen), the constant questioning of whether people are who they say they are, the emotional-sincerity problem that I mentioned in that long tangent earlier, this tit-for-tat you-share-my-post-I’ll-share-yours interaction system which leaves you wondering if people genuinely value you as a real human person or if they’re just using you to increase their own e-clout, and the ease with which every community turns into a tribal echo chamber in which anyone with even slightly differing opinions is ostracized right into another harmful echo chamber. All of this—and, I’m sure, much more that I am just unable to fully articulate at the moment—lends to online social media feeling very transactional and fake indeed.
But, again, I recognize the value of community, and I understand that some people do not have a real, in-the-flesh network of people that they can consider their own community, and that these people—for the sake of their own well-being—may need to find a community on social media instead. And that’s OK. In fact, it’s better than nothing. I would just caution those who pursue this avenue to be aware that these online communities can never replace the physical experience of being around other like-minded people in the flesh; and the more we retreat into these social media safe havens, the more we become sucked into them, the more we become reliant on them, and, thus, the more we disconnect ourselves from the people around us, thus thus driving everyone into these highly polarized online spaces from which it becomes nearly impossible to remove oneself due to the addictive nature of social media itself.
But, of course, there’s danger in everything we do. Perhaps I’m just being a doomsayer. Maybe I’m just trying to post-hoc justify my decision to remove myself from Mastodon.
Which is a nice segue back into the reason why you emailed me to begin with: your implied question, “Should I, too, leave Mastodon?”
And the answer is going to disappoint you, I guess. Because the answer is: I don’t know.
Here’s the lowdown on why I left Mastodon. Yes, I wrote that Mognet piece; yes, it was a real email to a real reader; and yes, I still believe everything I wrote in that email. (And yes, I’m posting this one here as a follow up because I feel what I’m about to get into here is very important.) But the twist here is that most of that first Mognet piece was projection. And when I posted the piece online (on Mastodon, lol), a lot of people got kinda defensive and upset about the whole thing, as if I was calling them out specifically. This backlash was mostly prompted by the following line (I think):
“. . . it doesn't remove the human need for self-validation that inspires all of the following: fake feel-good shit, posting pictures of video games and/or toys one bought hoping for someone to reply with 'wow, that's really cool' . . .”
But I wasn’t calling anyone out except myself.
Due to an unwise decision on my part, I chose to use the collective “we” pronoun throughout the entire email/piece, which, perhaps, was my subconscious mind kinda deflecting the accusations that my conscious mind was making against itself. Those accusations were that I was using social media to farm validation through the constant posting of my own stuff, all hoping that people would like, share, and comment things like “wow, you’re amazing and smart and introspective,” and so on and so forth. And that, really, the whole thing is a cautionary tale on why you should be careful about which pronouns you use in an article or essay or whatever.
The fact of the matter—the bit that was left out of the original email/piece (and why I’m taking so much time to type this up to you and then post it as a follow up to the first Mognet piece)—is that I have always had an addictive personality. I have had problems with drugs, alcohol, gaming, and whatever else you can think of. Anything that makes me feel good, I can’t stop doing. So, when I wasn’t at my computer scrolling through Mastodon, I was on my phone scrolling through Mastodon. Even when I was writing my long essays and whatnot, I was compelled to check Mastodon after writing every sentence just to see if anyone had liked or commented on my stuff; in hindsight, it’s like some sort of techno-demon had invaded my mind and taken control of my right arm so that they could constantly click on the Mastodon bookmark every few minutes to power some dark hell battery. I had even turned my mobile notification volume to max to kinda be like, “I don’t need to check Mastodon all the time now because when someone interacts with me on Mastodon, I’ll now get a very loud beep from my phone.” But even then, I still manually checked Mastodon. I could not stop.
So, what changed? I’m not sure, but something clicked in my brain and, suddenly, the techno-demon was exorcized. I kept thinking of a time when I didn’t use social media, which was many times throughout my life, and most of those times I felt happy and validated without it (social media)—and I just kept thinking about that. I kept thinking that there was a time in my life in which I felt validated and happy without having to check social media every 5 minutes. I kept thinking that there was a time in my life when I could just sit there playing a video game like Final Fantasy VII and not feel compelled to take screenshots to then post on social media every 5 minutes. There was a time when I could enjoy doing things without having to tell everyone online that I was doing said things. I started thinking: “Why can’t I just enjoy stuff for stuff’s sake? Why do I have to keep telling everybody about the stuff that I am doing?” And this thought then made me think that, perhaps, I was cheapening the things I enjoyed by insisting that my enjoyment of those things be validated by people online—as if my enjoyment of those things were controlled in some way by the whims of people other than myself. I don’t know if I’m explaining this well, but the whole thing really made me feel kinda sick.
Social media is a lot like smoking cigarettes, actually. I used to smoke about a pack a day—Marlboro Lights were my brand—and every thirty minutes or so, I would interrupt what I was doing to go outside and smoke a cigarette. Say, for example, that I was playing a video game or something; every thirty minutes, on the dot, I would get up, go outside, light a cigarette, smoke it for about 7 minutes, then go back inside and start playing the game again. And when I was back inside playing the game, I would barely be enjoying the game itself because, while playing, I was thinking about smoking another cigarette in thirty minutes and counting down the minutes.
And just to hammer the point home: If I were playing a video game for 4 hours straight but took a 7-minute smoke break every 30 minutes, that’s about 56 minutes of smoking during that 4-hour period, which is really just 56 minutes I could have been playing the video game. My mind was cigarettes all the time. I stopped smoking back in 2022, so I’ve secured much of that future wasted time. But, up until just yesterday, I had spent who knows how long just doomsurfing Mastodon and/or telling people on Mastodon about what I was doing instead of actually doing the thing I was telling people I was doing—literally an unquantifiable amount of time wasted when I could have been enjoying the stuff I was actually interested in.
So, I kept asking myself—why couldn’t I just enjoy things? Why did I have to tell everyone that I was doing the things? Why couldn’t I just sit down and read a book, play a game, or watch a movie without telling everyone I was reading a book, playing a game, or watching a movie?
Is any of this making sense? I feel like I’m just typing a bunch of words, the meaning of which is being lost due to the inadequacies of the English language (or just my inability as a writer—maybe both?).
Basically, I left Mastodon for personal reasons. And my personal reasons shouldn’t be your reasons. You need your own reasons.
If any of this resonates with you—good, I’m glad we can relate to each other. But don’t feel like you have to delete Mastodon because someone was irresponsibly using “we” pronouns instead of “I” in a piece about the ills of social media.
But, for the record, I do believe that social media is a cheap way to feel validated, and I also believe that it’s a cheap way to find community, and I also believe that it’s a tar pit of sorts that enables both personal and political inaction by being a hugbox echo chamber full of people just telling each other the things they want to hear, and I also believe that its entire design is conducive to being highly addictive and thus harmful long-term, especially to “neurodivergent” people with addiction problems and/or hyperfocus tendencies and/or trouble moderating.
But these are just my beliefs (and I’m realizing now that “belief” is a weird way to frame all of this, but whatever). You do you. I’m not going to tell you that you should leave Mastodon or any other social media network. I’m not comfortable telling you that. I’m not comfortable telling you what to do at all. But, if I were—hypothetically—comfortable telling people what to do, I would probably tell them something like this:
If you find yourself mindlessly scrolling through social media or constantly posting pictures of your favorite things or obsessively updating everyone on every little thing about your life or replying to posts with little platitudes while not actually caring all that much about the actual people behind the posts or getting angry over other people’s posts for whatever reason or comparing yourself to your followers or trying to be like some online influencer—ask yourself, WHY?
And if you don’t like the answer, do something about it.
The most important question you can ask yourself is WHY?
WHY AM I DOING THIS STUFF?
And then, when you think you know the answer, ask WHY again, and again and again and again and again.
For me, deleting my social media presence was merely one of the many conclusions I reached after asking myself WHY over and over again. And I’m not done.
Even now, I’m still asking.
Thanks,
Forrest
*sent on 11/10/2024