Social Media Sabbath (What's wrong with Social Media)

A few weeks ago I read a blog post by the fabulous Liz Gilbert (author Eat, Pray, Love) about how she had been taking a “Digital Sabbath,” every weekend to make space for quiet time, reflection, family, friends, reading an actual book, that kind of thing. This coincided with me working on a writing exercise about the problems with social media, so I was, admittedly, primed for the message when it appeared on my news feed. And, I have to tell you, I instantly fell in love with the idea. I also knew, just as instantly, that a complete digital break was not going to work for me. My husband and I have put significant effort into downsizing and living smaller over the past decade, almost everything in our house is digital, including our books, movies, and music. I didn’t want to dismiss the idea completely, so, I’ve been taking a Social Media Sabbath every weekend for the past three weeks. It was embarrassingly tough to log out of Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, Pinterest - all my favorite drugs - set up an auto-reply message on my email account, and then stay off for the whole weekend, but it has been a very productive, and introspective time. 

I realize that productivity wasn’t exactly the point, but relaxation doesn’t seem to be in my wheelhouse lately. I’ll be happy to chill out when the weather changes and there’s nothing to do but watch the snow fall. What I have been doing is cooking, spending time with my hubby, and our family without my iPhone and iPad getting in the way. Yes, I posed with my nieces for an insane number of Snapchat photos over the Memorial Day Weekend, but I wasn’t the one taking them, and I got more enjoyment out of seeing them laughing at our silliness than I ever could out of someone hitting the like button.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my on-line life. I love reconnecting with old friends, and being a witness to everything they are doing: the big, and the small. Social media has been a great boon to many, with great qualities in its favor. However, as important to me as my Facebook and Blog are, there are downsides to a connected life. It’s become normal for me to check my phone, or tablet first thing in the morning, or even in the middle of the night, to see if my social media friends have done anything interesting while I was sleeping. It’s become a completely normal part of everyday life, and it’s so quick and easy, that it has replaced picking up the phone and actually calling friends, and relatives in order to find out what they’re up to. 

The troubling thing is, our brains aren’t designed for the 21^st century: we don’t have the bandwidth. We’re so busy tweeting, poking, skyping, pinning and liking things to really know what’s going on in our own heads. There is no doubt around the fact that social media is designed to appeal to our dopamine response mechanism, and can become as detrimentally addictive as any drug, food, or bad habit. We cannot control all of the content of our news feed, some of it may be (usually is) distressing, whether it’s sad puppies or earthquakes, our brains cannot tell if the danger, or distress is thousands of miles away, or right behind us. Our dopamine receptors may be taking a hit every time someone likes that funny thing we said – and why wouldn’t they, we’re all hilarious –  but our brains are also spewing out stress chemicals like adrenaline, and cortisol all day long. Eventually all that over-stimulation leads to burnout and empathy fatigue. Social media so successfully mimics connection on a biochemical level, that we gradually lose our ability to connect with each other outside of an App. Most of us are only partly fooled by the biochemical mechanisms in our brains, we know the real-deal drugs of laughter, conversation, touch, sex, and presence that come from interacting with others in the flesh. Social media can only function as a kind of emotional patch, a stand in for the real thing. It is completely possible that the pituitary glands of future generations will adapt to the pervasiveness of technology in our lives, but for now we’re stuck with some pretty ancient equipment ratting around in our heads. It’s elegant, sophisticated, and beautiful, but there are certain bugs in the firmware.

Our profiles, as personal as they might be to us, provide a kind of buffer for our actions. This cushion enables us – to greater or lesser degree - to inflate our successes and hide our defeats behind someone else’s uplifting message. In the end, what many of us develop is an online persona that provides our private vulnerable selves with a degree of anonymity. An unfortunate side effect of this is that we become divorced from our actions, and others become disposable and infinitely replaceable. This separation enables some of us to be incredibly cruel to others in the form of trolling, and cyber bullying. Social medias pervasiveness in our lives, and the hold it has on our emotional state via dopamine, adrenaline, and cortisol makes cyber bullying all the more potent to those being bullied. Nobody is saying mean things to you in a specific context, they’re putting it in writing in front of everyone you know and are connected to. As much as I believe in personal responsibility, anonymity provides the perfect shield for less ethical people to act as poorly as they feel entitled to act with very little risk of reprisal. The shield of anonymity, the very thing we need to protect ourselves from harm, is the same thing that stops us from connecting in any kind of authentic way. 

Nothing in life is free. Most social media outlets do not charge their users because they are not the real consumer. The content we create and share is not impotent: we are the product being sold. Our clicks, our likes, our preferences are being tracked. That information is being stripped from our identity, bundled, used, and sold to market researchers, while time in front of our eyeballs is being sold to advertisers. We live in an increasingly public world, privacy is a precious commodity, and social media constantly encourages us to give away our privacy unwisely. I know, I know, I’m on social media RIGHT NOW, but too many of us are not aware of, nor manage their privacy appropriately. At the precise moment our lives are becoming public, our privacy – our only asset and means of protecting ourselves from harm – is being sold off to the highest bidding corporation. Just like our brains are not hardwired from this much information, we aren’t socially evolved enough, yet, to handle social media responsibly. This is how you get a generation of individuals who won’t change in a locker room at the gym, but will freely send a “dick pic” to anyone they think might be interested. We don’t even have a working model – as a society – of appropriate online behavior. 

Given social medias pervasiveness; its ability to reward our dopamine receptors, the cocoon of anonymity, its ability to so exquisitely mimic connection and make us feel like we’re never really alone, we have begun to spend so much time on line that many of us don’t know how to sit down and have a real conversation anymore. There is no discourse. People can be deleted and blocked without having to deal with any uncomfortable conversations. We don’t work through difficulties: we just walk away from them. Sometimes that is the best, in fact, the only reasonable action we can take, but it is becoming the societal default. The way we’re hardwired to experience connection is though story, shared events, the touch of a hand, a smile, the sound of a voice, or plain old physical proximity to the people we care about most. We might be able to tell our stories, make each other laugh, and share a picture of a smile, but that will likely never replace the real thing. 

Although I’m always available via text message and phone, taking a Social Media Sabbath has been a good object lesson, and it’s a habit a I plan to continue. I truly value the people on my friends list, and the time I’ve spent connecting with them – on whatever ever level possible – is not time wasted. I do, however, need to keep perspective, and direct some of that energy into my work and life. I don’t think participating in social media needs to be a zero sum game because it is, in and of itself, neither good nor bad: it has its benefits and it has its flaws. We can, and should, choose when and how to participate. To do that, we need to recognize what it is we’re doing, understand the consequences of our actions, and who is benefiting from our choices. Then we can begin to set appropriate boundaries for ourselves so that we don’t become chained to our devices every moment of our waking day.

Typewriter Music

The assignment was "First Memory"

I don’t remember my exact age, but I can remember clearly the clacking sound the keys made as they sprang up to slap a ribbon of ink against white unlined paper: the height of gravitas and adulthood to a young kid who’d only been allowed to work in pencil on dull wide-lined newsprint. It was Army Green with a black irregular pentagon shaped crest on the front panel that read Royal in engraved creamy-gold letters. My grandfather had died years before, but his office remained unchanged, and anytime my grandmother would babysit, I would hound her for hours so that I could sit at a huge wooden desk that had once belonged to him, and tap the time away until my parents came to collect me.

As a fairly unsentimental adult, I can’t deny the significance of sitting there surrounded by the belongings of a man I would only know by the stories my aunts and cousins told of him, and the things he’d left behind. The caramel colored art eraser and triangular ruler in his desk drawer, and the smell of onion skin carbon paper, and envelope glue, were as much a part of him as the collection of carefully displayed mugs, and beer steins, that circled the whole room on handmade shelves. For all I know his hands may never have touched the keys of that big green machine, but I always believed that they had, and that was enough for the connection to be real to the child I used to be.

I had not, yet, learned cursive in school, but I was already a better two-fingered-typist than printer. I had a tendency to forget how to shape certain letters, or reverse their direction. Someone said I had dyslexia, without much explanation of what that meant. I knew I had difficulty reading quickly, and hated to read aloud. I made lots of mistakes, but how many of those mistakes were nerves and how many because I wasn’t good at reading, I don’t think anyone knew. What I knew, is that my problems with printing disappeared sitting at that massive green machine, poking away at the clear acrylic buttons that protected parchment colored letters, what were framed with silver: some more worn than others.  I could memorize where the letters were, and never have to worry again about how to shape them with a pencil. Unfortunately for me, school wasn’t filled with big wooden desks, and heavy steal typewriters. 

The machine made a kind of music. I loved the way the carriage mechanism thumped up and down to accommodate the pressing of a shift key. By pressing, I mean, shoving it with my whole hand, it took so much strength to move that heavy rubberized roller up and down. The clack-click, clack-click, clack-click, clack-click, clacking of the keys, the fast double click of a spacebar, and then a thump-thump-clack-click, clack-click, clack-click, of the begging of a new sentence reminded me of snare, and bass drums. It made a funny hick-up sound when I pressed the backspace key to type the right letter multiple times over a wrong one, and at the end of each row a very satisfying ding-zip-thump of the carriage return ratcheting back to the beginning of the next line so that the impromptu melody could start again.

Sometimes I’d push the carriage return arm over, and over listening for the rolling dull clunk of the spacing gears change from single, to double, to triple, and back as I moved the lever with my opposite hand. Tapping the enter key on a computer, or even an electric typewriter, just doesn’t have the same gratifying sense. Then there was the ratcheting sound the roller made as you loaded a whole sheet of blank paper, and a shiny metal roller-guild sprang back into place: the sound of possibility.

It didn’t yet occur to me that this device could be used to record the thoughts and stories in my head, I just liked the sound it made, and how terribly adult I felt pretending to write terrible adult things in permanent ink.  Back then I held two contrary beliefs, that I still struggle with today. One is that everyone made up stories in their head, and the other, that it was not OK for gown-ups to make up stories in their heads. I kept my typing to the basics, the alphabet, the full names of my family members, cousins, teachers, and pets. Sometimes I would just type gibberish to see how fast I could go without locking up the keys, and sometimes I would deliberately try to tangle up as many keys as possible.  It was a dangerous game: if I tangled so many keys I had to ask for adult intervention I’d be made to stop playing with my favorite toy, and if I didn’t press my luck I’d be stuck unsatisfied, convinced I could have ensnared one more key. I wasn’t just fascinated with the letters imprinted on the page, and sometimes on the roller I had hit the key so hard, I also loved the mechanics of the heavy machine. The way one lever pressed would physically translate to a small metal arm raising out of a curved chassis to strike the page, leave its mark, and then return just as quickly to its well-ordered resting place. When I was strong enough, I would turn the whole thing over to see if I could watch the interaction of springs and levers that made the typing happen. 

My attraction wasn’t limited to my grandfather’s typewriter. My maternal grandparents had a Jet Black Underwood with black and white keys. Much more sophisticated with more buttons that I didn’t know how to use, but opportunities to play with that machine were limited. It wasn’t, in my grandmother’s opinion, an appropriate occupation for young boys, even if it did stop my non-stop fidgeting. The music I made on that machine was just noise to her easily irritated ears. At home, my parents had a Gunmetal Grey, Smith and Corona “Silent Secretary” that was anything but silent. That machine had its own pitch and music, and I was more prone to be careless when playing on it, the machine being ours, and all. The piece de résistance, lie dormant in our attic, for me to find a few years later: a Remington Portable with retractable keys. The Remington had certain quirks, the ribbon was near frayed through and no replacements were available, the carriage return would slide clear out of the machine and it tended to drop certain letters if you typed too quickly. It was temperamental. I had its own ideas about line spacing, typing speed, and what noises it should, and should not make. But then, what could you expect, it had been in The War.

Please Don't Pet the Peeves

The writing assignment was “Your Pet Peeve,” so here it is in 700 words more or less…I hope it will resonate with some of you.

I am always going to be the creative, introverted, over curious, over sensitive, “not so good at real life,” type. Generally, I’m ok with that, in fact since I don’t know how else to be, I’m rather fond of it! BUT, I deeply resent having it shoved in my face to justify someone treating me like I’m some lesser form of broken, or incomplete human: not quite a real adult. I am tired of never measuring up because I was not made to work in a cubicle, and drive my safe SUV to my McMansion, in my safe little suburb. I have never received a blue print for, nor do I have the skills to build, that sort of life: even if I wanted it. There is nothing wrong with that choice, but it’s not the only valid choice! I’m not going to devolve into criticizing someone else’s path just because I’m biologically hardwired to reject that path. Security, and stability are important, and human beings co-evolved to reward conformity. These are facts, I get it!

I am not some overindulged child playing an elaborate game of make believe and finger painting. I work very hard, I wrestle frequently with the kind of thoughts and ideas that cause most of the population to bury their heads in the television. When I sit down to work, every one of my demons is there waiting for me, and I have to push my way through the crowd, make space in a shit-storm of fear, insecurity, and shame, sit down in all that noise, and do my job. I do hard things, and I am brave, every single day, with no promise of a positive outcome, or payoff. I have maintained a marriage for twenty-five years, and anyone who’s been married for five months knows that’s not easy. When I say I’ll do something, I will do it. Every. time.  I am ALWAYS the person who steps up – and cleans up – when the shit hits the fan. I have a lot of responsibilities, that I take too seriously. I make choices based on my values, not because of some promise of a reward in this world or beyond. That’s what adults do. 

In other-words: I adult harder than most nine to fivers do before they’ve finished their morning commute. I am completely, and totally responsible for my success, or failure. There is nowhere to pass the buck. I am the boss, accounting, shipping, sales, production, and the guy who cleans the toilets. This is not a game, and I am not playing!

I respect and am grateful for the freedom I have, but others are only too happy to claw greedily at my time because they perceive it has no value. Their excuse is always the same: I don’t have to show up at work from nine to five, therefore I can work anytime. Let me tell you right now, so there isn’t any doubt. NO, I can’t. By the time I deal with feeding cats, scooping litter, making breakfasts, packing lunches, and putting out whatever fires need extinguishing, all I want to do is deposit a penny in my savings account, and think about what I’m going to order at Milliways. Douglas Adams references aside, I am not quick to focus on non-urgent tasks, and I have ADHD which makes me alternatively hyper-focused and unable to focus at all. I survive using structure, and discipline, both of which require strict boundaries on time.

I like pleasing people – hello, Chef and Writer – I get a great deal of fulfillment from earning approval, but, I have learned that I cannot rely on others to set boundaries. That’s why I’m such a prick about time, and not over-committing myself in any aspect of my life. I realize it means I have to say no a lot, and I realize people don’t like to hear me say no…a lot. I truly value my friends and family, and the time I spend with them. I cannot be fully present and enjoy the people I care about if I’m resentful, hurt, frustrated, or worried that I am not getting anything done on the work I feel I was put here to do. So, if I do something for you, or with you, it is because I chose to do it. I do not owe it to you! You do not get to discount the value of that choice because it didn’t take time away from my “Job.” 

It did!

Me As A Verb.

Whatever this soap maker, chef, writer, fitness freak, THING I’m doing is, everything I do is self-directed. OK, so I’m broke, but I also have a great deal of freedom, and I also have a great deal of fear. Succeeding requires, along with luck, a whole bunch of self-discipline, which in unstructured situations, isn’t my strong suit.

 

I think I more than covered my trouble with procrastination, but I can overcome that natural tendency when I have a firm deadline.  It seems logical then to try and create concrete consequences for not meeting my deadlines when it comes to all this self-directed activity. Easy enough, right?

Here’s the problem: I’m an adult, and I’m stubborn. I have developed a lifetime habit of procrastinating and giving in to fear, and even if it no longer (or never) serves me or my work, it’s a bad habit my brain doesn't want to give up. Also, no one is going to yell at me if I don’t meet my deadlines, I’m not going to lose money because I have no promise of an immediate payoff if I meet my deadlines, and frankly, being a grown up, my mommy or my teachers isn’t going to be disappointed in me, or give me a big red zero on my paper because it was late.  No boss is going to write me up of fire me, no publisher is going to demand I return the money I received as an advance. I’m only going to be disappointed in myself, and I’m already used to that. It's a comfortable but unhappy place to be in.

So, for the past week I’ve been focused on sitting down and getting real clear about my goals and values. Why I’m doing what I’m doing, and also the consequences if I don’t do what I’m meant to be doing. Even as I write that, it reads like it should be easy, but we all have tricks and mind games we play on ourselves that keep us from getting what we want. At least, I haven’t met a single creative type who doesn’t. This exercise has taught me one thing: at no time are your Gremlin or Demon voices louder than when you’re trying to be crystal clear about your goals and values.  I’m talking about every nasty thing that was ever said to you by a teacher, a parent, a mentor, a friend, or a shitty ex-coworker, and every insecurity and fear you posses, on a loop.

I can’t tell you that I’ve shut them up, but I’ve pushed through and at least written this stuff down, for my own reference. By sharing it here, I am hoping it will help others who are struggling and provide myself with some kind of culpability. It isn’t enough though, to just write down a list of values. In acting you learn to move your character through a story by using active verbs. We use the sentence structure: "I (active verb)" you can't just fill in the blank with the verb "to be." Let's say my value is courage, I can't just go out and BE courageous. The question I had to ask myself when making this list is, how is that achieved?

Value: Bravery

Verb: dare

If Brenè Brown is right, and she usually is, there is no way to show up and be seen (creatively) and not get your ass kicked. It is a consequence of being brave and not avoidable.  You can choose courage, or you can choose comfort: you cannot have both.

Value: Tenacity

Verb: resolve

I know I can get back up when I’ve been knocked down. There have been times in my life when I feel like I did it every single day. But, I’ve spent too much of my life living in anger and resentment because I didn’t have the skills to set and maintain firm boundaries. Tenacity, for me is about giving up perfectionism, pleasing others, and approval seeking. Yes, part of that is just how I’m made, but it can and does become detrimental to me achieving what I need to achieve for myself. Here’s the absolute truth about some people, they will take everything you have to give and perpetually ask for more. These people won’t set or maintain boundaries, so you have to.  

Value: Vitality

Verb :  animate

This is where the fitness freak comes in. I’d like to live a long healthy life, but I can only try to create a lifestyle in which that’s possible. I cannot be guaranteed the outcome. So, for as long as I am here, I’d like to be able to do as much as I’m capable of doing. This one isn’t only physical. It’s about moving forward, and seeing what is out there. As a natural born introvert I tend towards shyness, and I don’t expect that to change, but I cannot allow discomfort to keep me from trying new things.

Value: Curiosity

Verb: learn

This one comes naturally to me, and I hope I never lose it. Adult life has a way of trying to beat curiosity out of you and supplant it with what society and industry want you to think. I struggled to find the right wording here: wisdom, knowledge, education are actually outcomes of learning, which is – or should be – born of curiosity.

Value: Creativity  

Verb: initiate

All forms of art have some kind of rumination/percolation period involved in them, but eventually you just have to show up and do it.  Inspiration is such a capricious and random thing. Your job as an artist is to hone the skills required to be ready when it strikes. This may mean you make a lot of bad art in the process, but doing so is the only way of improving the outcome.

Value: Empathy

Verb: listen

At times I can be a prickly bundle of neuroses, and insecurity, waiting for any provocation to strike.I said it before, I've wasted a lot of energy on anger and resentment. Like a lot of people I think this is because I fail to listen and ask questions before I jump to conclusions and start talking. Kindness isn’t about being a pushover either; you can be kind and firm: see also, setting and maintaining boundaries. I was on the verge of writing compassion, and kindness as separate values, when I realized both were born of empathy and are actually verbs. Love for others isn’t a value either, it’s a verb. It is possibly THE verb: the reason we’re here.

Value: Authenticity

Verb: release

This one is about accepting who I am, how I’m made, and “keeping two eyes on my own paper.” As far as anyone has been able to prove, we only get one life, and our time here is extremely short. Authenticity isn’t about being a special little snowflake; it’s about avoiding comparison and staying on your own path. It is the polar opposite perfectionism and seeking approval, but mostly it’s about letting go: of who I think I’m supposed to be, of trying to control everything, of other people’s expectations, of societal pressures that are just, “so not me.”

A note on vitality, creativity, and empathy: none of these are possible if I’m an unfocused bundle of Cortisol and Adrenalin. I spent a good majority of my life, thus far, with diagnosed ADHD, it’s just the way my brain is made: I have to move to think.  If I don’t work out, none of the three are achievable on any level.

This is not a complete list, the verbs I used may not be perfect, and at first glance it looks pretty self eccentric, but, as I sit here banging away at my keyboard, I wonder how many adults have actually made this list. I wonder, what would happen if we all got clear on exactly what our values were, not what we’ve been brought up to believe they should be, but what they actually are.

So, is gratitude a value or a verb? Or is it both? If you feel inclined share your own list below. 

Part two coming soon: those pesky little consequences.