To walk away from a robust social media life is to walk away from doomscrolling. Now, most days, this is a positive thing. I’m not comparing my body or my work life or my marriage or my canceled vacation or my or my or my to anyone else’s. I’m also not getting sucked down a dark and twisted pattern of being irritated by someone I have never met. It feels good to live and let live. But some days, my thumbs really, really, really want to know. What’s everyone saying about this thing that feels too joyful or too heavy to hold by myself? What’s the latest? What’s going on now? What about now? I particularly miss Twitter. That place was my favorite.
I remain a firm believer that if you can access the news, you should access the news. To each their own, regarding limits and boundaries… but I feel it is our duty to stare wide-eyed into the world and then prepare ourselves to speak into it, clunky as it may be, for the sake of generations who follow us. For me, to walk away from a robust social media life could never equate to walking away from current events. It just looks a little different these days.
I listen to the daily flash briefing on my Amazon Alexa each morning, as well as most evenings. We have one in our bathroom, which I highly recommend if for no other reason than to match music to mood during showers and brushing teeth or hair and reading in the bath and staring at pores in the mirror. I might listen to the flash briefing multiple times when I’m feeling doomscroll-y, allowing the gentle scolding from Alexa – Rachael, you’re all caught up on your briefing – to slowly bring me back to earth. When I come across a headline that grabs my attention, in conversation or online (I’m not living under an off-grid rock, ok?), I Google it for a diverse offering of pieces on the topic. I also engage people in my everyday orbit, by asking my husband or a coworker or one of my kids what they think about the story I’m focused on that day. When I just know in my gut that a good conversation is happening on Twitter, as small as a comment on a basketball player’s shoes or as a big as a protest, I Google the topic with Twitter in the search phrase.
I am missing out, and yet I am not. Maybe it was always meant to be this way.
1 Comment
I think you have stumbled upon the old which is meant to also be the new — connected, but not.
I keep thinking how news and life has forever been changed because of technology — specifically. Screens that make war seem like a performance. Etc.
I just wonder if we’ve landed in a Roman Colosseum. Where everything is sport.
Perhaps disconnection is what rids us of desensitization. And allows us to feel again.