Greetings comrades. I’m at the midway point of my month-long social media and news cleanse and today I shall offer some observations on how it’s going. Hardly for the first time in my life, I turn to the closing scene of The Graduate to help me sort things.
For those of you too young to remember the movie at all and those of you too old to recall what happens at the end, I offer a refresher. Dustin Hoffman’s Ben and Katharine Ross’s Elaine are sitting in the back of a bus. She is in a wedding gown, having just fled her own nuptials upon the insistence and with the assistance of Ben. Their giddy, adrenaline-fueled jubilation at getting away with this then gives way to something more real as their joyful expressions fast fade to somber blankness.
It is the moment of NOW WHAT?
Because I have quit so many things in my life: my family of origin, drinking, meat, dozens of jobs and far more men than I can count, I understood in advance that quitting social media and the news, even if only temporarily, was going to prompt a lot of restlessness and NOW WHAT? on my part as I adjusted to my new reality. I did my best to plan for this, making a list of alternative activities to pursue. But knowing and experiencing things are often quite different and one can prepare only to a certain degree even with prior experience.
So instead of thinking, I’ve been restless before, I can handle more restlessness, I used the memory of prior restlessness to create some parameters. To get through the entire month without quitting quitting and resuming my pacifying habits of endless scrolling and perpetual posting, I understood I needed to be gentle with myself. If the self-imposed rules I set out to create to get me through were too many or too much, I knew I risked saying fuck it and just diving back into all of it.
I did not rule out watching TV and movies. I did not make a plan to begin some major project like writing a book. I decided long form journalism (mainly the New Yorker) would be fine to intake even if some of the articles violated my determination to avoid the news.
I also gave up white sugar. For the most part. But within that rule was another that said if I did eat a little sugar that would not be cause for self-flagellation nor would it be permission to fully resume my notorious habit of eating entire pints of ice cream on the regular.
Why did I throw in the no refined sugar rule? This relates back to restlessness. I have observed myself on many occasions standing at the kitchen counter playing that game with cereal wherein, because the ratio of cereal to milk is never precise, one can decide that, in the interest of not “wasting” the excess milk at the bottom of the bowl, one may add a little more cereal to sop it up. This, naturally, is followed by over pouring more cereal into the milk, necessitating the addition of more milk, and so on, until the box of cereal is gone. Rarely is this activity related to actual physical hunger. Almost always there is a component of boredom in this mindless consumption.
Boredom. Among the sundry rules I created heading into the experiment, I also vowed that at no point would I allow myself to use the word bored, that I would actively push back against the notion anytime it arose, as I knew (correctly) it would. Instead, whenever the word started knocking on my mind’s door, I would take this as an opportunity to look at all the unboring things around me, waiting for my attention.
My living space is a very large room that used to be a garage. Here I have several art stations set up—ceramics, fiber processing, painting, silversmithing. Additionally I have shelves of books. My phone is loaded with hundreds more audiobooks and thousands and thousands of songs. Also podcasts. No excuse to be bored.
But I also knew from past experience—and this is very much true with my latest quitting—that as the mind adjusts to a new reality, focus can be very difficult. Once I get started on a project, I can be utterly consumed for hours, even days. But it is the getting started part that is the challenge. And so I also added a rule that gave me permission to wander aimlessly, stare into space, accomplish nothing and be okay with that. Just as long as I did not succumb to a desire to proclaim boredom.
Being both the experimenter and the subject of the experiment promises a lack of objectivity. Still, the practice of watching myself navigate the endless extra hours I have at my disposal now is itself a sort of new hobby.
Perhaps the biggest observation is that I am so completely used to looking at screens that fully putting down the phone/iPad for a month feels like too much. So I have allowed myself to go online to places other than social media and news outlets. I fall down Wikipedia holes on the regular. Sometimes I google the term “pretty pictures” to see what shows up. Last night I watched several videos on how to use a drop spindle. But the new habit that has really taken over is a burgeoning addiction to Craigslist.
This began innocently. I was exploring the current housing scene in Austin as I prepare to bring in more roommates in part to replace my Airbnb income. Because yes, after that asshole Dominic slept outside my window, I pulled down all of my Airbnb listings. Despite CL’s reputation as a magnet for nut jobs, I’ve actually found some excellent prospective tenants. More excitingly, I have discovered sections of CL that I never noticed before.
For a week or so I couldn’t stop dipping into the Missed Connections category, full of bizarre notes in which, most often, one stranger will write a note to another stranger—who very more than likely will never see it—basically hoping to have wild sex with that person. These run the gamut from hilarious to disgusting. Once in a great while, the horny posts will be punctuated with something totally different. Like the brief post in which a “heavy guy” thanks the stranger at HEB who stopped to help him load water in his vehicle. That one, steeped in genuine gratitude, made me weepy.
Once, combining my newfound fascination with CL with my Wikipedia rabbitholing, I did a deep dive into the history of the former. Did you know, despite having the same horrible interface as it did upon its inception nearly 30 years ago, that CL hauls in a billion dollars per year? And that this is a fraction of what they could make if they charged everyone to post? But apparently the founders aren’t greedy and a billion annually is enough for them.
I love the anonymity of CL. I love how, unless you join the forums (which are so visually painful to navigate that I spend no time at all there) you cannot comment on someone’s post. Oh sure, you can send an email or make an appointment to meet someone in person and insult them to their face over whatever it is they are trying to sell. But you cannot sit online for hours at a time offering publicly displayed likes and dislikes and hearts and thumbs down. Not an option. Deprived of (or maybe gifted with) this lack of interactivity, the compulsion to stay at the site dissipates quickly enough. Last week I thought I might never give up CL. This week the novelty feels almost fully worn off. I’ll still glance at the listings but the sort of dopamine hits I get from the overstimulation of social media and the news—with all the comments and fighting—are not endless with classified ads.
I also notice that I take far fewer photographs now. I have been an avid photographer for decades. I still like capturing a great shot. But it occurs to me that for a long time now, my mind has looked at every potential photo as a thing to be posted. If I had any rationale for this, it ran along the lines of “my gift to you.” LOOK AT THIS SUNSET! LOOK AT THIS BABY GOAT! Now I am practicing simply looking for the sake of looking, of not disrupting this seeing by committing it to some digital archive. I literally have more than 75,000 photos stored in my phone. That’s an awful lot. Do I need to take fifty pictures every day? I do not.
Maybe the keenest observation is catching my mind shift into anxiety mode during particular moments of the day. What is my morning coffee if it is not paired with headlines about the hellish state of the world today? What is my bedtime ritual if not checking social media feeds? I feel an itch during these times that I am “supposed” to be doing something. Then I realize no, that’s not it. More, it is the habit I am missing, and having OCD, changing habits is a recipe for going bonkers.
When I attended a ten-day silent meditation retreat a decade ago, I swiftly implemented unnecessary routines, some of them forbidden. I broke the rule about not exercising and sneaked some yoga in every afternoon. I took a shower at the same exact time every day. I found a contraband pen in my bag and thumbed my nose at the no writing rule, taking copious notes on any form of paper I could find—toilet paper rolls, a toothpaste box, the wrappers of teabags. I washed my not actually dirty t-shirts by hand in a sink and hung them out to dry.
I needed rituals. I still need rituals. This is perfectly acceptable. It is behavior I observe in my animals who are unencumbered by social media except for being forced to participate as models for my photography (of which they remain blissfully ignorant). They do their animal things, rarely veering from the routines of making a racket when I show up to feed them breakfast, then grazing all day, then rushing back to their pens when I rattle the feed bucket in the evening to gather them in from where they have scattered themselves across the property. Or the inside animals, the dogs and cats who nap for hours and hours on end, clearly feeling no guilt about doing so, no compulsion to follow a to-do list populated with things that mostly could be left undone, no need to share their doings with others.
The changes are settling in now, becoming new habits and rituals. I am slowly resuming things I pushed aside. I do a little yoga nearly every day. I’ve been to Barton Springs several times now. I meet with friends in real life and engage in long conversations that do not include sentences like, “You might have seen my post about this on Instagram.” I tried watching TV a couple of times but in my newfound abundance of quiet time I find it all too overstimulating. I am regaining the capacity for sustained reading.
I’m curious to see what July will bring, if I will tack on another month of greatly curtailed screen time or dive back into my virtual life. If I will start posting fictitious Missed Connections on CL just to see what kind of responses I can reel in. If I will fill a tub with white sugar and just sit in it and rub it all over myself. Or if, perhaps, the WHAT NOW? that continues to visit me daily will give way to a quiet contentment of moving slower on the regular, embracing the lulls as part of a bigger healthy life rhythm not reliant on perpetual stimulation.
NOTES:
If you’re down for subscribing to my substack ($7 per month/$70 per year) that would be so cool. If you’re not in a place to do that, I get it. It still helps if you share this with folks you think might dig it. One-off donations also welcome—the tip jar is on Venmo @spike-gillespie. Thank you.
The first Crone Shenanigans Party is at the ranch on Tuesday July 11 at 6pm. This is a free gathering for ladies. There will be live music and readings and arts and crafts and whatever the hell we want. Email me if you want to be on the mailing list for updates.
My beloved place of employ is hosting the Lone Star Limericks competition. If you want more information about that, email me and I’ll hook you up.
Gad! The Shenanigans and the Limericks both sound so fun! Alas, it’s a “fer piece” to travel from Jalisco. Have fun, all!
Social media doesn’t pull me like it used to, but I still find plenty ways to waste time with my iPad. Can’t seem to give myself permission to create on a regular basis, but I can sure sit here and find things on the screen to keep me from that which makes me happy. I’m getting better in microscopic baby steps; It’s improved since that weekend at the ranch with you a year ago, but Jesus.
Reading your post and your awareness of the process you’re experiencing is helpful. Mwuah.