Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1) Anoesis. A State of mind consisting of pure emotion or sensation, devoid of cognitive content. NOT what occurs while playing with the Man Cub.

Kid is seriously smart.

2) Greeting. “How’s it going?”

“Oh, you know, right between ‘don’t get your hopes up’ and ‘be careful what you wish for’.”

For the next time “OK” isn’t gonna cut it. (HT Frazz).

3) Social*. My Sunday newspapers are filled with articles asking whether one should uncouple from the various social media sites available to us on the internet. You know, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and their slightly lesser cousins Whats App and Snap. Visuals of index fingers floating over the “delete” button abound. Ever more earnest posts in all of the above ask for help in deciding if it’s the right thing to do, or if it’s the right time to do it. (As an aside, isn’t that kinda like asking the bartender and all of your barfly buddies if you should quit drinking).

Well…is it?

My initial foray into everything social on the internet was a blatant attempt to boost my business while at the same time creating a bit of a personal brand in that space. A funny thing happened on the way to that pretty blatant business play: CrossFit. Yup, my hobby and my fellow hobbyists all discovered each other “off-site” on Facebook. Where I once pretty much lived my CrossFit life only on the main page of CrossFit.com (and existed in a tiny little solo bubble as a CrossFitter in a large commercial gym), now the larger CrossFit community came to dominate my feed. Complicating this was the fact that the lifespan of my sons’ Box occurred in this period, and as any Affiliate member can attest, your gym experience extends outside the gym and into your social media worlds. FB was the same black hole that CrossFit.com once was.

Twitter is an interesting place. Here I’ve been a bit better at sticking with the original plan of using the platform for professional purposes. We post about our business, and my professional writing has found a nice little audience. Here, too, I have discovered a broader community of folks who share some of my other interests (economics, healthcare policy, sports), and these very interesting people make Twitter just as attractive as any other online experience I’ve encountered. There are times when I sit down to spend a moment looking at what’s going on there only to look up an hour later and wonder where the time went. I should note that I pretty much skip by any and all political commentary, and still Twitter devours time as voraciously as a Black Hole does gravity.

So what are all of these folks to do? Or me? Should I stay or should I go? The fallacy is that it has to be all or none for most folks. Only the truly addicted, those who ignore the humans in their presence in favor of the bits and bots on their devices need to seriously take on this question (and for the record, for them the answer is an unequivocal “YES”, you should delete all of that shit. Now.). For the rest of us, why is this any different from TV? Why aren’t we using Social Media in the same manner that we (used to) use the television? People never went to work, set up shop and turned on the tube. You watched it as a diversion AFTER work. Yeah, sure, maybe you gathered with friends to watch a show or a game, but you were interacting with people AND the TV, not the people ON the TV. Tough to keep a job if you spend 1/2 your time watching Wheel of Fortune.

Anyway, that’s my bid. Deal with SM like it’s TV in the 90’s. For what it’s worth it seems that I am the first person to propose that we look at SM this way. At the moment my FB usage is plummeting as I find that there are fewer and fewer people whose activity holds any interest for me. Like 99% of what’s in the old TV Guide. My slow withdrawal feels a lot like my experience with the comments and Message Board on .com. Twitter feels like a cross between business and research, both of which can be treated like “appointment TV”; I go there when it’s convenient. Neither one feels necessary.

There is an obvious benefit to a SM diet, and that is the massive number of minutes you free up for all kinds of other stuff. I experienced the exact same phenomenon when I stopped watching NFL football on Sunday afternoons. More time to read. More time to write. Full on commitment to each moment spent playing with the Man Cub, and for that matter talking with family members who now tend to gather for communal weekend dinners. Admittedly it can be a bit of a challenge to fill the time previously lost to SM, but so much of my sense of needing more time in my day to add something new or different or just fun really seems to have been artificial. How can I not have time to re-learn French when so much time has been spent in the FB rabbit hole? I’d made my minutes artificially scarce.

Today I built something with my hands. You can, too. Re-claim your minutes by putting SM in its place. Like TV.

I’ll see you next week…

* I acknowledge the inherent irony in the fact that most of you will read this through SM.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 27th, 2019 at 9:51 pm and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.