hello. i posted yesterday but i have a new problem that i wanna talk about. I AM ON SOCIAL MEDIA TOO MUCH. i think this is a problem that a significant amount of people in the world have, and i've been struggling with it lately too. here are my thoughts on it and things i want to change.
first off, my parents are also on social media way too much. they love tiktok, and i hate tiktok. i dont have a tiktok account and i never will. they are also on facebook too much as well. in the mornings, they will spend the first hour of their day scrolling tiktok and facebook posts. i can tell they don't gain anything from the experience and they're scrolling just for the sake of scrolling, and it makes me frustrated. i'll think to myself, "don't they realize they're wasting their lives away? they don't have any hobbies, why don't they try and learn something?" i do a pretty good job with sitting in silence, and i'm comfortable with being alone with my thoughts especially when i'm in the presence of others. i like to give off the impression that i don't use social media at all, so i'll leave my phone off whenever i'm with anybody else.
but it's ironic because when i'm alone, i'll use social media way, way, way too much. this morning i've used it for about three hours, and i've only been awake for a little more than four. those same thoughts i've been thinking towards my parents are reflected back to me, although i'm self-aware enough to realize why i use social media: it's very easy to mindlessly scroll something.
when i'm on twitter, i don't gain anything from the experience. sometimes i'll see a post that i think is super cool, like a drawing of a dog girl or something, but the ratio of "posts i really like" to "posts i forget about immediately after looking at them" are essentially 1:1000. does that justify it? when i'm in the moment, it does! i'll crave seeing those good posts that i actually like seeing, and the hours wasted on looking at them will be worth it. but there's more to it than just that.
twitter and tumblr are wonderful ways of avoiding other tasks that i need to do. currently, i need to set up a simulation for a research task for a meeting i have on Friday; i have to send an email to a professor; and i have to catch up on reading papers. these are all high-effort activities, and social media is a very effective way to avoid these responsibilities. each minute i spend looking at a webpage is a minute my body is screaming "stop! stop, do anything else!" but it's drowned out by the equally-loud voice that says "i want to do absolutely anything else besides the tasks i need to, so i'm going to keep using social media to avoid those responsibilities." i'm dreading returning to school in a few weeks because i don't want to do those activities, but i realize that returning to school--returning to a rigid schedule--is probably the most beneficial thing i can do for my mental health.
i experienced the same thing during the week-long autumn break, where i experienced a period of dissociation, overall sadness, and high social-media usage. i had things i needed to do, and i really just wanted to do anything else besides that. during the semester, i regularly clock less than 15 minutes of screen-time a day, and it's because of my rigid schedule that i'm able to do it. i enjoy it! i'm so productive and everything is so consistent that it's very good for me. these times of break are a lot tougher in comparison.
what's the resolution? i know i can't be trusted opening social media anymore. a few of the genuinely-good reasons i use social media is to keep up with friends. there are three people that i only interact with through social media that i want to keep interacting with. i'm too shy to talk with them directly, and liking the posts they make is an easy way to signal to them "hi! i still remember you! i still think we're friends!" so any answer to my problem needs to acknowledge this at least.
my current mindset is to use social media as a quick escape from the things i really need to do. in theory i could instantly open social media and scroll for a few minutes before closing it and getting back to work, but it never ends up lasting only a few minutes in reality. in a perfect situation, i would stay aligned with my goals forever, and never require "breaks" or anything else, but jeez, is that even possible? why can't i just work forver? would i be happiest that way? this is very similar to yesterday's blog post...
one justification for hobbies (note: this justification is within the "higher-level" justification of "im doing this because it makes me happy", which i focused on in the previous blog post) is that a hobby is something that gets accumulated into my personality. you can't simply say "hobbies are activities that are fun and leave you feeling recharged" because social media can fufil this need. but social media is not something i want reflected in my personality. i don't want future friends to look at me and go "that's sophie, she uses twitter a lot." i want them to look at me and think "that's sophie, she throws knives and has read 1,000,000 books and plays visual novels about gender and kissing". in a sense, the second option is even better because it's at least somewhat memorable, while social media is extremely un-memorable (what do you remember of the last hour you spent on social media? if i forget my time knife-throwing, at least my brain retains the motions and is better/more accurate at throwing knives as a result, you know? so i still gained something from the experience.)
i can maybe focus on scheduling down-time, since it's difficult to say an objection to "why don't i just ONLY work and do nothing else?" clearly, my brain does not like that. i don't think it's even possible to only work and do nothing else. it would also run into the same problem discussed previously, where the resulting person is "not sophie". i'm scared of that happening so i will continue doing distinctly-sophie activities like writing in this blog and drawing myself as a dog and etc.
so back onto the task at hand: i do not want to scroll social media any more. i have decided i will ONLY use social media for the purpose of viewing my friends' posts. there are ways i can create a "dashboard" of twitter/tumblr posts that consists of only the posts my friends directly make (e.g., a dashboard which does not show reposts/reblogs or any kind of algorithm), so i will do that instead of scrolling. i'm not quitting social media, i'm just quitting the scrolling. this is like if i changed social media into a big RSS feed.
"but what about those few posts you do really enjoy?" i will make text files containing things like artists that i do like the posts of. when i want to see their new posts, i will manually search for their account and fetch the content through my custom dashboard. this custom dashboard has already been created for tumblr with the help of their super-easy xml api, and i'm working on doing the same for twitter. this resolves every issue i have. i can even go further and say "i will only use social media at all on the weekends." i'll try that out this week, while i'm motivated at least. in my next blog post i'll update you on how well i did.
i want to reiterate that sophie is not changing. there have been times when i see a post from a COMPLETE STRANGER on the internet--someone who i dont know or otherwise have known for more than a few minutes--saying something like "i'm leaving social media for good" and i'll get a little sad from it. like, "wah! you're gonna be a normal person now! you're probably gonna go talk about the news and think about stocks and stuff like that!" this is a silly idea, but it's real to me! it's like, don't you kind of want to be a little weirder than most people? i want to hang on to my dog-girl side because it makes me happier knowing i'm not like any other normal girl! if i stopped social media completely, it would make me feel my personality would slip away completely. maybe i would stop being genderfluid, too! whether or not that's ultimately a good thing is debateable, but it's very very scary to think that, so i want to keep being weird. if this means i only bark on the weekends, then that's fine.
thanks for reading! sophie isn't changing, and you'll still see me lots. really, in fact, you'll see me the same amount of times you've already been seeing me. (i don't know why i feel so sentimental about this, realistically there's nobody reading this who cares this much, but i like to imagine that somebody does. maybe its because i would feel this way about another person i see on neocities; when i see someone hasn't posted a blog post in a year, i get kind of sad despite not knowing anything about that person. maybe there are readers like that. maybe that's you! but probably not.) i'm just scrolling twitter less. if we're friends, i'm interacting with you the same amount i've been interacting with you before (just only on the weekends). and if we aren't friends, we can start being friends! my twitter and discord are both "@URLslug".
meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow. meow meow, woof.
- Sophie