I thought that I had already posted this, but just to TikTok I guess. Here’s the video link:
I’m gonna summarize this as briefly as I can, though off the cuff because I didn’t think to prepare a post before cell service.
For years, one of the core struggles in my mental health has been dealing with social rejection. Most of us primarily think of rejection as in very specific contacts, like if you ask a person out on a date, but in fact we experience social rejection all over the place all the time and Facebook and online dating dial it up by 100. Social media is advertised as giving us increased ways to connect, but really what that translates to for the majority of people it’s just increased opportunities for rejection. Because I have 3000 Facebook friends, everything I post on here becomes an opportunity to be rejected by 3000 people at once. Completely toxic, and something I need to simply stop doing.
In truth, social rejection is completely unavoidable in any kind of setting where we encounter a lot of people. Social contact is critical to human health and survival, and like every need we have it comes with a limit which varies individually. When we hit our limit for social contact, we become incapable of having quality interactions. Most of us don’t think about this, but deal with it instinctively by altering the boundaries that we set up with people around us. This is healthy, and we should do it. It’s worse when you live in a city, because the nature of the setting forces you to interact with hundreds of people every day, and no matter how extroverted you are, you will run out of energy if to each person that you encounter on a city street you say hello and genuinely mean it. Many people don’t understand that this is happening in their lives, but it happens to everyone, and most people survive it by altering their behavior to minimize the psychological expense of contact with others. Blinders you could say; we simply avoid eye contact, often outright ignore each other, or just do our best to get through every interaction as superficially as possible. Almost all of us find this frustrating and almost everyone at some point has bemoaned the existence of the standard dialogue, how are you/fine, what’s up/nothing, etc. We all absolutely hate the insincerity of these strategies, we all depend on the strategy for survival. I had a bit of a false Enlightenment a few days ago when I thought that this was really just a reason why we shouldn’t live together in large numbers, but now I realize that it’s inherent; we will always need to find ways to survive crowded places, And crowded places will indeed be everywhere that people want to be for the rest of history. So, even though we all hate them, we do indeed have to nonetheless employ strategies to minimize the psychological cost of our daily interactions with all of these people.
Anyway, this became crystal clear to me traveling the Alaska highway and noticing that when there are fewer people around in general, we don’t work so hard to avoid each other, and for the first time in recent memory, almost nobody has tried to avoid me or brush me off in the last few days . It eventually got to a point where I had to self limit because otherwise I would be allowed to tell my whole life story everywhere I went. It was great at first being truly paid attention to, and then abruptly I hit that point where I had to start adjusting my behavior. Now it is more clear to me than ever before that I do you need to tell my stories, in full length, but on paper, and books and magazines and the like, and actualize my reality as a writer and not try to pretend to fulfill that need through another channel that wasn’t designed for it, a channel such as social media. I’m not gonna go quite as far as calling this a goodbye post, but lately every time I touch Facebook it becomes clearer that it is not the right place for me. I believe that Facebook is very intentionally optimized to be as toxic as possible, to very specifically overwhelm us with too much stimulus and simultaneously make us feel chronically rejected and keep us filled with a sense of longing for more. I am not speaking a conspiracy theory, this is very much the truth about how Facebook is intentionally designed for “engagement” and well-documented. It’s like a cigarette, it is meant to be bad for you.
So what’s the answer? First off, less of this. Instead, talk to your actual friends. Make a phone call, send a text if that’s all you have, visit someone in person if you can. Stop scrolling, stop checking for likes, and stop posting to places where nobody really wants to read what you have to say like groups we’re a lot of people or just they’re looking for fights because that’s how they get a sense of feeling recognized. And yeah that’s on purpose as well, Facebook is designed to get people arguing because apparently arguing is “engagement“ and that’s what sells their ad views. It’s not designed to inform or connect, it’s designed to addict and enslave. So, though I know that three or four of you have been wanting to use this to follow my journey, I haven’t been posting much largely for these reasons, and I’m not sure that will change. I do have messenger on my phone, and if you genuinely want to keep in touch, use that to send me other contact information. I won’t be deleting Facebook specifically anytime soon because it is a business necessity like it or not, but soon enough I will be converting my personal page to a professional page simply in order to help me reduce my emotional responsiveness to the lack of engagement when I post. I remain present all over the Internet as @Whitewaterlawyer including that with a .com, and who knows how soon, but eventually you will be able to find me at your local bookstore and on Kendall with a couple of titles specifically on the way. There will be a memoir of the 50 state journey and there will be a short essay book with a title similar to “everything I wish you had learned in college but didn’t.”
Otherwise, you know where to find me.