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I Quit Social Media for a Year

joshcsimmons.com

151–160 of 380 posts

Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year

#151
post #54

This bit hit me hard: "You know what else is exhausting? Pretending to care about people you don’t give a shit about. Maybe you’re just a better person than I am and you genuinely and deeply care about everyone you are ‘friends’ with on Facebook. I didn’t. "

This was one of the reasons that pushed my of Facebook, in the end, my newsfeed was heavily filtered because I don't care that one my friends bought a new phone, or checked in into a shopping mall. I'll probably miss some more important life events, but I would argue that if they don't share that with me in person, we weren't really friends in the first place.

Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year

#152
post #55

My biggest issue with social media is less that it's distracting (IMO not necessarily an unhealthy thing) but that it has, for me, more than anything else seemed to make all aspects of my life a competition with others. On Instagram, you're competing with others on who has the happiest life. On LinkedIn, you're competing with others on who has the steepest career trajectory. Even on Twitter, perhaps more acutely in c…

Maybe I’m in the minority, but I like social media and I’m capable of controlling my usage. I’ve developed some ground rules to ensure a good healthy experience. To start, I have an iOS rule that prevents more than 7 minutes of each social media app per day. I pretty much only use Facebook. After the timer is up that’s it for the day. I honestly enjoy seeing picture of my friends, their kids, their vacations, and the…

nice setup. personally i've moved to a two device solution in two physical different places, where the "serious" device has /etc/hosts black holing of addictive domains + social media; were i able to consume it in a healthy manner on a mobile device, the iOS rule would be great.

Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as a minor correction: Nobody is telling you that you specifically are the problem. The problem is that as a white male, what is called "western society" was built with you as the presumed default, and that confers to you tons of small benefits that fall into one of two categories: 1) Unfair advantages that allow you certain freedoms other groups don't have, that one could argue no one should have 2) Advantages…

If you're going to say that Western society was built with white males as the presumed default, you might want to also mention who the builders were. And as a broader point, it also might be worth considering how Western society stacks up against all other societies to ever exist.

Except that Western civilization as in the minds of it's inhabitants likely wouldn't have existed without the subjugation and exploitation of those other societies, including but not limited to: China, India, the Middle East, most of Africa minus Ethiopia, and even some parts of Europe, and much more recently, South America.

The West has largely won because it won a lot back in the day, and that inertia builds up and continues to favor us.

Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year

#154

I might quit soon too. To be honest - seeing my peers buying homes (with, of course, no discussion about how they made it happen), getting married, traveling a lot, enjoying nice things, and having kids is kinda putting a sour taste in my mouth. It's a very biased feed. It's basically an endless feed of the highest points of everyone in your entire social circle. I do some of it but I tend to balance it out with, "I…

Do you think your peers were able to purchase homes through means not accessible to you? Not to speculate on your circumstances, but it's truly something how many people I know making six figures that choose to rent these days (in competitive, expensive housing markets). One possibility might be, we become so accustomed to renting. I can't imagine developing my career further, and then all of a sudden in 5 years, hav…

Banks will definitely loan out crazy stuff. But it's not very common, from my knowledge, to buy a $1m+ home with less than 20-30% down. (You have to pay PMI and a really high mortgage then anyway) To have a few hundred thousand dollars lying around before you're 28 is pretty remarkable. Especially if you aren't at FAANG.

The means they were able to do it through were likely rich family (no one here of course will say their family is rich) and high paying job ($300k+/yr). Both of which I am not in (for my position in my region). I'm at a startup. Watching my peers, who are not in companies like mine, just skyrocket in wealth is rather discouraging. It's even more harsh because it's usually a couple who are sky rocketing and I'm just sitting here with a SO who will never make anything substantial. Love them to bits but the lack of financial contribution is practically suicide here.

I know everything isn't perfect. It's curated. But the point is that often their highs are way higher than mine. I already know their lows are nothing like mine because I know a lot of the people well enough to know that much.

Side note about home buying: a lot of statistics online about homes being bought for x and what kind and where and all that. But there's very little information on who is buying and what they're doing with the home!

I only recently discovered that all the homes being bought under $1m in the Bay area aren't being owner inhabited. They're all being converted into rentals and as investment property. It explains why East Palo Alto hasn't gentrified.

Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year

#156
post #55

My biggest issue with social media is less that it's distracting (IMO not necessarily an unhealthy thing) but that it has, for me, more than anything else seemed to make all aspects of my life a competition with others. On Instagram, you're competing with others on who has the happiest life. On LinkedIn, you're competing with others on who has the steepest career trajectory. Even on Twitter, perhaps more acutely in c…

I think there is an opportunity for a new perspective here...a positive one. Once you realize that all you're seeing is a highlight real on these social platforms and move past that I think there is a great opportunity to be a good friend, family, community member. Let others you follow know you are happy for them and the things they felt were important enough to capture and share with you and their audience via their profiles/accounts. Click like and leave supportive comments and turn social media into a positive! I have found the more I celebrate with others and interact in positive ways that it is reciprocated and strengths relationships.

Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year

#157
post #26
post #20

When I quit I ended up reading books and watching TV for entertainment. I literally read over a million words of fiction (Worm) in one month with the spare time. It was a lot more fulfilling, and I'll remember that time. While in contrast there are few social media moments I'll miss. I had to actually force myself to get back into social media. I'm not sure what the author here means by withdrawal; there was maybe a…

The web serial Worm is amazing. The sequel, Ward, is really far along now and is even better IMO. You can catch up on https://www.parahumans.net/ The HN crowd would probably really like Worm in general. Basically a sci-fi superhero story with realistic uses of powers and complex characters. The protagonist has the powers of insect control and scalable multitasking.

I read Worm and hated it. So here's a strong anti-recommendation for anyone who's considering reading it.

For reference, Worm is divided into 30 arcs, of roughly 50,000 words each. I divide this into a few major sections.

Arcs 1-3: Taylor (the main character) gains her superpowers, learns to use them, and joins a team. She struggles a bit with hiding her new powers from her family. This is the only part of the story I thought was any good. By the end of this section, Taylor completes her metamorphosis from awkward teenageer into standardized rationalfic protagonist, and generally stops being an interesting character.

Arcs 4-20: Taylor and her team do typical cape stuff, mostly fighting various superpowered opponents, finding allies, and building influence in their home city. This was tolerable until I realized that the author is constitutionally incapable of letting his protagonists take any kind of meaningful loss. This section is a million words long and has no substantial consequences.

Arcs 21-27: I may have gotten the exact cutoff wrong, but somewhere around arc 20, there's an event that looks like it's going to cause a major shift in the story. Unfortunately, those major changes generally fail to materialize. This section is more of the same, though a bit more tolerable due to the novelty of having a bunch of new characters running around.

Arcs 28-29: Again, I'm probably off by an arc or two, but around arc 27, there's another big event. This time, there are some big changes to the story, but they're largely for the worse. All logic goes out the window, and the consequences of the big event are almost entirely ignored, in favor of buildup for the big finale.

Arc 30: This is hands-down the worst ending I have ever read in any piece of fiction. The climactic fight scene is largely told, not shown, and the author utterly fails at conveying the intended epic scale. The worst part of all, I'll omit due to spoilers, but in short, certain details of the battle make the previous 6,000 pages look like a complete and total waste of the reader's time.

There were two reasons I stuck with Worm for the full 1,600,000 words, in spite of its main plotline being dreadfully repetitive and boring. First, the interlude chapters, which explore backstories of side characters and the nature of superpowers, I thought were generally decent. And second, I was expecting all of Taylor's team's politicking and base-building to pay off eventually. (I had previously read Austraeoh, where I slogged through the million words of books 2-4, and it was worth it due to the excellent book 6.) But I was utterly wrong on the second point, and the first alone is not sufficient to make Worm worth reading.

Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year

#158
The article said he decided to quit THIS MONTH! Does that really justify an article on Sept 10th?

Edit: it seems like that was a typo in the article if he says he was off for a whole year. Pretty big typo, though.

Re: I Quit Social Media for a Year

#160
"“Why do I take photos?”"

This is a good question, and imo an underrated answer is to use them for digital journaling. I use an app called Journey which lets you make entries and attach photos to them, and this justifies taking photos to sort of help spur memories of fun events and such.

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