81–90 of 172 posts
Or if I can put it in one sentence: I don't want to consume the life of others. I want to create a life worth consuming.
There's something about the use of consume in this way that has always bugged me.
Maybe I'm the outlier - but everybody I am "friends" with on social media I'm friends with IRL (save for Twitter, but that's more blogging than social media). We just post what we did this weekend and stuff like that. Post stuff that the kids are doing (and for some of my friends what the grandkids are doing). No one is trying to impress anyone else. People just staying in touch. Maybe we older folks have a better fe…
My biggest complaint about Facebook (besides the obvious shitty company stuff) is that I don't want to see what other people are sharing (meme posts, etc). I wish there was an "only show me OC" filter.
I recommended it in a similar discussion before, but Cal Newport's "Digital Minimalism" offers reasonable ways to introduce intermittent fasting patterns into your social media consumption vs quitting cold turkey. Some sample strategies to adopt: 1) Mobile sites only, never apps. Always log out when done to increase the friction of subsequent logins. The most insidious pattern of mindless engagement is when you're bo…
> The most insidious pattern of mindless engagement is when you're bored at the checkout line, waiting in-between meetings with nothing to do, sitting on the toilet. Just curious, why is this considered the "most insidious"? Isn't that time wasted anyway? Before cellphones you would just stare off into space (you're not getting any deep thinking or deep work done waiting in line) or would just browse the gum or trash…
I love Twitter but recently removed Instagram from my phone and as a result, my usage dropped to near zero. I found I was watching the same updates (here's my baby doing this fun thing!), which was nice, but I wasn't really connected to this individual, and for most of my Instagram it was old friends and colleagues who no longer live near me or share much similarities. Twitter, Instagram, Hacker News, etc. are all at…
A couple thoughts here. I was an adult before social media was a thing, or even the web, and I sometimes wonder if I would have even attempted much of the experimentation I did - doubtful, at least at that age. Why bother when now it takes only a few minutes searching to find someone who already solved the problem, and better than you (think) you could have. But now I understand I would have missed out on so much had…
The safety lectures in videos for some hobbies probably would have let me get farther along in them as a child, if I had bothered to participate instead of just spectate.
Maybe I'm the outlier - but everybody I am "friends" with on social media I'm friends with IRL (save for Twitter, but that's more blogging than social media). We just post what we did this weekend and stuff like that. Post stuff that the kids are doing (and for some of my friends what the grandkids are doing). No one is trying to impress anyone else. People just staying in touch. Maybe we older folks have a better fe…
A good sanity check of this is to use Dunbar's number (usually considered at ~150)[0] and see how many of your friends and friends of friends have a number of social media "friends" that reaches or exceeds that number.
In case you are unfamiliar: Dunbar's number is a proposed cognitive limit to the number of real social relationships we can have based on brain size.
The total number of real, stable social relationships you can have is physiologically limited, so having 200 facebook "friends" that truly are your friends is impossible.
Because we do have connections with people outside of social media (hopefully!) even 150 friends is nearly impossible unless you are friends with literally every social relationship you have.
So if you want to see, I would first establish that you are really in the group you think you are. If you are only connected with true, irl friends you likely don't have much more than 30 "friends". Then sample the graph of that network a bit and see where you are in the distribution of "friends".
We are slowly forgetting how to interact in the real world.
I always find these "quitting social media" blog posts a bit ironic... "social media is addictive and encourages doing and posting things just for the attention and to make other people think I am interesting... so I wrote this blog post about quitting social media, and am posting it to hacker news and other sites... I hope lots of people read it and think I am insightful"
I understand your POV on this, I quit social media relatively silently[1]. From my POV, ex-social-media-addict now "clean" for 838 days[2], there is a strong degree of FOMO attached to not being on SM. Here are a few examples of where I wish I had "told folks" that I was quitting: * For the first 9 months folks would often say: "I missed you at my such-and-such event last month", and I would reply: "email me next tim…
At the end of the day, I realized I don't care about such-and-such events, births, deaths, etc. of people who will only talk to me if it's through Facebook.