8 ms·

Impoverished Emotional Lives

121 points by imartin2k 4y ago

PuppyTailWags 4y ago
I think the essay does not share my understanding of emotion. Emotions are a complex but transient physiological+psychological state in conversation with and reacting to events and thinking. The essay describes months of mourning as if people don't still grieve for months; the performative aspect of mourning constantly for months has gone out of fashion. People still grieve for months and years after the death of a loved one and the thought that somehow the internet has caused a shortening of grieving is a claim that would require much more than a substack essay for me to believe. All emotions generally last at most 10 or 15 minutes. An emotional state can refresh due to rumination, current circumstances, etc. Losing my dog causes me to weep over multiple days, but it's not like I'm crying constantly. Instead, I cry when I would normally walk him. I cry when I would normally feed him. I cry when I go to bed by myself, without the sounds of my friend settling in too. On the same day I feel happy when I hit a new high at my gym. I feel hungry when I skip breakfast. I feel annoyed when a car booming music passes me by. It's not like I'm sad all the time even though I am grieving. There is a conversation to be had about how social media affects the rhythms of the multiple transient emotional states humans go through regularly as part of normal behavior. But I don't think they shorten emotions specifically, because emotions are already pretty short phenomena. I would speculate they instead add in additional stimuli that affect what emotional states humans enter and how often they enter them.
shanusmagnus 4y ago
One (of many possible) ways to characterize the article is that social media, and our online lives, have restricted our emotional repertoires the way junk food has restricted our dietary ones. This resonates with me. A related phenomenon I've been thinking about -- or maybe it's the same exact one -- concerns limited emotional range. Hypothesis: people still apply all their emotional machinery to the very restricted emotional universes that modern life presents, as they did to the full gamut of emotional experiences that people were built to deal with, but which modern life rarely elicits. The implications of this hypothesis are unclear to me, but one candidate is that small and relatively unimportant issues that would hardly have been recognized in the past, become magnified so greatly that they can bring a group to the point of civil war or dissolution.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > restricted our emotional repertoires the way junk food has restricted our dietary ones. /me wonders if you've read a little book "Digital Vegan" [1] :) > Hypothesis: people still apply all their emotional machinery to the very restricted emotional universes that modern life presents, Is modern life flattened with respect to emotion? Incendiary Twitter traffic and torrents of "hate speech" everywhere would imply otherwise. Perhaps the intensity has gone up, but the range and nuance has shrunk? Interesting development I saw; Royal Marines started introducing "emotional intelligence literacy". Unsurprisingly the recruits hated it and thought it was "politically correct sissy stuff". Upshot was a measurable decrease in losses and incidents resulting from hot-headed decision making, poor judgement in the heat of anger etc. Emotional Intelligence now features highly in selection. It may be that the highest "EQ" self-exclude from social media. [1] https://digitalvegan.net https://digitalvegan.net
  - shanusmagnus 4y ago
    The digital vegan idea is interesting and I hadn't heard of it -- thank you. I think physiological metaphors have much to offer in thinking about online life. A sort of 'emotional hysteresis' akin to insulin resistance is another one I reach for frequently; and, like with IR, fasting seems to be a surprisingly effective intervention for the digital version of the pathology, though of course you have to apply it repeatedly to counter the 'dietary' excess. > Is modern life flattened with respect to emotion? Incendiary Twitter traffic and torrents of "hate speech" everywhere would imply otherwise. Maybe an example will be helpful to make this less abstract. Most Westerners are far safer, physically, than they have ever before. They are less likely to starve to death, get eaten by a bear, be murdered, die of exposure or of an infected hang-nail. And yet, I suspect that even in the midst of this relative luxury and safety, we are just as miserable as when danger from all causes was drastically increased. Put more mathematically, I suspect that people react emotionally to a problem of magnitude 4 as people 200 years ago reacted to a problem of magnitude 9, because progress has skewed the distribution of modern hazards so radically that the far ends of the scale are almost never experienced. So in a world of small problems, the largest small problems feels large because the brain is bad at absolutes.
bckr 4y ago
I think this article is insightful, but I am compelled to short-circuit the conversation it would start, by offering a rude injunction: Go touch grass. Really, stop using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and their ilk. Restrict your use of media like Reddit. OR you are doomed to be caught up in the mass emotional-intellectual toilet-circling that these platforms are a vessel for. One of several quantum leaps in emotional vibrancy I've experienced over the last few years was refusing to scroll through Facebook anymore. It is right up there with not calling a toxic family member and taking an antidepressant.
- MarkPNeyer 4y ago
  Same. It took working at a social media company on ad ranking to make the thing stick; I saw how much effort is going into putting stuff in front of my brain that is sorted in terms of the likelihood that I will react to it.
- coder4life 4y ago
  My cheap self-enforced act to stop using Facebook for a month: Every time someone come up on your feed (which you watch constantly you crazy bastards), hide them for 30 days. Eventually, within 5 days, barely anyone is going to be on your feed. You'll get to see that rarely seen message "You are all caught up for now" And thanks for writing this. It's been a year and I need another small break
  - namaria 4y ago
    You know, deleting your account is way more effective.
    - pixelpoet 4y ago
      My (probably useless 2c) opinion is that this something like "cheating", in the sense of conceding defeat and inability to deal with it, in a similar sense to the saying "if you hate something, you are defeated by it". The stronger way to deal with it is to work out a relationship with the medium that doesn't harm me, and leaves me access to it should that ever be useful someday. Otherwise you're only waiting for the next mega addictive thing (say, TikTok) to come round and facing the same problem all over. As someone with addiction problems (particularly of the computer variety) I know it's easier said than done, but I see shades of the "abstinence instead of safe sex" argument in there.
nopenopenopeno 4y ago
Karl Marx predicted this. See: Estranged Labor (1844) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts...
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Karl Marx did not predict this. He predicted estrangement from labor - from being emotionally dissociated from the results of your work. He didn't predict being estranged from (or worse, because of) your non-work interactions with others through media.
  - nopenopenopeno 4y ago
    He absolutely predicted that. According to Marx, in capitalism, relations between people become predominated by their relations to capital. It is not a separate phenomenon.
    - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      Really? HN didn't become Facebook, even though HN is tied to the capitalist class just as much as Facebook is. I have exactly the same relation to capital when I use HN as when I use Facebook (or would, if I used Facebook), and yet the alienation is much higher with Facebook. Marx didn't predict this. McLuhan did. HN is a different medium from Facebook (and deliberately so).
CliffStoll 4y ago
Slightly paraphrasing Donald Knuth: The Internet is a great way to stay on top of things. But I want to get to the bottom of things. Understanding, compassion, and emotional depth require reflection, concentration, and time ... a quiet walk in a garden does more for me than an hour of social media.
- hamiltonians 4y ago
  the internet is great for research though
- agumonkey 4y ago
  Just this afternoon I was reflecting on how, in many case, N hours of internet feels like nothing in your mind. It's a long stream of nice actions that rarely lead to a worthy memory. On paper it's great, you have free, high grade information.. but something is missing.
  - Jtsummers 4y ago
    Real engagement, not passive. Even discussions like these aren't always memorable. It's like driving the same route to and from the office for years, at some point you start arriving home or at the office with little recollection of what happened in between. You weren't asleep, but you made few new memories if nothing out of the ordinary happened (days I remember: Seeing a red truck on its side off the road, the days deer or antelope cross the path, the time a cow decided to turn up on the road, etc.). So what are you doing on the internet? Just reading? Is it creating new memories, new connections? Sometimes, but how frequently? What if you try to actively engage with the material, make summaries, try out the ideas in a small project, anything.
    - agumonkey 4y ago
      right, thus I wonder about two things: - disconnected events even if passive, like contemplating, or having someone around, doesn't cause the same kind of void - being genuinely active on internet is hard, your brain is constantly battling the possibility of a sweet distraction in your browser tab
wpietri 4y ago
Interesting points, but I don't think it goes deep enough. The rhythms of social media contribute to people's emotions, but they are also a function of people's emotions. There's a ton of parallel evolution in social media because it's seeking the intersection of capitalism's incentives and what people respond to. I think it also ignores that social media creates opportunity for both emotional stunting and emotional growth. One of the reasons I'm still on Twitter is that it allows me to get perspectives on the world that I would never normally encounter. People all across society, people with very different experiences. Personally, I've grown a lot in the broadness of my empathy through years of frequent encounters with people just talking openly about their lives. To make that work, though, I need to avoid spiraling down into many of social media's traps, like doomscrolling or pointless argument. Which in turn requires stronger emotional regulation than I had before. So used correctly, I feel like social media is an opportunity to practice the sort of intellectual and emotional skills that lead to good self-regulation.
WallyFunk 4y ago
> our emotional lives tend to be impoverished in an online context When you realize that when you pay attention to something and are getting negative results, then you become very selective about what you pay attention to. You just have to select and curate the things that excite you in a positive way, and nurture that. This applies online as-well as IRL/AFK.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
raydiatian 4y ago
“ “It is the emotional register that accounts for the Pavlovian alacrity with which we attend to our devices and the digital flows for which they are a portal,” I observed in 2017. “ Stroke your own dick harder. You lost me at this nonsense.
- nicbou 4y ago
  This is when I thought "this person needs an editor". This article has many flaws.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
hamiltonians 4y ago
I think people are just angrier and I don't know why this is. it,s not just limited to politics...angrier about everything
cetahfh14615 4y ago
Why does the author write in such laughably pretentious language? > It is the emotional register that accounts for the Pavlovian alacrity with which we attend to our devices and the digital flows for which they are a portal Why not just say "it's the feeling of being addicted to social media"? Another example: > I skim the surface of each emotional experience, but rarely can I plumb its depths or sound out its meaning. This isn't a satire but I wish it was. If the author has something to say, maybe they should actually make an effort to say it instead of larping as a philosopher
- hamiltonians 4y ago
  yet his articles routinely get to font page and he has a ton of readers. goes to show how useless or overrated most writing advice is, such as speak plainly or write simply.
- polio 4y ago
  If that's just how they write, then they aren't pretending, i.e. it's not pretentious. I don't think it's a particularly good sentence, however.
  - cetahfh14615 4y ago
    In hindsight pompous would've been a better word
rektide 4y ago
> The rhythms of digital media rush me on from crisis to crisis, from outrage to outrage. I relatively agree with this, but I don't think social media is special. I think we are almost all blown about by our own lives, by the small world about us, and by the larger world about. Digital media has little impact here; the same would be possible via telegraph: we are in touch with one another, with larger currents. That has impacts. I tend to think we need better means to reflect. We should be chipping in with what we are feeling, declaring how invested we really feel. And re-assessing our views & our investments latter. Rather than just a long history of meaning & caring stacking ever infinitely upwards, we should re-assess, review ourselves, where we are invested, check what we were feeling, declare whether we are feeling the same. Reflection is a missing component, and important given how exposed the individual is, how easily the self is stripped away, amid the barrage of otherness that we are so suffused in. Overall there's a ton of obtuse barely usable loose ideas presented to strongly as how-things are in this article. It's unintelligible entirely me to me how we reach conclusions stated in the intro that we feel to little, are too impoverished. Overload does not equal absence, nor is this grappled with nor explained. Although I agree that social media lacks important functions of reflection & stepping away, I don't see how that leads at all to the dire conclusions, and I don't think there's anything inherent that prevents us from developing better reflective practices with the connected media we already have. Also, it bugs me a lot that the author acts like emotions are only experienced in the limits of an experience. I think about the things I run into online regularly enough. I feel like the author only regards the emotions I feel right then when I'm on the site. But I feel like I'd have these emotions whether I was using social media, reading a newspaper, or on broadcast media. I am connected to the world & those feelings extend into my life. The author seems to miss that.
steve_adams_86 4y ago
A while back I became unhappy with my tendency to check internet things throughout the morning. I wasn’t on social media really, though I’d scroll Twitter here and there. I justified it for a while because I wasn’t doom scrolling, but waking up early and then having nothing meaningful to show for my waking hours by 10 or 11 felt grim. I decided to walk instead. I allow myself a podcast, but I often don’t bother with one these days. I just get dressed and go right out the door. I guess it has been since late May, rather than stare at a screen hoping something interesting happens, almost every day (I’ve missed 3) I’ve gotten up and walked for anywhere from 15 to 90 minutes. Usually by 6am. It has been infinitely more gratifying than anything on a screen in the same time frame. The bizarre part is that at one point, my brain was positive I’d get bored or be unsatisfied. Although I had the urge to do more with myself, it was like some addiction in me was insisting the walks would be a waste of time. The number of personal matters I’m much more in tune with because of these mostly short walks is a bit astonishing. I was depriving myself of so many opportunities to think for myself about even mundane parts of my life that actually matter so much. Things I push aside to let myself disappear into a screen. Things I care about, but never seem to matter as much as the next page of results. All manner of little things that weren’t getting the opportunity to appear in my mind’s eye because I was too focused on the firehose of random crap called the internet that I don’t actually care much about. It is a bit of a wake up. If this little bit of time with myself can yield so much, what about with people I care about? Without media present. Instead of time I’d maybe otherwise use a screen. How much more can I get out of this simple practice? As it turns out, it depends a bit on the person but generally the answer has been a lot. One of my sons loves walking with me now — he can chat forever about virtually anything and he really opens up. A friend enjoys it a lot, but struggles with feeling like he has the time to… Kind of like I did at first, too. My wife enjoys it, though she seems to speed walk to turn it into exercise and it becomes sort of a task sometimes, haha. Overall I’d say I agree with the article. Technology generally fails to deliver the same depth, although it succeeds in consuming as much or more time. As I get older, I strive to spend less time with it despite that it’s how I earn a living. For all the marvels it offers it still can’t give me anything like laughing with my son and taking in a sun rise. Or the peace of early morning, before the city is awake when you can hear the birds and rain and the breeze. These things are precious. Twitter is not.
LocalH 4y ago
Easiest life hack ever - pay attention to the passage of time during events which you wish to remember as taking "forever", and don't pay attention to the passage of time during events which you wish to remember as passing more quickly. This is the root of "time flies when you're having fun" and "a watched pot never boils".

121 points by imartin2k 4y ago

I think the essay does not share my understanding of emotion. Emotions are a complex but transient physiological+psychological state in conversation with and reacting to events and thinking. The essay describes months of mourning as if people don't still grieve for months; the performative aspect of mourning constantly for months has gone out of fashion. People still grieve for months and years after the death of a loved one and the thought that somehow the internet has caused a shortening of grieving is a claim that would require much more than a substack essay for me to believe. All emotions generally last at most 10 or 15 minutes. An emotional state can refresh due to rumination, current circumstances, etc. Losing my dog causes me to weep over multiple days, but it's not like I'm crying constantly. Instead, I cry when I would normally walk him. I cry when I would normally feed him. I cry when I go to bed by myself, without the sounds of my friend settling in too. On the same day I feel happy when I hit a new high at my gym. I feel hungry when I skip breakfast. I feel annoyed when a car booming music passes me by. It's not like I'm sad all the time even though I am grieving. There is a conversation to be had about how social media affects the rhythms of the multiple transient emotional states humans go through regularly as part of normal behavior. But I don't think they shorten emotions specifically, because emotions are already pretty short phenomena. I would speculate they instead add in additional stimuli that affect what emotional states humans enter and how often they enter them.

shanusmagnus 4y ago

One (of many possible) ways to characterize the article is that social media, and our online lives, have restricted our emotional repertoires the way junk food has restricted our dietary ones. This resonates with me. A related phenomenon I've been thinking about -- or maybe it's the same exact one -- concerns limited emotional range. Hypothesis: people still apply all their emotional machinery to the very restricted emotional universes that modern life presents, as they did to the full gamut of emotional experiences that people were built to deal with, but which modern life rarely elicits. The implications of this hypothesis are unclear to me, but one candidate is that small and relatively unimportant issues that would hardly have been recognized in the past, become magnified so greatly that they can bring a group to the point of civil war or dissolution.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
> restricted our emotional repertoires the way junk food has restricted our dietary ones. /me wonders if you've read a little book "Digital Vegan" [1] :) > Hypothesis: people still apply all their emotional machinery to the very restricted emotional universes that modern life presents, Is modern life flattened with respect to emotion? Incendiary Twitter traffic and torrents of "hate speech" everywhere would imply otherwise. Perhaps the intensity has gone up, but the range and nuance has shrunk? Interesting development I saw; Royal Marines started introducing "emotional intelligence literacy". Unsurprisingly the recruits hated it and thought it was "politically correct sissy stuff". Upshot was a measurable decrease in losses and incidents resulting from hot-headed decision making, poor judgement in the heat of anger etc. Emotional Intelligence now features highly in selection. It may be that the highest "EQ" self-exclude from social media. [1] https://digitalvegan.net https://digitalvegan.net
- shanusmagnus 4y ago
  The digital vegan idea is interesting and I hadn't heard of it -- thank you. I think physiological metaphors have much to offer in thinking about online life. A sort of 'emotional hysteresis' akin to insulin resistance is another one I reach for frequently; and, like with IR, fasting seems to be a surprisingly effective intervention for the digital version of the pathology, though of course you have to apply it repeatedly to counter the 'dietary' excess. > Is modern life flattened with respect to emotion? Incendiary Twitter traffic and torrents of "hate speech" everywhere would imply otherwise. Maybe an example will be helpful to make this less abstract. Most Westerners are far safer, physically, than they have ever before. They are less likely to starve to death, get eaten by a bear, be murdered, die of exposure or of an infected hang-nail. And yet, I suspect that even in the midst of this relative luxury and safety, we are just as miserable as when danger from all causes was drastically increased. Put more mathematically, I suspect that people react emotionally to a problem of magnitude 4 as people 200 years ago reacted to a problem of magnitude 9, because progress has skewed the distribution of modern hazards so radically that the far ends of the scale are almost never experienced. So in a world of small problems, the largest small problems feels large because the brain is bad at absolutes.

bckr 4y ago

I think this article is insightful, but I am compelled to short-circuit the conversation it would start, by offering a rude injunction: Go touch grass. Really, stop using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and their ilk. Restrict your use of media like Reddit. OR you are doomed to be caught up in the mass emotional-intellectual toilet-circling that these platforms are a vessel for. One of several quantum leaps in emotional vibrancy I've experienced over the last few years was refusing to scroll through Facebook anymore. It is right up there with not calling a toxic family member and taking an antidepressant.

MarkPNeyer 4y ago
Same. It took working at a social media company on ad ranking to make the thing stick; I saw how much effort is going into putting stuff in front of my brain that is sorted in terms of the likelihood that I will react to it.
coder4life 4y ago
My cheap self-enforced act to stop using Facebook for a month: Every time someone come up on your feed (which you watch constantly you crazy bastards), hide them for 30 days. Eventually, within 5 days, barely anyone is going to be on your feed. You'll get to see that rarely seen message "You are all caught up for now" And thanks for writing this. It's been a year and I need another small break
- namaria 4y ago
  You know, deleting your account is way more effective.
  - pixelpoet 4y ago
    My (probably useless 2c) opinion is that this something like "cheating", in the sense of conceding defeat and inability to deal with it, in a similar sense to the saying "if you hate something, you are defeated by it". The stronger way to deal with it is to work out a relationship with the medium that doesn't harm me, and leaves me access to it should that ever be useful someday. Otherwise you're only waiting for the next mega addictive thing (say, TikTok) to come round and facing the same problem all over. As someone with addiction problems (particularly of the computer variety) I know it's easier said than done, but I see shades of the "abstinence instead of safe sex" argument in there.

nopenopenopeno 4y ago

Karl Marx predicted this. See: Estranged Labor (1844) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts...

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
Karl Marx did not predict this. He predicted estrangement from labor - from being emotionally dissociated from the results of your work. He didn't predict being estranged from (or worse, because of) your non-work interactions with others through media.
- nopenopenopeno 4y ago
  He absolutely predicted that. According to Marx, in capitalism, relations between people become predominated by their relations to capital. It is not a separate phenomenon.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    Really? HN didn't become Facebook, even though HN is tied to the capitalist class just as much as Facebook is. I have exactly the same relation to capital when I use HN as when I use Facebook (or would, if I used Facebook), and yet the alienation is much higher with Facebook. Marx didn't predict this. McLuhan did. HN is a different medium from Facebook (and deliberately so).

CliffStoll 4y ago

Slightly paraphrasing Donald Knuth: The Internet is a great way to stay on top of things. But I want to get to the bottom of things. Understanding, compassion, and emotional depth require reflection, concentration, and time ... a quiet walk in a garden does more for me than an hour of social media.

hamiltonians 4y ago
the internet is great for research though
agumonkey 4y ago
Just this afternoon I was reflecting on how, in many case, N hours of internet feels like nothing in your mind. It's a long stream of nice actions that rarely lead to a worthy memory. On paper it's great, you have free, high grade information.. but something is missing.
- Jtsummers 4y ago
  Real engagement, not passive. Even discussions like these aren't always memorable. It's like driving the same route to and from the office for years, at some point you start arriving home or at the office with little recollection of what happened in between. You weren't asleep, but you made few new memories if nothing out of the ordinary happened (days I remember: Seeing a red truck on its side off the road, the days deer or antelope cross the path, the time a cow decided to turn up on the road, etc.). So what are you doing on the internet? Just reading? Is it creating new memories, new connections? Sometimes, but how frequently? What if you try to actively engage with the material, make summaries, try out the ideas in a small project, anything.
  - agumonkey 4y ago
    right, thus I wonder about two things: - disconnected events even if passive, like contemplating, or having someone around, doesn't cause the same kind of void - being genuinely active on internet is hard, your brain is constantly battling the possibility of a sweet distraction in your browser tab

wpietri 4y ago

Interesting points, but I don't think it goes deep enough. The rhythms of social media contribute to people's emotions, but they are also a function of people's emotions. There's a ton of parallel evolution in social media because it's seeking the intersection of capitalism's incentives and what people respond to. I think it also ignores that social media creates opportunity for both emotional stunting and emotional growth. One of the reasons I'm still on Twitter is that it allows me to get perspectives on the world that I would never normally encounter. People all across society, people with very different experiences. Personally, I've grown a lot in the broadness of my empathy through years of frequent encounters with people just talking openly about their lives. To make that work, though, I need to avoid spiraling down into many of social media's traps, like doomscrolling or pointless argument. Which in turn requires stronger emotional regulation than I had before. So used correctly, I feel like social media is an opportunity to practice the sort of intellectual and emotional skills that lead to good self-regulation.

WallyFunk 4y ago

> our emotional lives tend to be impoverished in an online context When you realize that when you pay attention to something and are getting negative results, then you become very selective about what you pay attention to. You just have to select and curate the things that excite you in a positive way, and nurture that. This applies online as-well as IRL/AFK.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

raydiatian 4y ago

“ “It is the emotional register that accounts for the Pavlovian alacrity with which we attend to our devices and the digital flows for which they are a portal,” I observed in 2017. “ Stroke your own dick harder. You lost me at this nonsense.

nicbou 4y ago
This is when I thought "this person needs an editor". This article has many flaws.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

hamiltonians 4y ago

I think people are just angrier and I don't know why this is. it,s not just limited to politics...angrier about everything

cetahfh14615 4y ago

Why does the author write in such laughably pretentious language? > It is the emotional register that accounts for the Pavlovian alacrity with which we attend to our devices and the digital flows for which they are a portal Why not just say "it's the feeling of being addicted to social media"? Another example: > I skim the surface of each emotional experience, but rarely can I plumb its depths or sound out its meaning. This isn't a satire but I wish it was. If the author has something to say, maybe they should actually make an effort to say it instead of larping as a philosopher

hamiltonians 4y ago
yet his articles routinely get to font page and he has a ton of readers. goes to show how useless or overrated most writing advice is, such as speak plainly or write simply.
polio 4y ago
If that's just how they write, then they aren't pretending, i.e. it's not pretentious. I don't think it's a particularly good sentence, however.
- cetahfh14615 4y ago
  In hindsight pompous would've been a better word

rektide 4y ago

> The rhythms of digital media rush me on from crisis to crisis, from outrage to outrage. I relatively agree with this, but I don't think social media is special. I think we are almost all blown about by our own lives, by the small world about us, and by the larger world about. Digital media has little impact here; the same would be possible via telegraph: we are in touch with one another, with larger currents. That has impacts. I tend to think we need better means to reflect. We should be chipping in with what we are feeling, declaring how invested we really feel. And re-assessing our views & our investments latter. Rather than just a long history of meaning & caring stacking ever infinitely upwards, we should re-assess, review ourselves, where we are invested, check what we were feeling, declare whether we are feeling the same. Reflection is a missing component, and important given how exposed the individual is, how easily the self is stripped away, amid the barrage of otherness that we are so suffused in. Overall there's a ton of obtuse barely usable loose ideas presented to strongly as how-things are in this article. It's unintelligible entirely me to me how we reach conclusions stated in the intro that we feel to little, are too impoverished. Overload does not equal absence, nor is this grappled with nor explained. Although I agree that social media lacks important functions of reflection & stepping away, I don't see how that leads at all to the dire conclusions, and I don't think there's anything inherent that prevents us from developing better reflective practices with the connected media we already have. Also, it bugs me a lot that the author acts like emotions are only experienced in the limits of an experience. I think about the things I run into online regularly enough. I feel like the author only regards the emotions I feel right then when I'm on the site. But I feel like I'd have these emotions whether I was using social media, reading a newspaper, or on broadcast media. I am connected to the world & those feelings extend into my life. The author seems to miss that.

steve_adams_86 4y ago

A while back I became unhappy with my tendency to check internet things throughout the morning. I wasn’t on social media really, though I’d scroll Twitter here and there. I justified it for a while because I wasn’t doom scrolling, but waking up early and then having nothing meaningful to show for my waking hours by 10 or 11 felt grim. I decided to walk instead. I allow myself a podcast, but I often don’t bother with one these days. I just get dressed and go right out the door. I guess it has been since late May, rather than stare at a screen hoping something interesting happens, almost every day (I’ve missed 3) I’ve gotten up and walked for anywhere from 15 to 90 minutes. Usually by 6am. It has been infinitely more gratifying than anything on a screen in the same time frame. The bizarre part is that at one point, my brain was positive I’d get bored or be unsatisfied. Although I had the urge to do more with myself, it was like some addiction in me was insisting the walks would be a waste of time. The number of personal matters I’m much more in tune with because of these mostly short walks is a bit astonishing. I was depriving myself of so many opportunities to think for myself about even mundane parts of my life that actually matter so much. Things I push aside to let myself disappear into a screen. Things I care about, but never seem to matter as much as the next page of results. All manner of little things that weren’t getting the opportunity to appear in my mind’s eye because I was too focused on the firehose of random crap called the internet that I don’t actually care much about. It is a bit of a wake up. If this little bit of time with myself can yield so much, what about with people I care about? Without media present. Instead of time I’d maybe otherwise use a screen. How much more can I get out of this simple practice? As it turns out, it depends a bit on the person but generally the answer has been a lot. One of my sons loves walking with me now — he can chat forever about virtually anything and he really opens up. A friend enjoys it a lot, but struggles with feeling like he has the time to… Kind of like I did at first, too. My wife enjoys it, though she seems to speed walk to turn it into exercise and it becomes sort of a task sometimes, haha. Overall I’d say I agree with the article. Technology generally fails to deliver the same depth, although it succeeds in consuming as much or more time. As I get older, I strive to spend less time with it despite that it’s how I earn a living. For all the marvels it offers it still can’t give me anything like laughing with my son and taking in a sun rise. Or the peace of early morning, before the city is awake when you can hear the birds and rain and the breeze. These things are precious. Twitter is not.

LocalH 4y ago

Easiest life hack ever - pay attention to the passage of time during events which you wish to remember as taking "forever", and don't pay attention to the passage of time during events which you wish to remember as passing more quickly. This is the root of "time flies when you're having fun" and "a watched pot never boils".