I can't hear my thoughts
On things I don't need to know about
I have struggled over the past few days trying to write this post. Having been a little swamped by one too many projects, I am quite aware that something has got to give or I’ll be facing a bout of burnout some time soon. So I have been trying to gauge how I fill - not spend - my time and what should be left for another day. I feel an immense dread when I finally go to sleep, not because I consciously think it’s time I could put to some more constructive end, but more like a gut reaction. I toss and turn, occasionally feeling guilty when I fall asleep on my side. Every skincare forum on Reddit will tell you that that’s an absolute no unless you are willing to tape your whole face, neck, and chest, and that’s not something I feel I could do every single night without feeling depressed. So it can take anywhere from thirty minutes to three hours for me to finally make it to the other side. And then I will often wake up with one or both of my hands numb, balled into fists or pushing against my chin or mouth in a cogito style that will make my teeth hurt. This, in turn, makes me anxious, thinking about what my dentist would make of my effectively pushing my teeth back.
When I wake up there’s another wave of dread not all dissimilar from the kind I get before going to sleep, but now directed at the fact that I often get up feeling exhausted. I check in with my Finch, get up, make my bed, go through the motions of my morning skincare routine and go about my morning chores. Halfway through those steps, some of the dread lifts as I grease the gears by pushing through it. I exercise, I have lunch, I do my job. I do my online stuff, but it’s increasingly never enough. I want to do things my own way, I want it to be authentic, but then each platform will work towards making you feel like you’re not doing it often or well enough. Be funny, be perky, be moody, be entertaining, grab their attention. You’re not growing quickly enough or even worse, you’re losing followers quicker than you’re gaining new ones. You’re boring them, what now? And then there’s a lot of noise from all corners and a lot of information about people I’ve never heard of doing something scandalous or breaking up or getting together or doing something amazing and it will be everywhere. Then someone will see a cool bug and post it on Reddit to ask what it is and it will either be a dangerous poisonous spider with a nasty bite or something quite harmless but that will die if you look at it. Down the rabbit hole we go. To wrap it up, at least two people will ask me favours, especially if we are not at all close.
On Sunday I woke up and though I had loads of things to do - because I always do - I decided to watch a BBC4 documentary about something completely random. I ultimately did not go through with that plan and decided to go for Louis Theroux because why wouldn’t I? I saw the Stormzy episode and halfway through it they talked about Mike quitting social media. He said that it was not really about haters or stupid hot takes, it was just that he felt like he could not hear his thoughts. If he was to create art, produce music, focus on being healthy and having a career, he simply could not cope with so much from so many people randomly coming at him at all times. So he quit.
I can’t hear my thoughts. It’s like waiting to cross an expressway. People will rather say something inaccurate or ridiculous than wait to gather more information. J’accuse! If it goes viral, it won’t matter anyway. There is no room to just think, ever.
Last year, I quit social media for a while too. It was pure delight. There was suddenly so much space. I love social media as a concept, but it’s a terrible thing that it has taken over the whole internet. People often complain about social platforms like Instagram becoming less about seeing photos of your friends and more about people advertising themselves and their businesses. That does not bother me at all because that is a fabricated narrative based on a short nostalgia loop. When Instagram was a photo-based app, it was very much still about self-advertising and then about judging others and hate-loving influencers that appeared as soon as it started out. Why oh why do you want to gaze at some boring rich people in their swimming pools? In the very beginning, Instagram was only available to Iphone users, which already says a lot about the kind of consumer statement that being on there entailed.
I don’t want to not be online, but I wish being online hadn’t become four or five mega corporations slicing the internet like a pizza between billionaires while slightly smaller corporations also fight for a share of the pie. When I was a teenager, the internet was uncharted territory; this could mean danger, but it also meant a lot more freedom. Then, you’d find me blogging, designing my own layouts, learning basic code, using my own domain - that’s what mostly everybody else did too. But we let that go and while I do retain my own blog as well to write proper reviews, I am quite aware that this platform is a lot more in tune with our anxious times. So I’m both in and outside, I suppose.
Things are so horribly dire that people are embracing the idea of talking to chatbots about personal stuff and claiming that it helps them (please don’t do that, they will sell all your data at some point if they haven’t already):
Everyday, loads of people will respond to AI-generated images circulated in automated posts, published by bot accounts, all the while believing themselves to be communicating in earnest. There is something painfully vulnerable and… human in that awkward naïveté. In some of my sleepless nights I will doomsday scroll through these things, thinking if I should play the old man yelling at cloud or use the small platform I do have to respond creatively to the hellscape. Should I be reading/reciting poems on TikTok? Talking about obscure writers? Writing short stories for the sake of it? ahem. You see, even the most artistically inclined corners of social media are already - and perhaps have always been - mostly about consumerism. Which is fine, but then you’ll get monstrosities of the like Duolingo - but for literature sort. Or this sad AI-generated little guy:
There are so many things that I don’t care for that I find myself knowing too much about. I don’t care about the American awards season and I certainly don’t care about a man arguing in The Atlantic that the Golden Globes got a little weird with it because, god forbid, foreigners won some awards. I am happy that Fernanda Torres has won but I wish we didn’t feel that Brazilian, or Korean, or Latvian art needs the validation of Americans. I am thankful for the Atlantic piece in the sense that it helped me to embrace the fact that in a lot of ways I want to be out of the loop. I want to be online without learning anything else about Emilia Perez. I don’t want to see random true crime specialists in my Twitter homepage. I don’t need any more Ariana Grande memes or any more obscure TikTok star controversies conveyed in never-ending threads. I have had enough of Andrew Garfield’s new hairline and of people’s opinions about someone who was in a cooking competition show three years ago. Though I wish Zendaya every happiness, I do not need to see another four-hundred posts wondering if she’s got engaged (or announcing it). I don’t want to know about pop fandom wars and I don’t want tips on how to improve things that don’t need any fixing. There is a world elsewhere. That is what has got to give.