This week in Curiosities: The darker impulses of the Dirt-bag Left, Sarah Z on the infiltration of Doomer ideology into leftist and activist spaces, and Ezra Klein interviews Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows.
Continue reading “Sunday Curiosities: Red Scare, OK Doomer, and The Shallows”Tag: Social Media
On Being Better On Social Media
I am the person I am today, in no small part, because of social media. When I was a newly-out gay man and needed the queer community, I found them on social media. That alone probably saved my life. Ever since those first days of finding my queer community online, I’ve made innumerable friends, connection, and community on social media. I also truly adore my Satanic family on twitter. I start with all this, because I’m going to spend the rest of this post articulating the dark side of social media, how it has reduced my quality of life, and what I intend to do about it.
Continue reading “On Being Better On Social Media”An Update Regarding Leaving Social Media
I hit a breaking point today. I woke up and discovered that I just couldn’t do social media anymore. My gears had ground to a halt. Burnout sneaks up on me, and when it’s time for me to burn a bridge, I douse it in gasoline and incinerate it.
Continue reading “An Update Regarding Leaving Social Media”Why I’m Reducing Use of Social Media
Several weeks ago I made a decision: that I would drastically reduce my time on social media. It was an attempt to drain the shallows from my life – reducing the meaningless, easy-to-replicate tasks to give more time and space to the activities that create meaning and fulfillment in my life.
Finding Depth In a World of Shallows
Our world is suffocated by addicting, irrelevant, glittering images: a perpetual cascade of memes, buzzfeed articles, emails, tweets, and status updates from friends. This is, as Cal Newport describes it in his book Deep Work, The Shallows.
In Praise of Secrecy
Years ago, a therapist once said to me, “Stephen, you are so open, and honest. You expose so much of yourself to the world, and that is wonderful. But I want to challenge you to do something: keep secrets. Keep something away from the world, just for yourself. I don’t care what it is – it could be your favorite drink at Starbucks – but just keep something secret.”
